American Dream

Winner of the 1991 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Barbara Kopple’s American Dream unflinchingly details the explosive 1985–86 labor strike against Hormel Foods in Austin, Minnesota, a city ripped apart in the tumult. 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.