The Power of Sugar Beets: Long-Time Labor Organizer on Politics in the Red River Valley
Warm temperatures likely delayed the official start of the sugar beet harvest season in the Red River Valley on the border of North Dakota and Minnesota by a few days, which typically begins on October 1.
“I never lost that, the thrill watching them harvest sugar beets,” says Mark Froemke, president of the West Minnesota Area Labor Council/Red River Valley, AFL-CIO, one of 500 local labor councils of the AFL-CIO. Froemke, who lives in Crookston, Minn., worked for the American Crystal Sugar plant in East Grand Forks, Minn. for over two decades.
Froemke, who will soon be 69 years old, was adopted as an 11-month old baby by a stay-at-home mother, and a father who sold farm equipment in Fargo, N.D. His family lived in Jamestown and Minot, N.D., as well as Denver, Salt Lake City, and Oakland, Calif. They returned to the Red River Valley in the 1970s, where Froemke began working in the sugar beet industry.
His union, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM), operates locals on both sides of the North Dakota and Minnesota border, where the Red River of the North, which flows northward and empties into Lake Winnipeg in Canada, creates a cool climate and rich soil that is ideal for growing sugar beets. According to Froemke, the union at his plant was formed in the 1930s when it affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The American Federation of Grain Millers was established in the 1940s and merged with the Bakery, Confectionery and Tobacco Workers Union to become the BCTGM in the 1990s.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than half of U.S. sugar production comes from sugar beets. The Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association represents over 2,700 growers who own American Crystal Sugar Company, an agricultural cooperative based in Moorhead, Minn., and the largest sugar beet producer in the U.S. In 1973, the association bought the company and became the first sugar beet agricultural cooperative. They own the farmland as well as portions of the factories. The powerful industry and its workers have shaped the economy of rural communities across the country, especially in the Red River Valley.
For decades, Froemke has organized sugar factory workers to fight for job security while building solidarity with farmers and workers across international borders. This has involved leading workers in rallies and protests around the U.S., including the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) and early 2000s protests opposing the Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR).
Froemke, left, standing with a drummer on the picket line during the Brainerd Lakes Area grocery store workers unfair labor practice strike which took place from December 22 to 25, 2023. Photo courtesy of Mark Froemke.
“To win battles for workers, it’s always a constant struggle,” he says. “Capital never takes a day off. The victories that you win, you can lose. So you always have to be vigilant.”
Froemke spoke with Workday Magazine about his history of labor organizing in the sugar beet industry and in small-town communities. The following interview has been edited for clarity.
Workday Magazine: Did you always know you would come back to the Red River Valley?
Mark Froemke: My folks moved back here in 1975, and I came back in ‘76. And then kind of what happened is, the winter was so cold it froze my brain. I never left, right? I went out to the sugar beet factory, got a job, and then met a woman, got married and had kids. The intention was never to stay forever, but you know, that’s how it kind of goes sometimes.
Workday Magazine: How long have you been president of the West Minnesota Area Labor Council/Red River Valley, AFL-CIO?
Froemke: Since the Minnesota AFL went through the New Alliance.
Workday Magazine: I was reading about the 22-month lockout of American Crystal Sugar workers from 2011 to 2013. How were you involved in that struggle?
Froemke: I wasn’t directly affected, I was no longer working for Crystal Sugar. My wife was locked out of the Crookston sugar beet factory. But the people in the beet plants, I knew a lot of them because I worked there ‘til I left. It was very personal. With the help of Minnesota AFL and North Dakota AFL, we raised money to keep the workers going. This was a story of the difference between states.
If you lived in Ada, Minn., but worked in the Hillsboro, N.D. beet plant, you weren’t eligible for unemployment. If you lived in Grand Forks, N.D., and worked in East Grand Forks, Minn., you were eligible for unemployment. Workers in Minnesota were eligible for unemployment and those in North Dakota were not, until right at the very end when the North Dakota Supreme Court ruled that there is a difference between a lockout and a strike. And then North Dakota changed the law so a worker now, if they ever get locked out in North Dakota, they’ll never get unemployment.
The money we raised helped those workers survive. We had food trucks coming out of the Twin Cities that would come to the valley and drop off food at strike headquarters and some pro-union grocery stores gave food. You had a lot more community support, in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, than you did in a small town like Hillsboro, because it’s a small town. The sugar beet growers have a lot of power. The smaller the town, the tougher it was.
Workday Magazine: How long did you work for Crystal Sugar?
Froemke: I worked there from 1978 ‘til I went to the AFL-CIO. In election years, I got released from work from anywhere from three months to six months to work on election campaigns.
It’s pretty deep red out here, but we got a couple spots that are pro-labor, so we’re doing well there, but in other places, it’s a tough haul.
Workday Magazine: What made you want to start working for Crystal Sugar?
Froemke: I needed money. And it was a union shop, and I was pro-union. So you got paid good and you were a part of the union.
Workday Magazine: Were you always pro-union or was there a certain event or idea that you were exposed to that made you pro-union?
Froemke: I like to read, and I read a lot about the Wobblies, the IWW, and about the organizing during the 1930s and the CIO. I just had a real belief that unions were something that all workers should have.
Workday Magazine: So as soon as you started working at Crystal Sugar, did you get active in organizing?
Froemke: I got hired by Crystal, then I started going to union meetings, and then I learned of how my union worked, and got very involved in it. Then I was elected steward and then I was secretary-treasurer for some years. But my main forte was always politics.
So we put together a very good political system. Crystal Sugar has five factories. Three are in Minnesota, two are in North Dakota. In Wahpeton, N.D., there was another beet co-op, they were part of our grain millers union. In Renville, Minn., there was another beet plant. I spent a lot of time working the politics in both states.
Workday Magazine: What was that work like?
Froemke: There was a lot of education for the members. Union members, like anybody else, get influenced by TV or crap that they hear, right? You gotta always be talking to them and discussing the issues. When you keep discussing issues with them, they want to do the right thing. You can convince them why this is important. This is your job, this is how we fight for a farm bill, how we fight for the sugar program, how we fight for the legislation in Minnesota and North Dakota to make sure that our jobs are safe, you know, and that we’ll have security in our job.
Workday Magazine: How are the farm bills related to workers and their working conditions?
Froemke: The federal government, every five years, passes a farm bill sugar program that makes sure that the sugar industry has certain protections against foreign sugar. When those protections are there, sugar beet farmers can make money off sugar beets and that means the factories are going to be there. If you don’t have a sugar program, your job probably won’t be there very long, because farmers can grow any crop. What protects your job is to make sure there’s a good sugar program.
They can shut down a sugar beet factory as quickly as they can shut down an auto plant. The only difference is because Crystal Sugar is a farmers co-op, they put tons of money to keep raising sugar beets and processing them to make money. That means for us as workers, if they’re making money, that means our plants are making sugar and we’re getting paid and getting our pensions.
Workday Magazine: What does the processing of sugar beets into sugar actually take? What does that work like inside the factories?
Froemke: Right now they’re harvesting sugar beets. Come October 1, they harvest sugar beets 24 hours a day. And to be very honest, I love watching the harvest. It’s like a military operation. They’ll harvest sugar beets 24 hours depending on the weather, and then they stockpile them. When they’re harvesting those sugar beets, that’s something. Technology is always improving the process. As they improve the process, unfortunately, you need fewer workers. But each factory has hundreds of workers.
So you take the sugar beet, and basically it gets sliced. Then you boil it and you subtract the sugar from it. And then it’s a process of turning that sugar, taking the juice—we call it juice—we boil it, turn it into molasses, and then we spin it and turn it into sugar. The waste of the sugar beet, we turn that into pellets. Everything gets turned into either sugar molasses, industrial molasses, or pellets. Nothing gets thrown away, and whatever we can’t process, farmers like to come and pick up what we call beet pulp and their cattle love it, because they taste kind of like candy. They pick that up for free, feed it to their cattle, and their cattle are happy campers.
As we process, there’s still juice left, and that goes to what we call the ion, and the ion sucks out even more sugar out of it. So the factory is like a closed loop.
We use a lot of water and before we can turn it back into the river, we have to purify it. In Minnesota, you can’t put water that has sugar in it in a river because it’ll kill the fish. So we have holding ponds and each holding pond is a different process for how it purifies the water.
Workday Magazine: I’ve also done some reading about the history of migrant laborers in the industry. How have working conditions changed over time?
Froemke: So one time you needed lots of farm labor to go out there and hold the beets. Now it’s all scientific. So the migrant workers that used to come up, most of them either work in the factories, or they got educations and are working just like everybody else in different industries.
I come out of the plant. I’m a worker. There were jobs when I started in ‘78 that I’m damn glad technology did away with because they were backbreaking jobs and they weren’t good for the worker.
Workday Magazine: Workers in different industries today are negotiating over technology and how it controls their working conditions. People are trying to save jobs, but what kind of jobs are we trying to protect?
Froemke: A friend of mine, he’s long since passed away, but when he worked in the steel industry in Youngstown, Ohio, they used to actually go up there and grab your shoulders, because it was backbreaking work and the stronger you were, the better physique you had, the more you could take that backbreaking work.
I don’t know if you ever heard the statement before, but in coal mining, in the old days, they used to have children working the coal mines, right? And children used to sit on a bench and pick the slate off the coal. They were called breaker boys. And then when they got old enough, then they would go into the mines. I’m talking, 13-year-olds. By the time they were in their 30s or early 40s, they were physically destroyed. And if you were lucky, you got to go back and sit on this bench and pull the slate off the coal belt. And they used to have the saying, “Once a man, twice a boy,” because you started out as a breaker boy and then you went into the mine, and if you were lucky, you got to go back and be a breaker boy again.
Workday Magazine: Child labor has been in the headlines a lot the past few years, and especially in Minnesota, because of the children who have been allegedly employed to clean meat packing plants.
Froemke: If capital can get away with it, which they think they can, you’ll see changes back into the kind of work that children can do either legally or illegally. In some states, particularly hard red states, they are trying to lower the age of workers. You can’t work in a sugar beet factory unless you’re 18. But in a lot of states, particularly in meat packing, in some states construction, they want to move that down to 16 years old. Once you move it to 16, what’s wrong with 14? In Minnesota, we have an incredible attorney general that sues every bastard that deserves to be sued.
Workday Magazine: What are some of the biggest differences between Minnesota and North Dakota when it comes to labor organizing?
Froemke: One of the biggest differences is North Dakota is a right-to-work state, so that means you don’t have to belong to a union if you don’t want to. Most workers, if they had the opportunity to join a union, they would. But unfortunately, because of all the mass propaganda, it’s very hard to organize anywhere, particularly in a right-to-work state. When you have a right-to-work state, you also have laws that don’t protect workers very well.
Workday Magazine: Minnesota has had a few years of passing progressive legislation affecting workers in hopefully positive ways. Has there been anything similar in North Dakota?
Froemke: There really hasn’t, because you have to have the legislature in your favor. And as North Dakota has turned redder and redder, you just don’t have many in the legislature that support you.
Workday Magazine: Are there any specific changes or wins you’re most proud of?
Froemke: We used to lobby the unions on behalf of the sugar program and the farm bill, and in one of the times we lobbied, we barely won the sugar program. The reason we won that is because of the sugar beet workers. We sent a large delegation of workers to Washington, D.C. to work on that and we worked really hard.
You know the “Battle of Seattle”? We had the second biggest delegation going to Seattle for the WTO. We had the second biggest delegation go to Florida to fight against Free Trade of the Americas. When Sen. Paul Wellstone had a big rally in Washington, D.C. for agriculture, we had the biggest delegation. Those are things I’m surely proud about.
During the NAFTA battle, in Pembina, N.D., a little town right by the Canadian border, we had a major rally with the Canadians against NAFTA, right in this little town, and we had like 700 people there. The Canadians brought buses and we organized buses, and then we hired Huguenots to cook the food for us. They did a hell of a job. That was a lot of fun.
There might be somewhere in your office an old CD made by the Labor Education Service. When we made that, we were out in a field with a friend of mine, where they’re harvesting sugar beets. He let Barb Kucera and Howard Kling and myself go out in those fields and watch them harvest. Then we visited with a small banker, what sugar beets mean to the bank and their community. We went to the hardware store, the grocery store, and a school. What would it be to your school if the sugar beet industry went away? That means you’re gonna lose those farm kids and all kinds of workers’ kids. In small towns, those schools are, you know, barely making it. It was also the first time Crystal had ever allowed anybody to film inside their factory.
Froemke was filmed by the Labor Education Service at an anti-CAFTA rally in November 2003, when he said, “We gotta build better and stronger ties with the workers in Latin America, Central America, and around the world.”
Workday Magazine: How did you convince them to let you take cameras inside?
Froemke: If I have anything I’m good at—which is up to debate—I always knew how to be able to talk to people to get what I thought was important. Don’t get me wrong, they had to think about it. They thought it was important too, at that time, to tell our story.
This story is part of the Greater Minnesota Worker Listening Project series, a profile series on union and non-union workers in Greater Minnesota and other rural communities.
Amie Stager is the Associate Editor for Workday Magazine.
Workday Magazine holds the powerful to account while bringing the perspectives of everyday workers, and the organizations that defend their rights, to focus. We emphasize long-form investigative journalism to unearth the concealed and buried. Our publication is based in Minnesota and covers the greater Midwest, along with international issues that affect workers, like climate change and U.S. militarism.
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