Song of the Stubborn One Thousand by Peter Shapiro

Author:Peter Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Labor, Women's Studies, ebook
ISBN: 978-1-60846-749-5
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2016-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Enter the Teamsters

On March 9, a group of women strikers and the NCSSC took over the Watsonville High School auditorium to commemorate International Women’s Day, a holiday not normally observed in Watsonville. The Register-Pajaronian, still fretting over the civil unrest a few weeks before, noted the “positive tone” of the event and stressed that it was peaceful: “The speeches were spirited but not venomous. The closest thing to a march came at the end . . . when everyone headed to the cafeteria for some food.” The three hundred strikers and strike supporters in attendance were treated to music, dance performances, a juggling act, and speeches that were clearly meant to be a show of unity and morale in the wake of the Shaw settlement.

Guillermina Ramírez shared emcee duties with Linda García, who had just returned to work at Richard Shaw. Putting aside their differences, Cruz Gómez and Shiree Teng gave solidarity statements on behalf of their respective support committees. The presence on the platform of Bea Molina, state president of the Mexican-American Political Association, served notice that the strike was becoming a cause célèbre in the California Chicano movement.

But the most enthusiastic response was reserved for three visitors from Austin, Minnesota. Skinny Weis, white-haired and smiling, was an officer of UFCW Local P-9, which had walked out at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin a few weeks before the start of the Watsonville strike. He was joined onstage by a younger couple, Bud and Barb Miller. Bud was a P-9 rank and filer; Barb belonged to the United Support Group, made up mainly of strikers’ wives who had taken on many of the day-to-day tasks of the strike. Shouts of “Huelga! Huelga! (Strike! Strike!)” greeted the three when they declared, “Hormel and Watsonville are hand in hand in the fight against concessions.”

Their own struggle had just entered a difficult period. They were touring the West Coast as part of a concerted effort to build national support. They got a particularly warm reception in Watsonville, where they also addressed a February 22 rally at the county fairgrounds—the latest of Bill Walsh’s mobilizations in support of the food bank.1

Watsonville was something of a revelation for the three Midwesterners. Culturally as well as historically, it was a world apart. Austin had been settled in the early years of the century by Scandinavian immigrants whose grandchildren would become leaders of Local P-9 and whose politics had often included a powerful dose of old-country radical syndicalism. The town became a union stronghold in the early 1930s, when an old Wobbly named Frank Ellis made the hog kill department at the Hormel plant the nucleus of a citywide general union that would soon organize packinghouses across northern Iowa and southern Minnesota.2 If, as some believed, the Watsonville strikers were the future of the labor movement, the Hormel strikers represented some of the best things about its past. They were descended from a generation of European immigrants and their children who were the heart and

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