How a bitter strike and immigrant labor transformed Hormel's hometown

[chowmama]

2. We still don't have any Hormel in our house. Forever.

And DH quit a courier job when management intimidated labor into voting against staying in the union. He came home and reported what happened and I said right out "So you're quitting". He'd expected some blowback about it, so he was pleasantly surprised. (He shouldn't have been.) He gave his notice next day with my blessing.

When he went in to get his last check, they pretended that it was the first they'd heard about it. Then they asked him what they could offer to get him to stay on. He said, "A union."

The new contract created a shell company between the actual owners and the drivers to shield them from the legal consequences of any of their decisions and had the nerve to say they just wanted it as boilerplate; they weren't actually going to do anything. Spoiler alert - they did plenty. Example - workers could be fired at will but had to jump through multiple hoops to quit. The pay rate was impossible to decipher, so nobody knew enough to see if they were being screwed, And so on.

They are now out of business.