American Dream

American Dream

Right after Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers who were on strike, a strike seemed like a dangerous gamble. But in Austin, Texas, the meatpackers of Local P-9 walked out.

That decision and what happened afterwards is documented in “American Dream,” last year’s Academy Award-winning documentary by Barbara Kopple. It’s the kind of movie you watch with shocked interest as families lose jobs and houses, management plays macho hardball and rights and wrongs get hopelessly twisted together.

Kopple made one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen when she went to Kentucky to chronicle a bitter miner’s strike in “Harlan County, U.S.A.” That was a strike that presented clear choices between good and evil.

The Hormel strike is more complicated. Kopple follows it through months and years of agony as Local P-9 hires a freelance strike consultant named Ray Rogers after deciding to act independently from its parent international union in Washington. Rogers brings charts, graphs and promises of national press attention. He delivers all those things but also denies Local P-9 the experienced negotiating skills that could have been supplied by the international.

Once P-9 has started its campaign and solidified its position, Lewie Anderson is sent in by the international as an experienced negotiator. He despairs at the locals’ naivete. “They made the critical mistake of opening up the whole contract,” Anderson says wearily at one point. “That allows the company the chance to renegotiate language it took us 40 years to win.” A chain-smoking everyman with Lech Walesa’s worn charisma, Anderson wants to compromise with Hormel. The P-9 militants, fired up by Rogers and their local president, don’t want any such thing.

They want their $10.69 an hour or else. The company locks out the striking workers and eventually begins hiring replacements while some dissident local members break away from P-9 and side with Anderson. The international in Washington eventually declares the strike illegal, seizes control of P-9 and negotiates its own deal with Hormel. But most P-9 members stay loyal to the strike, and eventually some 80 percent of them lose their jobs.

The result is much more complex than that. Even though Hormel compromises on a wage with the union, it soon closes down half of the plant and rents it to another meatpacker that pays $6.50 an hour. We are pulled in two directions as “American Dream” presents these events. We want to see the movie as a fight between right and wrong, good and evil. But we also see it as a clash between two tactics. Would P-9 have been better off if it had never heard of Ray Rogers and his consulting wizardry, and let Lewie Anderson negotiate a settlement?

Or would Hormel have shut down half its plant anyway, in a transparent move to allow the $6.50 operation? One of the central issues in “American Dream” involves the legality of employers who hire permanent replacements for workers who are participating in a legal strike. Some companies are so cocksure these days that they hire replacements and, if found guilty of violating labor laws, are happy to pay a fine; they’re millions ahead in the long run.

In this film, people are so real they make most movie characters look like inhabitants of the funny page. Families are torn apart by this strike; one brother goes back to work, another stays out on the picket lines. Workers have tears running down their faces as they describe not being able to support their families and it becomes clear that no possible win by the members of P-9 could compensate them for those lost wages (especially since they’re striking not for a raise but against a pay cut). A nobility creeps onto the scene here: People make enormous financial sacrifices simply because doing so feels morally right our hearts go out to them even though we can’t be sure from this film whether they’ve chosen wisely.

Stories like this Hormel strike are too long and complicated to be told every day; only a documentary has room enough for the whole picture.

Is there a lesson at the end of “American Dream”? I think so. The American tradition of collective bargaining will break down if companies can simply ignore a legal strike, hire replacements and continue as before.

There was a time in American history when such behavior by management would have been seen as not only illegal but immoral; the new management philosophers who won ascendency in the 1980s dismiss such views as sentimentalism they are concerned only with the bottom line, where they see profits, not people. For a recent overseas trip, the White House announced that the video library on Air Force One was stocked with “Gone With the Wind”; next flight, could they take along “American Dream”?

Watch American Dream For Free On Gomovies.