Cheri Register began writing her memoir, Packinghouse Daughter, as a recollection of the 1959 meatpacking strike against Wilson & Co in Albert Lea, Minnesota. It developed into more.

Hers is a coming of age story -- it describes her first childhood understandings of class consciousness and her adult realization that her Ph.D makes it impossible to return comfortably to the blue collar community she grew up in and at the same time impossible to forget that she will always be a "Packinghouse Daughter."

Wilson & Co. dominated Albert Lea and the lives of Register's family and friends. Known simply as "the plant," Wilson built its processing operation just outside of town and thus avoided paying city taxes and following city regulations. Yet its presence hung over everything.

Albert Lea's air smelled of the plant, its lake turned into a stinking pool, and the powerful in town catered to the plant. But in the years following World War II, the 1200 workers at Wilson, like millions of workers across the country, made hesitant peace with this cost of Corporate

America in a bargain of decent wages for steady work.

In 1959 this all changed. It started as a walkout over the company's unilateral implementation of mandatory overtime, a move that threatened workers' family-life and their dignity as workers. It became a lock-out when Wilson refused to negotiate and refused to allow workers to return unless they signed a "yellow-dog contract" giving the company broad authority to restructure their work. It sparked violence when a scab-driven car leaving the plant hit a striking worker. And it ended 109 days later in a hearing before an arbitration board, after Governor Orville

Freeman had declared martial law and called in the National Guard, not to protect the strikebreakers, but to shut the plant down and preserve peace.

The strike made front-page news across the nation, but Register's memories are more prosaic. She has no recollection of 2500 people marching down Albert Lea's main street, but recalls vividly the feeling of resistance she felt when she slipped marshmallows down the antenna of a National Guard jeep. She does not remember the different negotiating positions taken by the company and the union, but she sees her father weeping after he learns Wilson will not recall him because of trumped up charges of violence on the picket line.

Register's memoir is more than a history of one strike and how it affected one young girl or a small Southern Minnesota town. It is also a story of industrial America where class differences are often sharp but the choices are not always clear.

The battle in 1959 divided the community into "us" and "them" and began as a clear conflict between "workers rights" and "management prerogatives." Over the months of the lockout, however, the union's demands narrowed to a grim fight to win back their jobs after the company permanently replaced them.

"Which side are you on?" asks the old Wobbly song "The Preacher and the Slave." The question is more complex than the simple answer the song presumes. The choices faced by UPWU Local 6 in 1959 were "the complexities of survival in a declining economy."

What followed the 1959 strike was not a clear triumph of good over evil. "This isn't really a question of victory or defeat [but of] facing the realities in front of us," Frank Schultz told fellow union members before they voted to return to work. Most of the workers got their jobs back and good times returned, but the good times were short lived and the company succeeded in winning the contractual flexibility to eliminate jobs and change work through increased automation.

Twenty years later, in 1983, Wilson & Co. declared bankruptcy, closed the plant only to re-open it after slashing workers' wages to $6.50 an hour from $10.69. It took another strike, this one lasting for five weeks, to raise wages to $8.50 an hour. For nearly two decades, workers and the city fought to preserve meatpacking jobs in Albert Lea, but to the extent they exist today, they still pay less than most packinghouse workers earned 25 years ago.

What comes through Register's memoir is a provocative discussion of class divisions. Class is a word out of fashion today. Appeals to the "working class," such as they are, become cliched populist phrases. Register confronts her own class upbringing and goes beyond simple cliches.

She writes of belonging to "a generation of working-class children propelled into the middle-class by postwar prosperity, higher education, and our parents determination to spare [their children] the spirit-wrenching disappointments they endured as the youth of the Great Depression."

Class differences, for Register, operate in the more mundane events of everyday life. A blue work shirt is not a status symbol bought from a fancy catalog, but something you wash out the blood of freshly killed hogs from. Rich kids get away with smoking and promiscuity, while working class kids risk their futures. The company breaks workers' lives, but workers are "thugs" for vandalizing company property. In real life, management rights clearly trump the rights of workers who put lifetimes into the often brutal work of the plant.

Register forsakes the security of easy romanticism and nostalgia with which too many writers infuse their working class roots. Instead, she gives us a more complicated (and more honest and identifiable) story of class division, of workers who find dignity in work and ask for nothing more than respect and fairness in return. "Fairness," she writes, "is the supreme virtue governing human social life." One day, perhaps, fairness will prevail. In the meantime, books like Packinghouse Daughter help keep the vision alive.

Erik Peterson is Director of Northern Minnesota Programming for the Labor Education Service at the University of Minnesota. This review first appeared in the Duluth Labor World.