Episode 18: AMERICAN DREAM
When Hormel cut wages like a buzz saw on a pork shoulder, workers rebelled
Criterion has released a 4K digital restoration of American Dream.
As a young filmmaker, Barbara Kopple won two Oscars for best documentary. In 1977, she won for Harlan County, USA. Then in 1991, she won again for American Dream, a film about a meatpackers strike in Austin, Minnesota against Hormel, the makers of Spam.
In 2016, I interviewed Kopple about both films. In Episode 2, we talked to Kopple about Harlan County, USA. In this episode, we discuss American Dream.
Janus Films describes American Dream this way: “Fed up with dangerous plant conditions and drastic wage cuts, Austin’s Local P-9 went against the advice of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union and, with the help of labor activist Ray Rogers’s campaign to damage the meatpacking giant’s public reputation, conducted a nearly yearlong walkout.
“But as the strike dragged on, some workers found themselves desperate to make ends meet and ready to cross the picket line, dividing a community already betrayed by a once progressive company and roiled by blockades, riots, and the intervention of the National Guard. Following up her landmark documentary Harlan County, USA with another engrossing report from the trenches of working-class America, Kopple poignantly captures the human and political costs of one of the most significant setbacks to organized labor amid the unchecked corporatism of the Reaganomics era.”
Unionized workers walked off the meatpacking line in Austin, Minnesota in 1985-86.
THE AMERICAN DREAM FILE