The Chain Read online

  Much would be made later of that response, of how Wadding had ordered the brain machine removed from the factory floor immediately, of how he had the apparatus dismantled and brought to the conference room where he sat with the MDH team after the plant tour—to prove that it was out of commission before they even left the premises. Much praise, too, would be voiced for his willingness to speak to reporters in the wake of an MDH press release announcing an outbreak of a neurological disorder in his plant.

  What no one knew then was that, in the weeks between Devries’s first visit and the arrival of the full MDH team, QPP quietly sold an 80 percent interest in itself—all 800,000 of the available voting shares—for just one cent per share. Control of a company with an exclusive contract to supply the flagship plant of Hormel Foods, with an estimated $280 million in annual revenue, was signed away for just $8,000. The buyer, Blaine Jay Corporation, had incorporated in 2004, but this was its first purchase recorded with the Texas state franchise board (on November 15, 2007). Corporate documents list an accounting firm on the LBJ Freeway in Dallas as Blaine Jay headquarters and Kelly Blaine Wadding as president.

  Wadding denies that he knew in advance of the MDH visit that a piece of faulty equipment was causing the illness among his workers, and he responded angrily when I suggested later that it appeared, to me, that he had not only known but quietly arranged for a way for the company to avoid taking a financial hit before inviting health inspectors inside. He insisted that his company would never resort to such a business trick. “That did not happen,” he told me. “That simply did not happen.”

  Dale Chidester, the longtime office coordinator of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 9, was a bear of a man with unruly hair and a salt-and-pepper goatee, but he spoke in a sweet, soft rasp. His office in the Austin Labor Center, the official name of the local union offices, somehow made Chidester seem older than his years. The building’s brickwork and institutional architecture, mostly reserved these days for elementary schools and county lockups, was like a time capsule of Depression-era proletarianism. Each morning, Chidester opened the window at the check counter, pushing up the wooden shutter as if it were a gate on a service elevator, and planted himself in his creaky office chair—a picture of FDR over one shoulder, a picture of Geronimo over the other.

  Chidester didn’t yet live in Austin during the 1985–86 strike that so harshly divided the town. He was still working at the Hormel plant in Ottumwa, Iowa, but he remembered well the regular four-hour runs up Interstate 35 to deliver supplies to the families struggling through those lean months. Chidester started in meatpacking in the late 1970s, just as the country was sliding toward recession and all of the major meatpacking companies were consolidating and forcing workers to accept lower wages. He told me he had witnessed a lot of dirty tricks meant to double-cross the unions. The Wilson Foods pork-processing plant in neighboring Albert Lea filed for bankruptcy in 1983 in order to nullify existing contracts and cut workers’ average pay from $10.69 an hour to $6.50. With improved margins, owners were able to sell the company at a sizable profit.

  In Austin, the Packinghouse Workers Local 9 (P-9, as it was then known) bristled at talk of lower wages. Workers had already conceded too much in return for Richard Knowlton’s promise to build a state-of-the-art plant and keep Hormel’s primary operation in Austin. He had convinced P-9 to give up the incentive pay system, freeze wages until the new plant was complete, and sign away the right to strike until three years after the plant opened. Knowlton had recognized that profit margins were vanishing from butchering and designed the new plant around the concept of highly automated tasks performed by low-skill workers—but he never informed P-9 of his plans. When the new plant did finally open, P-9 workers were shocked by the radical shift toward automation. They had been told that these changes would make their jobs easier, but instead, it simply made the work more monotonous and much faster.

  Peter Rachleff, a labor historian at Macalester College in St. Paul, interviewed dozens of workers about revised operations inside the new plant. He described the new technology and new speed with chilling clarity: “There was automated batching in the dry sausage, prepared sausage, and canned meat departments; integrated computer inventory management; flexibility in hog-skinning; automated storage and retrieval systems; forklift robots; and automatic ham deboners, together with faster power saws and knives. Chain speed was so fast that workers often stumbled into one another as they fell behind.” Some workers were injured as a result of the breakneck pace, slicing open their arms or mangling fingers in new equipment. More commonly, the new, machine-sharpened knives dulled quickly, and workers overexerted while making cuts, causing a rash of carpal tunnel syndrome.

  Worst of all, the so-called “new plant agreement” that did away with the incentive system had replaced it with a union-negotiated standard that all workers were expected to meet. Like a latter-day Jay Hormel, Richard Knowlton had seen the key to improved margins in maintaining a steady pace of work. But, unlike his forebear, Knowlton was reaching for increased profits (as well as a hefty bump in his own compensation) by wresting away worker benefits. In October 1984, after all of these changes had been implemented, Knowlton demanded a 23 percent wage cut, from $10.69 an hour to $8.25, insisting that the new plant had turned the work into unskilled labor. Under the no-strike restriction of the union contract, P-9—which had just been absorbed into the United Food and Commercial Workers—had no recourse until August 1985. Workers were outraged but had only two choices: quit or stay on at the new plant for close to a year.

  On the very day the no-strike period expired, P-9 walked out, beginning a thirteen-month standoff that remains among the most notorious and rancorous in American history. But P-9 wasn’t just battling Hormel; they were also fighting their new union bosses. Fearing that Hormel couldn’t compete against larger companies that had already brought union wages down to $8.25, the UFCW leadership in Washington, D.C., urged P-9 to accept the lower pay, so as to restore the chain bargaining system that had existed for decades, with a common wage scale across all companies and plants. When P-9 refused, and even organized a nationwide boycott of Hormel products, the UFCW sent a letter to every local in the AFL-CIO, declaring the walkout a wildcat strike and asking other plants not to support P-9.

  Caught between the international union and the local office, many workers crossed the picket lines—the windows of their cars pounded daily by outraged coworkers. Minnesota governor Rudy Perpich called in the National Guard to protect those workers, along with the scab workers brought in from outside. Finally, after a year of heartbreak and a rift among friends and union brothers that still divides Austin, the UFCW ended the strike by putting P-9 into receivership. They negotiated a one-cent increase over the wages proposed by Hormel, in return for agreeing to allow a lower wage for newly hired workers. To keep Hormel from cleaning house and installing an all-new workforce, they negotiated an agreement that senior workers would retain preference for high-paying jobs inside the plant and former strikers would be given preference for rehiring as scab-occupied positions were vacated. P-9 leadership warned that creating a two-tier wage scale would turn the workforce against itself, but they were powerless to resist the agreement negotiated by UFCW.

  “That strike was an unconditional surrender,” Chidester told me, knitting his fingers behind his head and creaking backward in his office chair, “because, you know, the company won.” But if workers felt sold out by the union, it was nothing compared to the betrayal they soon suffered at the hands of Hormel.

  The QPP parking lot is gravel, and on a day like the one when I was first there—the very beginning of March, when the mercury had finally pushed above freezing and the glaciers of plowed snow were starting to drip and calve—the driveway to the security gate turns muddy and rutted and pocked by potholes. At four, the sun hung blindingly bright in the sky, and the entrance to the fenced grounds was alive with workers flowing in and out: the shift change. They were mostly Hisp
anic but also Somali and African American, all pushing through the narrow turnstile as I waited for the security guard to reemerge from his booth. One man, his dreadlocks wound and tucked under a blue bandanna, swiped his employee ID several times, before he shouted out, “I guess my card not working, man.” He spoke with the unmistakable lilt of Jamaica. The guard buzzed him through, then opened the door a crack, apologetically. “They are just ridiculously uptight about things like this,” he told me. Indeed, in the years since the outbreak caused by the brain machine, QPP had never allowed a reporter onto its grounds—until I visited.

  Finally, Carole Bower arrived and ushered me toward the entrance. She was dressed in hospital white, down to her shoes. Even her manicured nails were tipped in white, and her hair had been frosted with highlights. Her demeanor, too, though not exactly icy, was officious. She passed through the double doors without looking back. She was very sorry to have kept me waiting, she said, but “Quality Pork and Hormel take security very seriously.” A stream of workers climbed stairs toward the kill floor. They moved steadily past the laundry room window, taking clean white aprons. But Bower steered me away from their path, gesturing toward the office entrance. Inside, all eyes rose from their computers; heads poked above their cubicle walls as we passed.

  Once we had squeezed into a tight, private office borrowed for the occasion, Bower shut the door and closed the blinds. She sat behind the desk and opened a manila folder, revealing a set of talking points. As I asked each question, she scanned the prepared remarks and read the appropriate response. I felt bad for her. She seemed taxed by the dilemma of owning up to QPP’s role in the outbreak without accepting culpability. But even when I asked questions that departed from her bullet points, Bower steadfastly defended the speed of QPP’s response to the outbreak and reiterated management’s deep caring for the affected workers. “When the public health department came on site, we had open meetings with all of the employees in our two big break rooms,” she said. “They took them off their work time, paid them for their time, and the president of the company and our HR manager and myself and anyone else that was involved talked to them, had interpreters, explained what was going on. We had weekly meetings just like that with everybody in the plant for the following four, five, six weeks.”

  I told her that I had interviewed more than ten affected workers and found only one who had attended any of those meetings and noted that it would have taken a dozen such meetings, for each time there was a new development, to inform workers this way. Bower’s calm reserve faltered.

  “We had multiple meetings,” she snapped. “We would have the day hot side, the day cold side, livestock. . . . We probably had four meetings in a row.”

  She stared across the desk at me, her lips pinched.

  “Right,” I said. “I just don’t see how—”

  “Day and night,” she interrupted. Then paused again.

  “But—” I started.

  “For weeks,” she said. Her face grew flush. “Do you see it now?”

  In November 1987, barely a year after the conditions of the strike resolution were made official, Hormel announced a shutdown of nearly half of the new plant. The company said it would continue to operate the packaging operation on the refrigerated side, but the cut-and-kill would be taken over by Quality Pork Processors Inc. QPP then existed only on paper but was headed by Richard C. Knight, a former executive at Swift, the Chicago-based meatpacker that pioneered the conveyor line and had a major plant in nearby Worthington. Knight claimed his new company would be separate from Hormel, though QPP would buy exclusively Hormel contract hogs and sell the butchered meat exclusively back to Hormel. They would use Hormel’s space and Hormel-owned equipment, rely on the Hormel mechanics, and drive Hormel forklifts.

  Leaders of the wounded and strike-weary P-9, newly re-dubbed UFCW Local 9, felt this was a union-busting tactic and asserted that 550 former strikers still on the preferential recall list were entitled to the new jobs created by the subcontract—and at the wages the union had just agreed to. Hormel denied this and, to make its point, erected a wall in the middle of the plant to divide Hormel from QPP. Eventually it would add a separate entrance and run a chain-link fence through the center of the parking lot. “It’s kind of like taking a room in the middle of a house,” Dale Chidester told me, “and saying it’s not really part of the house.”

  Local 9’s attorney asked the St. Paul Pioneer Press: “What good is a union contract if the company can avoid the contract by simply leasing its premises to another company and get the work done at non-union rates?” On the first day of operation in June 1988, an arbitrator agreed to take up that question and ordered QPP closed down. But the union no longer had the strength to engage Hormel in a protracted battle. After a year of legal wrangling, Local 9 eventually conceded. The contract was amended to allow lower pay for subcontractors, and the plant reopened in June 1989. UFCW bosses in Washington, D.C., hailed the deal as a victory, even though they had won a wage of only $9 per hour at QPP after the local had gone on a yearlong strike to protect a $10.69 hourly wage at Hormel just three years earlier. The two-tier pay scale that the old P-9 leadership had warned against was now a permanent reality—but cloaked in double talk. “It’s not a two-tiered wage,” Chidester told me with an ironic smile. “It’s just a subcontractor with a lower wage scale.”

  With new wages came new workers, and even rumors that QPP recruited laborers in Mexico. Matthew Garcia said he didn’t know of formal recruitment, but in his hometown of Magdalena Peñasco, a small village in the state of Oaxaca, nearly every adult male he knew had, at one time or another, worked at QPP. By the early 1990s, Austin had gone from having a united local workforce to having a sharply divided workforce that, while still technically unionized, is, on the QPP side, decidedly less vocal and less powerful. By some estimates, QPP’s labor force at the time of the neurological outbreak was 75 percent immigrant. But the anger of former strikers who had been promised preferential rehiring did not fall on QPP for its hard-nosed labor practices; many townspeople instead turned on the immigrants who filled the positions that Hormel had promised. Chidester just shrugged. “It’s still leftover bitterness from the strike,” he said.

  Workers who attended the QPP meetings in late 2007, people like Miriam Angeles, remember the break-room gatherings very differently from Carole Bower. When Angeles spoke to me at Austin’s Centro Campesino—with the cultural center’s director, Victor Contreras, serving as interpreter—she said management insisted that, although people from QPP had become sick, there was no evidence that the illness originated from inside the plant. The managers instructed workers to keep quiet until the company made a public statement. “We prohibit any comment about this,” she remembered being told. “Anyone who comments on this disease, you could lose your job.”

  Affected workers were instructed not to identify themselves in the group meetings nor ask questions. In one meeting, however, a sick worker rose in a swell of panic to ask Kelly Wadding, “What’s going to happen with my health?”

  Wadding, according to Angeles, said: “Sit down. We’re going to talk to you in the nurse’s office.”

  After that, there were more meetings, but sick workers were afraid to speak out. They whispered in locker rooms. They phoned each other at home. They slowly figured out who some of their suffering coworkers were, but when Wadding called a final meeting to announce that the mystery illness was under control, Angeles said employees who were still on work restrictions were too scared to say anything. And though they were all in the UFCW, neither Local 9 nor the bosses in Washington, D.C., took up their cause.

  To this day, there is no agreed-upon number of QPP workers who were affected by the illness. The MDH conducted a survey and found fifteen. In his published study based on rigorous testing, Lachance says he found twenty-one. Thirteen were sufficiently incapacitated to file workers’ compensation claims against QPP. The count is further complicated by the revelation that MDH reached out to th
e two other plants in America where pork brains were being harvested, and some published reports include seven additional cases from the Indiana Packers Corporation plant in Delphi, Indiana, and one more from the Hormel plant in Fremont, Nebraska.

  Angeles didn’t seek out sick coworkers. She had two daughters, one still a newborn, and she couldn’t risk getting into any trouble with her bosses. She resolved to just do her job and keep quiet. She never complained, she told me, even though she said her supervisor never honored her doctor’s orders that she sit for fifteen minutes every two hours. When the strong medications that had been prescribed for pain in her arms left her with blurred vision, the supervisor still refused to let her take a break. “No,” Angeles said she was told, “you have to keep working.”

  Many of the most severely incapacitated workers didn’t attend the QPP meetings because they were out from work for weeks at a time. They only found out about what was happening to them by chance. Susan Kruse, who was at home and unable to work, didn’t learn of the outbreak until she saw it on the evening news. Emiliano Ballesta didn’t know how widespread the illness was until he arrived for a steroid treatment at the Austin Medical Center and found the waiting room filled with his coworkers. Upon returning to QPP after another five months out, Matthew Garcia was surprised to discover that Dr. Lachance had referred him, along with a group of fellow employees, for examination by P. James B. Dyck in the neurology department at the Mayo Clinic. Only at the end of the checkup did Dyck explain to Garcia that there was an “epidemic of neuropathy” that was affecting QPP workers—a newly discovered form of demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy.