User:Solstrsyn/Local P-9

Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), now known as Local 9, is a union local at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota.

Notable: IUAW and 1985 strike. In 198X the UFCW put them in receivership.

Joining the CIO (1937–1943)
Between April and August 1937, the IAUW dissolved itself and most of its branches joined with the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), an industrial union federation founded two years prior. The Hormel local of the IAUW thus became Local 183 of the CIO, as part of the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC). In 1937, the CIO chartered the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC). ("[Radical union organizers who organized across race and ethnicity] joined forces to pull Chicago meatpacking workers into the newly formed CIO. By fall 1937, the CIO issued charters to nine Chicago locals with a membership of 8,200. Chicago’s locals along with the former IUAW affiliates, including the large John Morrell and Company union in Ottumwa, Iowa, and the MUAPHW [Mid-West Union of All Packing House Workers]; grew from Cedar Rapids split from the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL’s) Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen (AMCBW)] groups, formed the core of the new Packinghouse Workers Organizing committee (PWOC).") In 1943, the PWOC became the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) and Local 183 became Local P-9.

Worker participation era (1940s–50s)
During the late 1940s and 1950s, due to the strength of the union and the post–World War II economic expansion, workers at Hormel had a significant amount of control over the shop floor and there was relative peace between capital and labor. Hormel avoided the strike wave of 1945–46 and the meatpacking industry strike of 1948.

A guaranteed wage plan is when waged workers are paid a base salary, or are ensured some minimum amount of employment. Rather than being "undertaken unilaterally by employers" as in the late 19th century, these plans "reemerged as elements in [labor's] collective bargaining proposals" during the 1950s. In Hormel's case, it was XXX.

Economist Fred H. Blum studied the Austin Hormel plant in the early 1950s. He found, according to Joseph Kahl, that the "guaranteed annual wage plan, in effect since 1940, has not made workers smug and lazy; comparisons with the rest of the industry show that Hormel workers earn 30 percent more than those in other plants, work 20 percent less time, but produce enough to keep unit labor costs at or below the standards of the other companies."

Merger into AFL–CIO (1955–1979)
In 1955, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and the CIO, including the UPWA and Local P-9, merged into the AFL–CIO. In 1968, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters (AMC), chartered by the AFL as a craft union in 1897, absorbed the UPWA. In 1979, the AMC and the Retail Clerks International Union merged into the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).