Showdown in Chicago - By JoAnn Wypijewski, CounterPunch
Is This Really an 'Insurgency ' to Shake Up the Labor Movement?
Hansen is intimate with the status quo, his reputation stamped in the mid-1980s when he was the UFCW leadership's tool in destroying the strike and ultimately the union of meatpackers with Local P-9 at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota. "P-9" is one of those markers in labor history, emblem of both the courageous spirit of rank-and-file workers and the machinations of treacherous union leadership. Hansen, who'd plotted with strikebreakers, was made the trustee from which position he expelled the workers' elected leaders, offered unconditional surrender to the company, and saw to it that none of the strikers ever returned to work.
His most notorious action was sandblasting a 16x80 foot mural that 100 workers had painted on a labor center wall, doing it himself with the other trustees after the Austin building trades refused, and erasing first the painted faces of the workers and then the slogan "Solidarity".