Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, February 3rd, 1986, the Hormel Meat Packing Plant in Austin, Minnesota is back open after about six months.

Workers at the plant had been on strike against the Hormel Corporation citing low wages, dangerous working conditions on the meat packing line and more.

And now the parent company, Hormel, was reopening the plant and bringing in a lot of new workers, many of them migrant workers.

And this strike and this labor battle would continue for another six months or so, but this moment

in early 86 was in many ways the moment the strike started to flounder and a real turning point in this

labor story.

The Hormel strike is considered a real critical one in American labor history, particularly

in the 1980s.

We've talked about it on this show,

a case study for how labor and the power of unions

was really changing throughout the 1980s.

It is also a case study in another force in American cultural and political life

spam which is the canned cooked pork product. It is made by Hormel foods. It became

popular during World War II and persisted in the public imagination and the

public stomachs ever since spam is what they were making at the Hormel

planned in Austin Minnesota and spam is the subject of a new multi-part series

from the excellent podcast The Experiment, which is co-produced

by WNYC and the Atlantic and is hosted by Julia L'Goria.

She's the host of the Experiment.

You may know her from More Perfect and Radio Lab

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