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In partnership with Ramsey County Historical Society & Roseville Library

In August 1985 the nation’s attention turned to Austin, Minnesota, where 1,700 meatpacking workers prepared to launch a strike against the George A. Hormel Company in what was widely seen as the most significant labor-management conflict since the Professional Air Traffic Controllers’ strike of 1981, and as a harbinger of the change in the direction of American labor relations since the election of Ronald Reagan. From coast-to-coast, from factory floors to corporate boardrooms, from the front pages to the drinking fountains, it was seen as history in the making. In 1993, the story would become the subject of Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning documentary, “American Dream.”

How did a small town in southern Minnesota come to occupy such a large place in our country’s labor history? What roles have meat-packing unions and the labor movement played in the Minnesota economic and political landscape? How have those roles impacted the influence of Minnesota’s labor movement on our nation’s economic and political landscape? And, now, thirty-seven years later, what impact might this history have on the emergence of a new labor movement, based in very different industries and led by workers who are very different from those meat-packing workers?

Join Peter Rachleff, Emeritus Co-Executive Director of the East Side Freedom Library, in an exploration of these and related questions.

Peter Rachleff is a Macalester College history professor emeritus, co-founder of the East Side Freedom Library, and author of Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement (1993).

Please check out our partner Subtext Books, located in downtown St. Paul and online at: https://subtextbooks.com/ for this and other History Revealed titles.