Here is wiki's thumbnail account of the strike:

1985–1986 Hormel strike
Date August 17, 1985 – September 13, 1986
(1 year, 3 weeks and 6 days)
Location Austin, Minnesota, United States

Caused by
Unsafe working conditions
Decrease in hourly wages from $10.69 to $8.25

Goals
Return to $10.69 hourly wage
Improved working conditions

Methods
Corporate campaign
Boycott
Strike action

Resulted in
Local P-9 entered into trusteeship by UFCW
UFCW negotiates new labor contract
Hormel subleases part of the meatpacking plant in 1989

My personal involvement in this National News Story began in January of 1986, as Hormel was in the process of carrying out their threat to re-open the plant. While I was trying to create a differently structured labor movement after being fired from my job as General Counsel of a UFCW local union in Texas, for committing the crime of winning a strike I was supposed to lose. (That is my side of the story. My lawsuit got settled in 1990 so the facts never got litigated.)

I had met one of the P-9 road teams in Madison, Wisconsin where I was meeting with a dissident group of UFCW members employed by Oscar Mayer. Both groups were resisting the UFCW International Union, which was obliging packinghouse local unions to cave in to the pay cuts demanded by our employers in that hideous era.

From that chance encounter with one of the P-9 executive board members, I was able to work out an arrangement with Local P-9 where I would work for expenses only and to bill for hours worked, payable after the strike at the Rockford Files rate of $200 a day. Eventually, I made the UFCW pay my account receivable after they put the local union into trusteeship.

In Austin, Minnesota, I met Ray Rogers, a former union staffer, like myself, who went into business for himself, offering a realistic way to fight employers. He had worked for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, and was highly skilled at media relations.

I watched Ray as he was interviewed by Tom Petit of NBC news, giving me an eye witness view of the national media -- Petit spent a half hour, re-phrasing one question probably 20 times: "You know you are going to lose, don't you?" Ray never showed on camera the slightest annoyance as he used different words each time to say, "No, our boycott is killing them."

Ray had told me, "What the networks really want is for us to blow up a house so they can take a picture of it."

The President of Local P-9 was Jim Guyette, a packinghouse worker who, by the grace of the mass media gods, was great on television but he was totally green about labor-management shit. He had blond hair and ice blue eyes and all the small town media people covering the strike were enchanted by "Jim."

The biggest rush I ever got from union work came when Jim Guyette appeared on "Nightline." Ray and I helped him prepare -- I had told him that whatever Ted Koppel says when he calls on you, say, "That's exactly right, Ted." Then do not take a breath and you hit our talking points as hard as you can."

Jim was a prodigy. His innocent baby blues disarmed Ted, who let him go on to our rap until Jim was done.

Skipping lots of stuff to get to the Final Irony.

There is still a lefty union publication called Labor Notes. As the P-9 strike had made so much national news, it made sense to have a national level conference about our struggle. There were several "workshops" planned, and I prepared a rap about "North American Meat Packers Union. (NAMPU)." That was the name we came up with as the new union to replace the UFCW. This was intended to evade the trusteeship that he UFCW ultimately imposed, officially ending the strike.

The facts speak for themselves here. The local union was kicking Hormel's ass. We knew that because Austin, Minnesota was and remains today a small town, where everybody knows everybody. The sales department staff folks were openly in a panic about the boycott as Hormel was losing its shelf space in the grocery stores. How long would it take to get it back? According to the sales department, decades. So the Company got our international union to put us out of business through trusteeship.

Winning is no longer labor's goal. Having a good relationship with management is the cornerstone of today's labor movement. A union is its paid staff.

The UFCW caught some criticism from the supposedly still militant unions -- but nothing of real-world significance.

This came into clear focus at the Labor Notes conference about our effort. Like most conferences, there were smaller group workshops including one for NAMPU -- in a hotel room without seating for more than a dozen people, held on Sunday afternoon when many participants had already gone to the airport.

I was new to the renegade life, and I was still at heart an Inside guy, so when one of the 15 or so lonely souls who came to the meeting took the floor and said, "This is the most important thing going on at this whole damned conference. I want to know why it is taking place on Sunday afternoon in a hotel room without enough chairs."

I gave a mealy mouthed response about how I was glad to have any platform.

Then Barbara Koppel, the Oscar winning documentary director, stepped out from behind her camera and said, I was wondering the same thing. So I asked the Labor Notes people. The answer is that David Twedell (FWF) is too controversial."

Fighting the Boss is a nice thought, but it makes it too hard to a have career doing it.