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1985!: 1400 meatpackers walk off the job for a year at Austen Minnesota at the Geo A Hormel Plant in a bitter strike that lasts a year.Hormel froze wages in 1977. So by 1985, when the company demanded a 23 percent wage cut on top of that wage freeze, workers walked off the job in protest.
The strike was declared by Local P-9, but the UFCW parent union did not support it. The UFCW ultimately struck a deal with Hormel management, seized control of Local P-9, and removed the local union leaders, actions that challenged the credibility of the UFCW in the eyes of many in the larger labor movement. The strike gained national attention and led to a widely publicized boycott of Hormel products. (Thank god there was no drop in Spam supplies to create misery at)
In the course of their struggle, the P-9ers took on Hormel, the local authorities, the courts, the press, their own national, and the National Guard. The union mobilized its members in a display of democracy not seen in the labor movement for many years. Union activists poured into Austin to participate in the pickets, demonstrations and rallies. It became a fight for the rank and file throughout the nation. Many strikers' lives became transformed. As they entered into the field of political activity, these "typical workers" became class-struggle militants, willing to face jails and bullets in their fight for social justice. They learned to look beyond their own narrow economic interests, viewing their struggle as part of an international movement of workers against all their employers.
After six months, a significant number of strikebreakers crossed the picket line, provoking a vigorous response. On January 21, 1986, Minn. Gov. Rudy Perpich called in the National Guard to protect the strikebreakers. This brought protests against the governor, and the National Guard withdrew. People were shocked that the National Guard and the State Police would haul people off to jail, would bust the windshields out of cars that were trying to block exit ramps off I-90, that they were very rough with people who were trying to commit what they considered in a very Martin Luther King-kind of way, to be a principled, civil disobedience.

In the midst of the fray, a P-9 leader, Denny Mealy, and muralist Mike Alewitz led the workers in painting an exuberant mural on their union hall which came to symbolize the strike. The union dedicated the mural to then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela, at a time when he was still being vilified as a terrorist by Reagan's government.
After the strike ended, the national union wiped out the memory of the historic struggle by sandblasting the mural off the wall. By October of 1986 it was gone. The green dragon of capitalism featured in the mural was recreated by Alewitz in another mural commissioned in 1990 for the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research in Los Angeles, and still exists. A song, entitled "P-9," was written by Dave Pirner of the Minneapolis band Soul Asylum. The song was included on their 1989 album "Clam Dip & Other Delights."