On This Day in History: Workers Seize the Hormel Plant

On November 13, 1933, workers at the Hormel meatpacking plant in Austin, Minnesota launched what may have been the first sit-down strike in American history, a bold action that would help set the stage for the explosive labor militancy of the New Deal era.

The strike didn't emerge from nowhere. Jay Catherwood Hormel, who ran the family business, called his management style a "benevolent dictatorship," but workers had a different term for it: "sheer tyranny." The plant, which employed 2,700 people in a town of 17,000, was the economic lifeblood of Austin. In 1931, the company had introduced a controversial "straight time pay plan" where workers received a weekly wage instead of an hourly rate, and tensions had been building ever since.

Enter Frank Ellis, a veteran labor organizer with ties to the Industrial Workers of the World. Hired by Hormel as a foreman in the casing department, Ellis began meeting with workers during lunch hours in the hog kill department, the most militant section of the plant—to discuss forming a union. In July 1933, the Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW) was born.

By early November, grievances had reached a boiling point. On November 8, union members presented Hormel with five demands. Two days later, on November 10, Jay Hormel responded with an open letter claiming the company couldn't afford the concessions. The workers walked off at 10 p.m. that Friday night. Armed with clubs and rocks, strikers forced company officers to leave, physically carried Jay Hormel out of the building, and shut off the plant's refrigeration system, putting millions of pounds of meat at risk.

What happened next was crucial. Hormel expected Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson to send in the National Guard to break the strike, as had been standard practice for decades. But Olson refused, maintaining that the state would remain neutral in labor disputes rather than serve as a police force for business interests. Instead, the Farmer-Labor Party governor traveled to Austin to mediate.

On November 13, after three days of occupation, both sides agreed to submit their disputes to the State Industrial Commission for arbitration. The commission ordered wage increases from 40 cents to 45 cents per hour, and its decision was final and not subject to appeal. The union had won recognition and established a precedent that would reverberate through American labor history.

The IUAW went on to aggressively organize packinghouse workers throughout Minnesota and Iowa, funded not by national union offices but by donations from the Austin workers themselves. The sit-down tactic they pioneered would become a powerful weapon in labor's arsenal during the 1930s.

The victory at Hormel proved that workers who seized the means of production—literally occupying their workplace—could force management to negotiate. And crucially, it showed that political power mattered: a governor willing to resist corporate pressure could tip the balance in favor of working people. In that cold November of 1933, a new chapter in American labor history began in a meatpacking plant in southern Minnesota.