Labor Practices in the Meat Packing and Poultry Processing Industry: An Overview

Order Code RL33002
CRS Report for Congress
Received through the CRS Web
Labor Practices in the Meat Packing and
Poultry Processing Industry: An Overview
Updated October 27, 2006
William G. Whittaker
Specialist in Labor Economics
Domestic Social Policy Division
Congressional Research Service ˜ The Library of Congress

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Labor Practices in the Meat Packing and
Poultry Processing Industry: An Overview
Summary
During the early 1960s, segments of the meat packing industry began to move
from large urban centers to small communities scattered throughout the Midwest.
By century’s end, this migration had effected major changes within the industry. The
old packing firms that had established their dominance during the late 1800s had
largely disappeared or been restructured as part of a new breed of packers. Joining
with the poultry processors who had emerged in the wake of World War II, they
quickly became a major force in American and, later, global industry.
The urban-to-rural migration, some suggest, had at least two major motivations.
One was to locate packing facilities in areas where animals were raised rather than
transporting the stock to urban packinghouses as had been the tradition: a more
economical arrangement. The other was a quest for lower labor costs: to leave
behind the urban unions and their collective bargaining agreements and to operate,
as nearly as possible, in a union-free environment. This initiative involved a low-
wage strategy, allowing for employment of lower skilled and low-wage workers.
The aftermath of this migration was complex. The urban unionized workforce,
by and large, did not follow the migrating plants. Since most local communities
could not provide an adequate supply of labor, the relocation process implied
recruitment of workers from outside the area of production. In practice, packers and
processors came increasingly to rely upon recent immigrants or, allegedly in some
instances, upon workers not authorized for employment in the United States.
Gradually, the new breed packers (and their poultry counterparts) began to
dominate the market — through various business arrangements consolidating the
industry into a small number of large firms. This corporate churning impacted the
trade union movement and its relations with the industry. The unions, too, were
restructured. The labor-management relationship, largely set during the 1940s, was
gradually replaced with new patterns of bargaining. Further, the demographics of the
workforce changed with the introduction of a new racial/ethnic and gender mixture.
Distances between the rural plants made union organization difficult, as did the new
linguistic and cultural differences among workers. Gradually, the workforce was
transformed from high-wage, stable, and union, to lower-wage and often non-union,
and came to be characterized by a high turnover rate.
From time to time, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) has received
requests for information on labor standards and labor-management relations in the
meat packing industry. Often, these queries have been associated with the Fair Labor
Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act, but there has been concern with
other legislation and issues as well. Some of these areas have been (and continue to
be) the subject of litigation. This report is intended as an introduction to the meat
packing/processing industry, the unions that have been active in that field, and labor-
management practices among the packers and their employees. It will not likely be
updated.

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Contents
A Sketch of the Meat Packing Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Consolidation: Round One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Consolidation: Round Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The Poultry Processing Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Grow-out Farmers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Plant Workers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Unionization of the Meat and Poultry Workforce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
The Early Years Under the Amalgamated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Developing a Stable Union . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
A Time of Trial and Upheaval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
The CIO and the Packinghouse Workers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Grass Roots Initiatives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
The Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC) . . . . . . 15
United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
The Merger: UPWA and the Amalgamated (1968) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
The Retail Clerks (RCIU) and the Amalgamated . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
A Merger Is Consummated (1979) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Industrial Restructuring and Its Impact on Labor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Managerial Churning and Collective Bargaining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
The Ascendance of the New Breed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Areas of Economics and Public Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Assembling a Workforce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Recruitment and Characteristics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
Turnover and Worker Retention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
The Immigration/Alien Worker Factor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
A Shortage of Labor? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Actively Seeking the Foreign Worker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Only Jobs That Americans Don’t Want? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Employers, Workers, and Immigration Authorities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Labor Standards and Working Conditions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
A Movement for Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
FLSA Coverage and Related Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Donning and Doffing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Chicken Catchers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Line Speeds and Rest Breaks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Possibilities for Change in Labor Practices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Looking at the Workplace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Considerations of Public Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
Fair Labor Standards Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
National Labor Relations Act . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

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Migrant and Seasonal
Agricultural Workers’ Protection Act (MSPA) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Administration and Enforcement Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Concluding Comment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Appendix: Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
List of Tables
Table 1. Racial and Nationality Trends Among
Slaughtering and Meat-Packing Workers
in Chicago, 1909 and 1928 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

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Labor Practices in the Meat Packing and
Poultry Processing Industry: An Overview
During the early 1960s, segments of the meat packing industry began to move
from urban centers to rural communities scattered throughout the Midwest. By
century’s end, this migration had effected major changes within the industry. The old
packing firms that had established their dominance during the late 1800s had largely
disappeared or had been restructured as part of a new breed of packers. Joining with
the poultry processors who had emerged in the wake of World War II, they became
a major force in American (and, later, global) industry — and a major employer.1
Business practices have affected the labor-management relationship, recruitment
of workers, and the protective labor standards that apply to persons employed in the
industry. The last half of the 20th century witnessed relocation of major firms, a
move from predominantly urban to more heavily rural production, and a shift in the
demographics of the industry’s workforce. The dispersal of the industry, some argue,
has also affected the manner in which employment-related law is enforced. Clearly,
it has impacted the trade unionization of the workforce. At issue are a number of
federal statutes and their administration: the Fair Labor Standards Act, the National
Labor Relations Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act and, potentially, the
Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Workers Protection Act. Similarly, both the
industry and its workforce have been affected by federal immigration policy. These
general areas have been a continuing focus of Department of Labor (DOL) action and
of litigation.2
This report provides an introduction to labor issues in meat packing and poultry
processing. It sketches the evolution of the industry and of the related trade union
movement, stressing development of corporate and trade union cultures and the
shifting demographics of the workforce. It notes areas of tension and conflict within
and between both labor and management. And, it points to considerations of public
policy that affect the continuing labor-management relationship.3
1 Seafood production, now largely absorbed into the meat and poultry industry, is not dealt
with here. In general, see the essays from Southern Exposure, fall 1991: Richard Schweid,
“Down on the Farm,” pp. 14-21; Eric Bates, “The Kill Line,” pp. 22-29; and Eric Bates,
“Parting the Waters,” pp. 34-36. See also David Griffith, Jones’s Minimal: Low-Wage
Labor in the United States (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), which
deals with meat, poultry, and shellfish. (Hereafter cited as Griffith, Jones’s Minimal.)
2 In general, see U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, Agricultural
Economic Report No. 785, Feb. 2000, Consolidation in U.S. Meatpacking, by James M.
MacDonald, Michael E. Ollinger, Kenneth E. Nelson, and Charles R. Handy, 42 pp.
3 The meat packing and poultry processing industries are complex structures. This report
(continued...)

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A Sketch of the Meat Packing Industry
“Up to the 1860s,” writes Lewis Corey, “meat packing was a small-scale
enterprise, not yet industrial,” dominated by merchants.4 Livestock were slaughtered
for local consumption where they were raised or, if transported to market, were
shipped or driven live to rail yards and, then, to urban packinghouses. Butchers, both
in small community packing houses and retail markets, were skilled craftsmen, often
self-employed or engaged in a facility with only a few other similarly skilled workers.
Consolidation: Round One
Late in the 19th century, larger plants began to develop. Live animals, collected
from throughout the Great Plains, were shipped to facilities normally located in major
rail centers such as Chicago, Kansas City, or Omaha. Dressed beef was then shipped
to branch houses for final processing and sale. Pork was treated somewhat
differently, some being cured or, later, canned. The packing plants were enormous
multistory facilities. Animals entered at an upper level and the carcass moved along
a disassembly line until dressed meat and by-products emerged at ground level.
Refrigerated rail cars appeared in the 1870s and 1880s. While this made
shipment of dressed meat less difficult, it appears not to have diminished the
dominance of the great midwestern packing companies. Early in the 20th century,
five firms became dominant: Swift, Armour, Morris, Wilson, and Cudahy. By 1916,
the “Big Five” slaughtered the great bulk of cattle, calves, hogs and sheep moving in
interstate commerce.5
The stock yards were “capital intensive” but with a rapidly expanding
workforce. The workers (and cattlemen/farmers) found themselves at a disadvantage
when dealing with the packers who were highly organized with an eye for efficiency
and profitability. With the introduction of labor-saving equipment and careful
structuring of the work process, the packers were increasingly able to employ largely
low-wage workers with few skills.6 Such work came to be associated with the most
recent round of immigrant labor. “Immigrants flooded the labor market and ...
accepted the common-labor earnings” offered by industry. “Simultaneously,” notes
David Brody, “an increasing number of women found a place in the packing houses
3 (...continued)
presents an overview of the industry and of labor policy and practice in that sector. It has
been developed from published sources: synthesizing the academic literature, selectively
examining industry journals and related materials. But, it is a sketch — an introduction.
Occupational Safety and Health, a highly specialized and technical field, is discussed in
other CRS reports and documents and is not dealt with in any substantial manner here.
4 Lewis Corey, Meat and Man: A Study of Monopoly, Unionism, and Food Policy (New
York: The Viking Press, 1950), p. 37. (Hereafter cited as Corey, Meat and Man.)
5 Richard J. Arnould, “Changing Patterns of Concentration in American Meat Packing,
1880-1963,” Business History Review, spring 1971, pp. 20-22. In 1923, Armour acquired
Morris.
6 Corey, Meat and Man, p. 45.

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CRS-3
at wages well below the unskilled male rate.”7 Gradually, if sporadically, the
workforce became unionized: wages increased, worker protections were introduced,
and work processes became institutionalized.
Consolidation: Round Two
In the late 1950s, two veteran packinghouse executives, Currier Holman and
Andy Anderson, reassessed conditions in the beef packing industry. “Why should
meat companies,” they queried, “remain wage-locked in heavily unionized cities
when unorganized workers could be hired at far lower wages out in the country?”8
In March 1960, having accepted their own challenge, Holman and Anderson set up
a new company: Iowa Beef Packers, Inc. — later, just IBP.
Though the old firms were still economically viable, the huge urban plants had
become dated and, in some measure, inefficient. Further, the continuing “supply of
cheap, unskilled labor” had begun to dry up9 and, since the late 1930s, the industry
had become increasingly unionized.
Led by IBP (among others), packers migrated to rural areas where land was
cheaper and local communities, pressed for economic development, were willing to
provide tax and other incentives to relocating firms.10 But, there were other elements
as well. Growers found it more economical to move livestock to a local/regional
center rather than shipping animals to Omaha or Chicago. The new (1950s) interstate
highway system provided easy access to national markets. Rather than ship sides of
beef to markets for on-site cutting, the packers introduced a system of boxed beef in
which meat, deboned and trimmed, was sealed in vacuum bags and shipped directly
to supermarkets. Easier to handle, boxed beef was quickly accepted by retailers —
and had the added advantage of largely eliminating the need for retail butchers.11
7 David Brody, The Butcher Workmen: A Study of Unionization (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1964), p. 6. (Hereafter cited as Brody, The Butcher Workmen.)
8 Steve Bjerklie, “On the Horns of a Dilemma: The U.S. Meat and Poultry Industry,” in
Donald D. Stull, et al., Any Way You Cut It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), p. 53. (Hereafter cited as Bjerklie, On the
Horns of a Dilemma.) That Anderson and Holman were concerned with efficiency and cost-
cutting — and were anxious to operate with a minimal union presence — is stressed in
Jeffrey Rodengen’s corporate study, The Legend of IBP (Fort Lauderdale, Write Stuff
Enterprises, Inc., 2000), pp. 22-25, and 47. (Hereafter cited as Rodengen, The Legend of
IBP.)
9 Bjerklie, On the Horns of a Dilemma, pp. 56-57.
10 See Charles Craypo, “Strike and Relocation in Meatpacking,” in Craypo and Bruce
Nissen, eds., Grand Designs: The Impact of Corporate Strategies on Workers, Unions, and
Communities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 201-202. (Hereafter cited as
Craypo, Strike and Relocation.) Concerning industrial migration and local governmental
policy, see, for example, James C. Cobb, The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade
for Industrial Development, 1936-1990 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
11 Bjerklie, On the Horns of a Dilemma, p. 54; Craypo, Strike and Relocation, p. 185; and
Jimmy M. Skaggs, Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the United States,
(continued...)

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CRS-4
Reduced labor costs were a significant aspect of the move. Relocation “altered
the wage structure within which the industry operated.”12 The new workers were said
to have been accustomed to low wages and to a “country-style” non-union work
environment.13 Further, automated facilities allowed the new breed14 of packers to
organize line operations in a manner that diminished the need for skilled workers,
permitting employment of inexperienced and low-wage personnel.15 Finally,
formation of new corporate entities (with new plants in new locations) permitted a
change from established labor-management relationships.16
This migration involved fierce competition between firms for market share.
Some older established firms went out of business or were taken over by new breed
packers (sometimes associated with conglomerates). Others adjusted to the new
strategies but, in the process, changed their corporate culture — adopting a more
contentious labor-management relationship. By 1990, a new “Big Three” had
emerged: IBP, Excel (a subsidiary of Cargill) and ConAgra.
The Poultry Processing Industry
Poultry processing had early been a distinct sub-segment of the meat industry.
With the restructuring of the 1960s, such distinctions came increasingly to be blurred.
A single corporation might have interests in each line — and in other areas as well.
Until the early 1940s, poultry raising was largely a small farm type operation.
Its transformation began with wartime demand. Initially, large numbers of relatively
small growers entered the field; but, at least by the 1950s, some consolidation had
begun. By the late 20th century, five or six major concerns had come to dominate
poultry production — with about 250,000 persons employed in the industry.17
11 (...continued)
1607-1983 (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1986), pp. 190-196. On Sept.
15, 2003, p. C15, the Bureau of National Affairs’ Daily Labor Report stated: “According
to UFCW [United Food and Commercial Workers, AFL-CIO] data, approximately 100,000
of its 1.4 million members are retail meatcutters, compared with about 400,000 meatcutter-
members 30 years ago.”
12 Roger Horowitz, “The Decline of Unionism in America’s Meatpacking Industry,” Social
Policy, spring 2002, p. 33. (Hereafter cited as Horowitz, The Decline of Unionism.)
13 Bjerklie, On the Horns of a Dilemma, p. 53.
14 The term, new breed, is widely used in the literature to differentiate the post-1950s
packers from the more-traditional firms. It is suggestive more of a business approach,
however, than of the age of the firm.
15 Wilson Warren, Struggling with “Iowa’s Pride”: Labor Relations, Unionism, and
Politics in the Rural Midwest Since 1877 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), pp.
120-121. (Hereafter cited as Warren, Struggling with “Iowa’s Pride”.)
16 Carol Andreas, Meatpackers and Beef Barons: Company Town in a Global Economy
(Niwot, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1994), pp. 59-82. (Hereafter cited as
Andreas, Meatpackers and Beef Barons.)
17 Industrial Safety & Hygiene News, July 2002, p. 14. See also The News and Observer
(continued...)

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“Before the 1960s,” suggests Bob Hall of the Institute for Southern Studies,
“nearly all birds were shipped whole from the slaughterhouse to the grocery store,
where butchers cut them up or packaged them whole — sometimes with the store
label. Today [1989],” he states, “poultry giants ... have replaced the neighborhood
butcher with huge processing units attached to their slaughterhouses.” By 1990, the
industry expected to produce 5.5 billion broilers a year.18 More recently, there has
been a transition to value-added products such as chicken fajitas and nuggets.
Several patterns quickly developed. The industry, increasingly, came to be
centered in the Delmarva region and the South. In structure, with growth, it became
vertically integrated with corporate control of the birds from egg to market.
Sequentially, two groups of workers are involved: grow-out farmers and hourly
workers on the disassembly line. For the latter, work is unpleasant, hazardous, and
reportedly requires only low levels of education or skill — but may be attractive to
a rural population with few economic options.19
Grow-out Farmers. Typically, the corporate processor will contract-out the
actual growth of the birds to local grow-out farmers. Usually, the processor (or
integrator) provides the chicks, feed, any necessary medication, etc., to the grower.
The grower provides the buildings in which the birds are raised and the labor
involved in caring for them — receiving four or five batches of chicks each year.
When the boilers are ready for slaughter, the integrator dispatches a crew of chicken
catchers to retrieve the birds and haul them to the processing plant. Ordinarily, the
farmer does not actually own the chickens that are raised for the processor.
For the grow-out farmer, several patterns have developed. First. Starting from
a marginal agricultural operation, the farmer may take out a loan to construct his
growing facilities. In the 1990s, a reasonable structure may well have cost about
$100,000 — perhaps more. Several such chicken houses were often needed to
sustain the farmer.20 Speaking generally, the chicken houses were specialized
17 (...continued)
(Raleigh, NC), June 6, 2001, p. A17.
18 Bob Hall, “Chicken Empires,” Southern Exposure, summer 1989, pp. 12-17.
19 David Griffith, “Hay Trabajo: Poultry Processing, Rural Industrialization, and the
Latinization of Low-Wage Labor,” in Donald D. Stull, et al., Any Way You Cut It: Meat
Processing and Small-Town America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), pp.
129-130. (Hereafter cited as Griffith, Hay Trabajo.)
20 Cost estimates vary. Of the early 1980s, Hope Shand, “Billions of Chickens: The
Business of the South,” Southern Exposure, Nov./Dec. 1983, p. 78, states: “A new fully
automated chicken house costs from $60,000 to $80,000.” (Hereafter cited as Shand,
Billions of Chickens.) Steve Bjerklie, writing a decade later, “Dark Passage: Is Contract
Poultry Growing a Return to Servitude?,” Meat & Poultry, Aug. 1994, p. 25, states: “One
integrator’s figures show the cost of building a chicken grow-out house to company
specifications to be about $125,000. A turkey house runs $190,000.” By the late 1990s,
grow-out chicken houses seem to have averaged about 40 feet in width and 400 feet long,
covering 16,000 square feet and accommodating about 20,000 birds. See Stephen F.
Strausberg, From Hills and Hollers: Rise of the Poultry Industry in Arkansas (Fayetteville:
(continued...)

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CRS-6
structures with little value for other purposes. Second. The grower may begin
operation with a substantial debt and, essentially, with a single market: i.e., the
corporate processor. Grower/processor contracts have tended to be short-term,
renewed with each new batch of chickens.21
The grow-out farmer normally “relinquishes all major decision-making
responsibilities” when the contract is signed.22 Though the farmer “pretty much
works like a wage-earning worker,” he is actually an independent contractor and, as
such, lacks options a laborer might enjoy. Tied to his mortgage and chicken houses,
he “can’t change jobs” easily. The grower is not covered by wage/hour and related
laws nor does he receive “retirement benefits, health insurance, or paid vacations.”23
In spite of intermittent attempts by growers to organize to enhance their bargaining
power, they seem to have been unable to do so.24
Aside from profit motivation, brand name marketing may require that the
processor retain quality control — including the manner in which birds are raised, fed
and cared for. “Vertical integration allows us to control the quality of the birds from
conception to consumption,” John Lea, a Tyson vice president, reportedly stated.25
20 (...continued)
Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station, 1995), p. 180. (Hereafter cited as Strausberg,
From Hills and Hollers.) Donald D. Stull and Michael J. Broadway, in Slaughterhouse
Blues: The Meat and Poultry Industry in North America (Belmont, CA:
Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004), p. 46, state: “A broiler house costs between $125,000 and
$140,000 and must be built to company specifications. Breeder and pullet houses can cost
even more.” (Hereafter cited as Stull and Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues.)
21 Stull and Broadway, in Slaughterhouse Blues, p. 41, state: “For growers, contracts
offered a guaranteed income from their flocks and took the risks out of raising chickens,
save one — the company did not have to renew the grower’s contract.” They observe,
however, that the income of grow-out farmers can be relatively meager (pp. 41-51). See also
Strausberg, From Hills and Hollers, p. 136; and Fred A. Lasley, et al., The U.S. Broiler
Industry (Washington: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Nov. 1988), Economic Research
Service, Agricultural Economic Report Number 591, p. 20.
22 William D. Heffernan, “Constraints in the U.S. Poultry Industry,” in Harry K.
Schwarzweller, ed., Research in Rural Sociology and Development: Focus on Agriculture
(Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, Inc., 1984), p. 238.
23 Barry Yeoman, “Don’t Count Your Chickens,” Southern Exposure, summer 1989, pp. 22-
23. See also Bob Hall, “The Kill Line: Facts of Life, Proposals for Change,” in Donald
Stull, et al., Any way You Cut It, p. 221. (Hereafter cited as Hall, The Kill Line.)
24 U.S. Department of Agriculture, The Broiler Industry: An Economic Study of Structure,
Practices and Problems, 1967, p. 45. See also John Strange, “‘One-Sided’ Contracts Make
Farming Risky,” National Catholic Reporter, Nov. 15, 2002, p. 12; Richard Behar,
“Arkansas Pecking Order,” Time, Oct. 26, 1992, p. 53; Shand, Billions of Chickens, pp. 78
and 79; Strausberg, From Hills and Hollers, pp. 80, 91, 104, 122, and 136; Keith Nunes,
“Developing a Common Voice,” Meat & Poultry, Dec. 1992, pp. 16 and 18; and Chao
Xiong, “Taking Wing: Hmong Are Moving Again, This Time to Poultry Farms,” The Wall
Street Journal, Jan. 26, 2004, pp. A1 and A6.
25 Scott Kilman, “Moving On Up,” The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 25, 2004, pp. R6 and R10.

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Given market constraints and fluctuations in demand, it may be unrealistic for a
farmer to assume that the supply of chicks will be constant.26
Plant Workers. The poultry industry early developed in the rural South where
land was relatively cheap and water, a prime requirement for meat packing and
poultry processing, was relatively plentiful. As with beef packing, low-wage labor
with a union-free environment seems to have been an important consideration.
In the 1960s, many rural workers lacked marketable skills. More traditional
family farming, for many, no longer offered significant employment and, thus, the
“superfluous labor” of farming communities became available for processing plants
and for “part-time labor on the grow-out farms.”27 Some suggest that the industry
had concentrated in right-to-work states in an effort to minimize labor costs and had
systematically developed a low-wage strategy.28
Plants are described as operating on a two-tier labor system. On top are core
workers: trained, stable, with strong labor market attachment, who keep the plants
operating. They are supplemented by a body of unskilled low-wage workers with a
high turnover rate. The latter, it appears, have low expectations, both with respect
to living and working conditions, and may view their employment as short-term.
They are unlikely to complain or to join a union, especially if they are not authorized
residents. The two-tier system reportedly allows integration of new line workers with
little disruption.29
The new breed packers and processors appear to have developed a workforce
the demographics of which are somewhat different from that of the older urban
packers. There are fewer African-American males and more Hispanic and Southeast
Asian workers: often (but not always) transient, low-skilled but hard-working, less
assertive of their workplace rights than experienced workers, and willing to work for
low wages under conditions that may be adverse. But, conditions vary from plant-to-
plant and from one location to another.30
26 On the grower/integrator relationship, see three articles by Steve Bjerklie collectively
titled “Dark Passage,” which appeared in the industry journal, Meat & Poultry, Aug. 1994,
pp. 24-26, and 55; Oct. 1994, pp. 32-35; and Dec. 1994, pp. 20, 22, 24, 26, and 28.
27 Griffith, Hay Trabajo, p. 130.
28 Lourdes Gouveia and Donald D. Stull, “Dances with Cows: Beefpacking’s Impact on
Garden City, Kansas, and Lexington, Nebraska,” in Donald D. Stull, et al., Any Way You Cut
It: Meat Processing and Small-Town America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1995), p. 103. See also Greig Guthey, “Mexican Places in Southern Spaces: Globalization,
Work and Daily Life in and around the North Georgia Poultry Industry,” in Arthur D.
Murphy, et al., eds., Latino Workers in the Contemporary South (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2001), p. 63.
29 Griffith, Hay Trabajo, p. 146; and Donald D. Stull, et al., Any Way You Cut It: Meat
Processing and Small-Town America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), p. 8.
(Hereafter cited as Stull, et al., Any Way You Cut It.)
30 In general, see Griffith, Jones’s Minimal. Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and
(continued...)

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CRS-8
Unionization of the Meat and Poultry Workforce
In the 19th century, most butchering was conducted at the local retail level. With
the rise of the packing plants, a distinction was made between butchers, per se, and
packinghouse workers; but trade unionization focused on the butchers (craft workers)
rather than packinghouse workers (industrial workers).
The Early Years Under the Amalgamated
The late 19th century witnessed a number of attempts by workers in the packing
industries to organize. Generally, their efforts were without success. In 1894, during
the Pullman (American Railway Union) strike, packinghouse workers engaged in a
sympathetic walkout.31 When the rail strike was broken, the packinghouse workers
were replaced “from among the thousands of unemployed workers who crowded the
yards, anxious to take any job they could get.”32 Other strikes would follow.
At first, the packers had hired “recent immigrants from eastern Europe” — but,
then, they began to use African-Americans — at first as strikebreakers and, less
often, as regular workers.33 In so doing, explains Alma Herbst, the packers “tapped
an almost inexhaustible supply of cheap labor” and secured a workforce more
resistant to unionization than were the European immigrants.34 While the “majority
of the strikebreakers were white,” the “Negro, because of his color, attracted more
than his share of hostility and was associated by many packinghouse workers with
the collapse of the strike[s].”35
30 (...continued)
Community in the Neuvo New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2003), provides a case study of labor supply and labor-management relations in a small
North Carolina town. (Hereafter cited as Fink, The Maya of Morganton.)
31 Brody, The Butcher Workmen, p. 13. See also Ken Fones-Wolf, “Eight-Hour and
Haymarket Strikes of 1886,” in Ronald Filippelli, editor, Labor Conflict in the United States
(New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1990), pp. 164-169.
32 Walter A. Fogel, The Negro in the Meat Industry (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1970), p. 19. (Hereafter cited as Fogel, The Negro in the Meat
Industry.)
33 Ibid., p. 19.
34 Alma Herbst, The Negro in the Slaughtering and Meat-Packing Industry in Chicago
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1932), pp. 19-20. (Hereafter cited as Herbst, The
Negro in the Slaughtering and Meat-Packing Industry.)
35 Fogel, The Negro in the Meat Industry, p. 19-20. Interpretation varies. See Sterling Spero
and Abram Harris, The Black Worker: The Negro and the Labor Movement (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1931), pp. 264 ff. (Hereafter cited as Spero and Harris, The
Black Worker.); Horace R. Cayton and George S. Mitchell, Black Workers and the New
Unions (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1939), pp. 228 ff.; and
William M. Tuttle, Jr., “Labor Conflict and Racial Violence: The Black Worker in Chicago,
1894-1919,” in Milton Cantor, ed., Black Labor In America (Westport, CT: Negro
Universities Press, 1969), pp. 88-89. (Hereafter cited as Tuttle, Labor Conflict and Racial
(continued...)

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CRS-9
The labor force was divided, roughly, into two groups: retail butchers and
packinghouse workers. Among the latter was a hierarchy of sub-crafts. Workers in
the packing houses, where unions were formed, had “invariably unionized along
narrow craft lines” in the 1880s and 1890s.36 But skill was coming to count for “less
and less” and “[s]pecialization was making the employment of cheaper labor
possible.”37 Recalcitrant workers could quickly be replaced — and both management
and the workers knew it.38
Developing a Stable Union. In 1896, American Federation of Labor (AFL)
president Samuel Gompers called a national convention of butchers. On January 26,
1897, a charter was issued to the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen
of North America. Michael Donnelly of Omaha was elected president.39
The Amalgamated moved into Chicago in 1900 and began organization of
packinghouse workers still demoralized from the strikes of the 1890s. The union
faced a number of challenges. The companies had adopted a systematic approach of
de-skilling packing jobs: segmenting the work process so that less expensive workers
could be hired, given partial training, and engaged (when needed) as replacement
workers for those with somewhat greater skills. Though a rational policy from the
perspective of industry, it complicated the efforts of the union to recruit and hold
members.40 At the same time, by careful recruitment, the packers were able to shift
dominance from one racial/ethnic faction to another — and to stir tensions between
male and female workers.41
These management-enhanced divisions within the workforce convinced some
workers of the need for industrial (cross-craft) organization. All workers would have
35 (...continued)
Violence.)
36 Brody, The Butcher Workmen, p. 15.
37 Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, p. 264.
38 Brody, The Butcher Workmen, p. 15.
39 Ibid., pp. 17-33; Gary M. Fink (ed.), Labor Unions (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1977), p. 216 (Hereafter cited as Fink, Labor Unions); and Carl W. Thompson, “Labor in
the Packing Industry,” The Journal of Political Economy, Feb. 1907, pp. 96-97.
40 Tuttle, Labor Conflict and Racial Violence, p. 90. See also Stull and Broadway,
Slaughterhouse Blues, pp. 34-35.
41 See, inter alia, Selig Perlman and Philip Taft, History of Labor in the United States, 1896-
1932 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, Publishers, 1966), vol. IV, p. 118; Fogel, The Negro
in the Meat Industry, p. 18; Edith Abbott, and S. P. Breckinridge, “Women in Industry: The
Chicago Stockyards,” The Journal of Political Economy, Oct. 1911, pp. 649-651, and 639;
and Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz, Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black
Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality (New York:
Twayne Publishers, 1996), p. 6. (Hereafter cited as Halpern and Horowitz, An Oral
History.)

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CRS-10
to be organized if the Amalgamated were to succeed; but, even so, solidarity —
across racial, ethnic, gender and skill lines — would be difficult to achieve.42
A Time of Trial and Upheaval. Organizationally, the “great prize,”
according to Brody, was the packinghouse where large numbers could be organized
“in one swift stroke.” At the turn of the century, a little over 25,000 workers were
employed in Chicago’s stock yards, about a third of those employed in the industry
nationally. Donnelly set out to organize the workers and to instruct them in trade
union strategy. The skilled craft workers were the first organized and remained the
core of the union. The union sought out the immigrant worker and actively courted
African-American workers (about 500 then employed in the yards) — and the latter
“hesitantly joined” the ranks of organized labor.43
Organization, alone, did not erase the workers’ grievances. Increasing line
speed was a concern — as it would continue to be through the rest of the 20th century.
Jurisdictional issues arose. Hours of work, often irregular, and seasonal disparities
in employment continued as a source of discontent. Wage considerations were
always an issue. “Under any circumstances, it would have been difficult to control
the untutored and excited mass of packinghouse men,” Brody notes, but
“... discontent was stirred by Donnelly’s cautious negotiating policy ... benefits came
too slowly and unevenly.”44
On July 12, 1904, over Donnelly’s reservations, the union struck. The weakness
of the Amalgamated — internal dissension and lack of discipline — was quickly
exposed. Again, industry imported black strikebreakers; and, as might have been
anticipated, violence broke out — with the strikebreakers frequently the object of
attack. With the union financially strapped, Donnelly sought accommodation — and
was rebuffed. Intervention by Jane Addams (a Chicago social worker) and her
associates brought an end to the strike, but the men were granted no concessions from
the packers.45 The union was largely fragmented and, in 1907, Donnelly resigned and
42 See James R. Barrett, “Immigrant Workers in Early Mass Production Industry: Work
Rationalization and Job Control Conflicts in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1900-1904,” in
Hartmut Keill and John B. Jents, eds., German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850-1910:
A Comparative Perspective (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1983), pp. 104-
124.
43 Brody, The Butcher Workmen, p. 34 and 41. For an overview of race and unionization,
see Walter Fogel, “Blacks in Meatpacking: Another View of The Jungle,” Industrial
Relations, Oct. 1971, pp. 338-353.
44 Brody, The Butcher Workmen, pp. 47-48.
45 Ibid., p. 58. See John R. Commons, “Labor Conditions in Meat Packing and the Recent
Strike,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Nov. 1904, pp. 1-32. (Hereafter cited as
Commons, Labor Conditions.) Black strikebreakers had also been used by the packers
against the Packing House Teamsters in 1902. See Howard B. Myers, “The Policing of
Labor Disputes in Chicago: A Case Study,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago,
1929, pp. 347-366 (Hereafter cited as Myers, Labor Disputes); James R. Barrett, Work and
Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 118-187, (Hereafter cited as Barrett, Work and
(continued...)

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CRS-11
left the movement.46 For a decade, few victories appear to have been achieved by the
Amalgamated.
In 1917, the United States entered the European war. Immigration, the
traditional source of packinghouse labor, declined. The draft further reduced
manpower availability. Labor shortages were accompanied by a heightened demand
for meat — and the Amalgamated rebounded — but under federal wartime
regulation. The war years also sparked a northward migration of southern blacks
who, in significantly increased numbers, took jobs in the packing plants. Brody
states that, by some estimates, “90 percent of the northern Negroes in the Chicago
yards carried union cards.” (Italics added.) But the newcomers, like immigrant
groups before them, proved difficult to organize and, once in the union, to retain. By
the end of the war, late in 1918, some 10,000 black workers were employed in the
yards — “over 20 percent of the labor force.”47
The post-war period, however, did not bode well for unions. The Chicago race
riots (1919) added to tensions between black and white workers.48 Then, internal
union discord broke out. By 1921, the treasury of the Amalgamated was depleted.
Wartime restraints vanished. Unemployment became widespread. Union
membership shrank. So, in the dead of winter, in an effort to rebuild and regain its
strength, the Amalgamated called a nation-wide strike.49 Within weeks, on February
1, 1922, the strike was called off: again, a failed effort. The Amalgamated reverted
largely to representation of local retail butchers.50
45 (...continued)
Community); Barrett, “Unity and Fragmentation: Class, Race, and Ethnicity on Chicago’s
South Side, 1900-1922,” Journal of Social History, fall 1984, p. 50, (Hereafter cited as
Barrett, Unity and Fragmentation); and David Witwer, “Race Relations in the Early
Teamsters Union,” Labor History, Nov. 2002, pp. 505-532.
46 Myers, Labor Disputes, pp. 532-533; and Brody, The Butcher Workmen, pp. 59-74.
47 Brody, The Butcher Workmen, p. 85. See also William C. Pratt, “Advancing
Packinghouse Unionism in South Omaha, 1917-1920,” Journal of the West, Apr. 1996, pp.
42-49.
48 Barrett, Unity and Fragmentation, p. 43, states: “While white butcher workmen had little
to do with the attacks on Blacks, the riot ended any prospect of creating an interracial labor
movement in the Yards for more than a generation.”
49 Barrett, Work and Community, pp. 257-259.
50 Ibid., pp. 258-259; Roger Horowitz, “‘It Wasn’t a Time to Compromise’: The
Unionization of Sioux City’s Packinghouses,” The Annals of Iowa, fall 1989/winter 1990,
p. 253 (Hereafter cited as Horowitz, ‘It Wasn’t a Time to Compromise’); and Rick Halpern,
Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904-
1954 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p.71. (Hereafter cited as Halpern, Down
on the Killing Floor.) William C. Pratt, in “Divided Workers, Divided Communities: The
1921-22 Packinghouse Strike in Omaha and Nebraska City,” Labor’s Heritage, winter 1994,
p. 56, reports that Nebraska employers used “many African Americans as replacements
during the strike” and attempted to secure Mexican-American strikebreakers as well.
(Hereafter cited as Pratt, Divided Workers.)

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CRS-12
The CIO and the Packinghouse Workers
By the 1930s, workers in meat packing had suffered defeats in a series of
strikes: in 1894, 1904 and 1921-1922. The conflicts had been demoralizing and had
left the packinghouse side of the union in shambles.
The Depression of 1929 hit the packinghouse industry hard and “... opened a
period of social ferment in which radical ideas received a wide and sympathetic
hearing.”51 “With hundreds at the gate begging for jobs, managers could select
whom to employ as their whims or prejudices dictated.” And, some managers, it
appears, exacted retribution against workers who had been engaged in strike activity
or now attempted to organize.52
Ethnic/racial diversity still prevailed in the plants; but, now, these were often
workers of a second generation. (See Table 1.) In their continuing search “for cheap
labor,” the packers looked “to Chicago’s expanding Afro-American community”;53
but, these were people who had migrated north during World War I, had become
acculturated to the industrial workplace, and were more supportive of unionization.54
By the 1930s, they had become “a permanent component of the labor force” and,
some argued, “provided the [union] organizing drive with its backbone ...[,]
dynamism” and “key leadership.”55
51 Roger Horowitz, “Negro and White, Unite and Fight!” — A Social History of Industrial
Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-1990 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 67.
(Hereafter cited as Horowitz, Negro and White.)
52 Rick Halpern, “The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: Welfare Capitalism in Chicago’s
Packinghouses, 1921-1933,” Journal of American Studies, Aug. 1992, pp. 161, 164-165.
(Hereafter cited as Halpern, The Iron Fist.) On labor-management during the 1930s, see
Irving Bernstein, The New Deal Collective Bargaining Policy (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1950); and Jerold S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette
Committee and the New Deal (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1966).
53 Halpern, The Iron Fist, p. 165. Halpern (pp. 166-167) notes an increased number of black
workers in “the semi-skilled and skilled segment of the labour force.”
54 Shelton Stromquist, Solidarity & Survival: An Oral History of Iowa Labor in the
Twentieth Century (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), p. 101. (Hereafter cited as
Stromquist, Solidarity & Survival.)
55 Halpern, The Iron Fist, p. 162.

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CRS-13
Table 1. Racial and Nationality Trends Among Slaughtering and
Meat-Packing Workers in Chicago, 1909 and 1928
1909
1928
Race
Number
Percent
Number
Percent
Native-born
White
2,031
18.9
3,604
27.3
Black
459
3.0
3,894
29.5
Foreign-born
Polish
4,293
27.7
1,570
11.9
Lithuanian
1,860
12.0
1,033
7.8
Mexican
1
N.A.
746
5.7
Source: Paul S. Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Chicago, and the Calumet Region
(Berkeley: University of California Press, Mar. 31, 1932), p. 40. By 1928, the Poles, Lithuanians, and
Mexicans were the three most numerous nationality groups — with a wide scattering of other
immigrants represented in smaller percentages.
Mexican workers began to appear in the meat packing industry of the Midwest
during World War I. After 1920, Horowitz notes, “the Mexican presence increased
sharply.”56 Most appear to have migrated from Mexico, rather than from other parts
of the United States, having come north as agricultural or track laborers (railroad
maintenance of way). After brief periods at such work (or in the steel mills), they
migrated in the late 1920s “to other industries, particularly to meat-packing.”57
56 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 62. Pratt, in Divided Workers, p. 52, notes that some 283
Mexicans were resident in the Omaha area at the time of the 1921-1922 strike and that, at
least on that occasion, the union printed strike ballots in English, Polish, Lithuanian, Czech,
and Spanish. Not all local residents of Mexican origin, of course, were employed in the
packing plants. See T. Earl Sullenger, “The Mexican Population of Omaha,” Journal of
Applied Sociology, May-June 1924, pp. 289-293.
57 Paul S. Taylor, Mexican Labor in the United States: Chicago and the Calumet R egion
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, Publications in Economics, 1932), vol. 7,
no. 2, p. 41. There is some suggestion that Mexican workers were engaged as strikebreakers
at various times — but, also, that some struck alongside non-Mexican workers (see p. 34 and
45). Taylor states on p. 68: “So far as I could ascertain, Mexican laborers were not
imported to Chicago by packing plants.” There was a perception, Taylor suggests, that
Mexican workers were more adaptable and “that they would accept disagreeable work more
readily than others, even than the Negroes.” (See pp. 87-88.)
See, also, Dionicio Nodin Valdes, Barios Nortenos: St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican
Communities in the Twentieth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), p. 25.
(Hereafter cited as Valdes, Barios Nortenos.) Here, Valdes divides early Mexican
immigration to the Midwest into three periods: first, 1906-1910, “associated with railroad
companies already employing Mexicans in the Southwest”; second, 1916-1919, “linked to
railroad and industrial employer demands during the wartime economic boom and labor
shortages that resulted from restricted immigration from Europe”; and, third, 1920-1921 and
after. He states, perhaps in contrast to Taylor: “The colonia in the Stockyards district of
(continued...)

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CRS-14
Robert A. Slayton, in his study Back of the Yards, observed that “... Mexicans entered
the packing plants gradually.” He continues: “In 1920, Swift & Company employed
97 Mexicans; within a few years this figure rose to 217....” At Armour, during the
period, 400 were employed — and 94 more were employed at Wilson & Company.58
Grass Roots Initiatives. In mid-1933, workers at Hormel (Austin,
Minnesota) resolved to form a union. Under Frank Ellis, a “long-time member of the
IWW” (the Industrial Workers of the World), organization began.59 Soon, the
Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW) emerged — and organization spread
throughout Austin well beyond the packing plant.60 In September 1933, with Ellis
at its head, the IUAW won the right to bargain for the Hormel workers. After a brief
lockout/strike, settlement was reached laying the foundation for labor-management
cooperation at the Austin-based firm.
The IUAW then “organized a network of affiliated unions and supporters in the
midwestern meatpacking industry” under the banner of industrial unionism.
Gradually, its influence spread through the upper midwest.61 But to sustain its
position in Austin, the IUAW found that it would need to organize the entire industry
— a task beyond its strength. Thus, it reached out to other independent unions such
as the Cedar Rapids-based Midwest Union of All Packinghouse Workers. In early
57 (...continued)
Chicago appeared when employers seeking to break the packinghouse workers’ strike in
1921-1922 hired a contingent of Mexicans.” Valdes states (p. 29): “Smaller numbers of
Mexicans also found work in the packing plants of Omaha, Kansas City, and Sioux City,
Iowa. During the 1920s, packinghouses in South St. Paul offered the most important urban
employment available to Mexicans in the Twin Cities.” Immigrant attitudes toward
organized labor, of course, varied among individuals, localities, and over time. See also
Zaragosa Vargas, Proletarians of the North: A History of Mexican Industrial Workers in
Detroit and the Midwest, 1917-1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 80
and 90.
58 Robert A. Slayton, in Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1986), seems to suggest the same view as Valdes. He
notes on pp. 179-180 that “... five hundred Mexicans arrived in 1921 and 1922" in the Back
of the Yards neighborhood — though he does not specifically relate their arrival to
strikebreaking. He does, however, suggest: “Most of these jobs were made available to
Mexicans during the 1921 strike, when the packers hired anyone they could find.”
59 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 64. Founded in 1905 (and anti-AFL), the IWW was, by
the 1930s, organizationally spent but still a strong intellectual force in portions of the labor
movement. See, also, Peter Rachleff, “Organizing ‘Wall-to-Wall,’ The Independent Union
of All Workers, 1933-1937,” in Shelton Stromquist and Marvin Bergman, eds., Unionizing
the Jungles: Labor and Community in the Twentieth-Century Meatpacking Industry (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1997), pp. 51-74.
60 Larry D. Engelmann, “‘We Were the Poor People’ — The Hormel Strike of 1933,” Labor
History, fall 1974, p. 493. (Hereafter cited as Engelmann, The Hormel Strike of 1933.)
61 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 45; and Engelmann, The Hormel Strike of 1933, p. 509.

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CRS-15
1936, these groups combined to form the Committee for Industrial Organization in
the Packing Industry (still independent but oriented toward the national CIO).62
The Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC). With
passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA, 1933), “[t]housands of
American workers rushed to join the unions of their trade, and where unions did not
already exist, they organized them.” But much of industry remained unorganized and
AFL efforts, some felt, were too tepid. In 1935, John L. Lewis of the United Mine
Workers, with leaders of several other international unions, formed the Committee
for Industrial Organization, an “extralegal committee organized to promote industrial
unionism and to convert the AFL to that principle.”63
The Amalgamated — half craft (retail butchers) and half-industrial — was the
only AFL union active in the packinghouse field. It was presided over by Patrick
Gorman who, though he understood the need for industrial organization, was also
firmly rooted in the AFL. By late 1936, the CIO entered negotiations with the
IUAW-Cedar Rapids group and, soon thereafter, IUAW-related entities began
advertising themselves as affiliated with the CIO. Negotiations between Lewis and
Gorman followed but, ultimately, Gorman opted to remain with the AFL. In October
1937, the PWOC was created with Van A. Bittner of the United Mine Workers (a
Lewis associate) in charge.64
Industry raised strong opposition to the PWOC and organization was further
complicated by hostilities between the PWOC and the Amalgamated. Only in
February 1940 did the PWOC secure its first major contract. In 1943, in the context
of World War II, the PWOC became the United Packinghouse Workers of America
(UPWA).65
CIO organization of the packinghouse workers proved contentious. First. The
emergence of the UPWA, out of the Amalgamated, was not entirely clearly drawn.
Some packinghouse workers remained in the Amalgamated and, more broadly, there
was the continuing clash (often bitter) between the AFL and the CIO. Second. The
IUAW had been of the local rank-and-file. Joining the CIO jeopardized that tradition
and entailed, Horowitz suggests, an alliance “with men and women who were
62 The IUAW was not affiliated with the Amalgamated — and not yet affiliated with the
CIO. For other upper-midwest organizing initiatives, see Farrell Dobbs, Teamster Rebellion
(New York: Monad Press, 1972); and Philip A. Korth, The Minneapolis Teamsters Strike
of 1934 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995).
63 Fink, Labor Unions, pp. 65-66. The Committee would become the Congress of Industrial
Organizations or CIO only in May 1938. Here, keeping those dates in mind, both bodies
will be referred to as the CIO.
64 Valdes, Barrios Nortenos, p. 167, states that Mexican packinghouse workers were
“responsive” both to the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) and to the PWOC.
65 Walter Galenson, The CIO Challenge to the AFL: A History of the American Labor
Movement, 1935-1941 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 349-374.
(Hereafter cited as Galenson, The CIO Challenge.)

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CRS-16
sociologically very different.”66 The top leadership of the PWOC (appointed, not
elected) was from outside the industry. While meat packers would come to play a
leadership role, some still viewed the national PWOC/CIO as too far removed from
the line — and, perhaps, too preoccupied with non-packinghouse matters.67 Third.
There was a cultural shift. Ellis, out of the IWW, “believed in union democracy,
shop floor organization, direct action, an industrial structure, and solidarity among
all workers,” recalls Peter Rachleff.68 He states: the IUAW had “demonstrated how
to build a lively, democratic, militant labor movement, rooted in local control,
committed to horizontal solidarity. [But] ... had not found a way to keep this alive
while building a strong national organization able to control conditions in any given
industry.”69
United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). The UPWA of
1943, Brody states, “failed to achieve the one-party rule characteristic of American
trade unions” — a failure some might view as positive. Under Ralph Helstein (an
attorney: first UPWA general counsel and, after 1946, president) and Ellis, the union
would be politically liberal and protective of the rights of various racial/ethnic and
political minorities.70
The new labor legislation of the 1930s and 1940s, some argue, tended to convert
unions from bodies of militants to part of the regulatory structure: weakening the
role of the rank-and-file and widening the gulf between workers and the union
hierarchy. This thesis suggests that unions came to act “less as advocates for their
members than as buffers, mediating between capital and labor.” The UPWA, some
argue, may have been an exception. First. Its origins were strongly of the rank-and-
file. Second. There was a growing African-American component within the UPWA
concerned with civil rights and social justice. Third. “... acceptance of racial
diversity translated easily into tolerance of political diversity” (i.e., of a more left-of-
center sort).71
Rank-and-file activism in the UPWA, Horowitz, states, resulted in an alliance
of “black workers and white progressives” that allowed the union “to expand its
program of social unionism” into “cooperation with the emerging civil rights
movement.”72 As World War II commenced, many Afro-Americans urged a “Double
66 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 52. See also Galenson, The CIO Challenge, p. 360.
67 Galenson, The CIO Challenge, pp. 362 and 374.
68 Peter Rachleff, Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the
Labor Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1993) p. 28. (Hereafter cited as Rachleff,
Hard-Pressed.)
69 Ibid., p. 42. Conversely, see Paul Street, “Breaking Up Old Hatreds and Breaking
Through the Fear: The Emergence of the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee in
Chicago, 1933-1940,” Studies in History and Politics (1986), pp. 63-82.
70 Brody, The Butcher Workmen, pp. 226-227.
71 Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor, pp. 203-205.
72 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 145.

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CRS-17
V” campaign: “for victory over fascism abroad and Jim Crow at home.”73
Meanwhile, many white workers held that inter-racial solidarity was essential if
wages and working conditions were to be improved.74 The UPWA attacked
discrimination both in the shop and in the community and “consciously worked with
and influenced community-based organizations, especially local branches of the
NAACP....”75 After 1943, the UPWA negotiated anti-discriminatory provisions in
its new national agreements.
During the war, controls had kept wage rates relatively stable even in the face
of inflation. Since the UPWA was a party to a national no-strike pledge, there was
little opportunity for more direct labor-management activity. With the end of the
war, however, pressure mounted. In late 1945, the UPWA began to map a strategy
for a wage increase — with some measure of cooperation from the Amalgamated.
When, in January 1946, the packers refused the union’s wage demands, a strike was
called that was immediately effective.76 Ten days into the strike, President Truman,
still operating under wartime emergency procedures, seized the plants and ordered
work to resume. The union declined, demanding that government guarantee
enforcement of any settlement reached through a board of inquiry. The
Administration agreed and, while the locals were not wholly satisfied, the settlement
provided a wage increase.77
From across the industrial spectrum, management turned to Congress; and, in
1947, the Taft-Hartley Act was passed. It imposed significant new restraints upon
trade union activity and, inter alia, required union officials to file non-communist
affidavits if their unions were to avail themselves of the services of the National
Labor Relations Board. For some of the CIO unions (like the UPWA) with a left-of-
center leadership component, the requirement had a serious impact.78 First. In
73 Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor, p. 213.
74 Fogel, The Negro in the Meat Industry, pp. 68-69.
75 Halpern and Horowitz, An Oral History, p. 20. Ray Marshall, in The Negro and
Organized Labor (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1965), p. 179, observed: “No union
operating in the South has followed a more militantly equalitarian racial position than the
UPWA.” Fogel, The Negro in Meat, p. 70, would add: “That same statement [Marshall’s]
applies equally well to the North.” See Rick Halpern, “Interracial Unionism in the
Southwest: Fort Worth’s Packinghouse Workers, l937-1954,” in Robert H. Zieger, ed.,
Organized Labor in the Twentieth-Century South (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee
Press, 1991), pp.158-182. Halpern presents a somewhat more complicated picture. Bruce
Fehn, “‘The Only Hope We Had’: United Packinghouse Workers Local 46 and the Struggle
for Racial Equality in Waterloo, Iowa, 1948-1960,” The Annals of Iowa, Summer 1995, pp.
185-216; discusses the campaign for civil rights undertaken by the Packinghouse Workers
union.
76 Brody, The Butcher Workmen, p. 228.
77 Horowitz, Negro and White, pp. 168-170.
78 Section 9(h) of the Taft-Hartley Act required, as a condition for utilization of the services
of the Board, that there be on file with the Board “an affidavit ... by each officer of such
labor organization and the officers of any national or international labor organization of
(continued...)

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effect, it placed the government on the side of the more conservative factions within
the union. Second. It deprived these unions, it was argued, of some of their most
talented leaders. Third. Where the affidavit requirements were not complied with
(and the UPWA initially refused to do so), the NLRB refused to certify the union for
collective bargaining purposes. Fourth. Since the Amalgamated did comply, the
stage was set for renewed competition between the unions.79
At that juncture, the UPWA faced a new round of bargaining: this time, without
the cooperation of the Amalgamated. The union authorized a strike for February
1948 — that some thought ill-timed and ill-advised. Although “hard-fought,” it
“lacked the unity and purpose which could keep men out on the streets
indefinitely.”80 In mid-May 1948, the union capitulated. Financially weakened, its
membership having dropped from about 100,000 to about 60,000, it “faced dozens
of legal cases arising out of picket line violence, as well as the danger of losing
NLRB certification at many plants because of election petitions” filed by competing
unions. The debate over non-compliance with Taft-Hartley had come to an end.81
The Merger: UPWA and the Amalgamated (1968)
Through the war years, the Amalgamated and the UPWA (like the AFL and the
CIO — to which they were respectively affiliated) had remained at odds. The unions
were divided by philosophy: craft versus industrial unionism. They had different
approaches to the new regulatory structure — notably, to alleged bias of the NLRB.
There was disagreement concerning the political role of unions and where, along the
political spectrum, the unions should stand. Most difficult, however, may have been
conflicts rooted in personal hostilities dating from PWOC days.
While the UPWA was advancing the cause of social unionism, a new element
was emerging on the scene: the decline of the old packing firms and emergence of
the new breed of packers. Slowly, Brody states, it “became apparent to both unions,”
78 (...continued)
which it is an affiliate or constituent unit that he is not a member of the Communist Party
or....” The requirement was repealed by Section 201(d) of the Labor Management Reporting
and Disclosure Act of 1959 (the Landrum-Griffin Act). See Charles O. Gregory, Labor and
the Law (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1961), pp. 438-442 and 573-575.
79 Horowitz, Negro and White, pp. 182-183. See R. Alton Lee, Truman and Taft-Hartley:
A Question of Mandate (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966); and Arthur F.
McClure, The Truman Administration and the Problems of Postwar Labor, 1945-1948
(Rutherford: NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1969).
80 Brody, The Butcher Workmen, p. 233.
81 Horowitz, Negro and White, pp. 188-189. An accurate assessment of the strike appears
clouded by rhetoric. See Halpern and Horowitz, An Oral History, p. 19; Brody, The Butcher
Workmen, p. 235; and Bruce Fehn, “Ruin or Renewal: The United Packinghouse Workers
of America and the 1948 Meatpacking Strike in Iowa,” Annals of Iowa, fall l997, pp. 349-
378.

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the UPWA and the Amalgamated, that cooperation would be mutually beneficial.82
But, he suggests: “The past was ... not easy to exorcise.”83
The new firms, emerging during the 1950s and 1960s, “took large chunks of the
market away from the old dominant companies.”84 Technology changed as well and,
with it, what the packinghouse workers actually did. Where employment once had
been stable, the new breed firms accepted rapid employee turnover and structured to
accommodate it. Urban-to-rural transition also meant that fewer African-American
workers, a major segment of UPWA membership, would remain in the industry’s
workforce.85 With its base shrinking, the UPWA changed its name to the United
Packinghouse, Food and Allied Workers (1960) and reached out to new groups to
organize. But, the “unrelenting drumbeat of plant closings placed a financial squeeze
on the organization that made its rebuilding strategy impossible to sustain.”86
Mergers within the trade union movement had become a common response to shifts
in industry and/or technology. In late 1967, UPWA leaders approached the
Amalgamated; in 1968, a formal merger was effected.
The merger may not have been a perfect fit. The UPWA gave way to the
Amalgamated nearly six times its size. Gorman remained at the helm: Helstein
became “a titular vice president but without any responsibilities.” Service units,
regarded as vital within the UPWA, were disbanded. New units, subsumed into
larger bodies, some suggested, were underfunded and unable to pursue normal/prior
responsibilities. Some from the UPWA found it difficult to work within the new
structure. Lines of communication were broken up. Much of the freedom and rank-
and-file democracy, to which the UPWA locals had been accustomed, was said to
have disappeared. Perhaps most important, the merger had occurred in the context
of the restructuring of the industry. New breed packers were assembling a workforce
quite different from that associated either with the UPWA or with the Amalgamated
— and one increasingly devoid, perhaps by careful personnel selection, of trade
union consciousness. The merged union had to reach out to a workforce neither
accustomed to trade unionization nor predisposed toward organized labor.87
82 Brody, The Butcher Workmen, pp. 219-220. Through the period, the National
Brotherhood of Packinghouse Workers (the Swift union) would maintain its independent
status.
83 Brody, The Butcher Workmen, pp. 238-239.
84 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 247.
85 Fogel, The Negro in the Meat Industry, pp. 1-2, 5, and 8; and Donald D. Stull, “‘I Come
to the Garden’: Changing Ethnic Relations in Garden City, Kansas,” Urban Anthropology,
winter 1990, p. 314.
86 Horowitz, Negro and White, pp. 257-258.
87 Ibid., pp. 258-261. See also Fink, Labor Unions, p. 218; and Rachleff, Hard-Pressed in
the Heartland, pp. 56.

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The United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW)
In 1977, Patrick Gorman stepped down from leadership of the Amalgamated.
Faced with a power vacuum and a general decline, the union sought yet another
merger.88 The Retail Clerks International Union (RCIU) seemed a likely candidate.
In 1979, the two merged as the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW).
The Retail Clerks (RCIU) and the Amalgamated. The RCIU, a craft
union chartered by the AFL in 1890, was neither activist nor especially successful.
By 1933, it had a membership of about 5,000. “The RCIU was hampered by a timid,
conservative leadership either unwilling or unable to take advantage of the organizing
opportunities” of the New Deal era.89 Then, in the mid-1940s, a new leadership
assumed control and, largely based upon supermarket employment, the membership
of the RCIU expanded rapidly making it one of the largest unions in the AFL.
There had been a long — not always harmonious — relationship between the
RCIU and the Amalgamated. Their members often worked within the same firm and
building: one union representing the sales staff; the other, meat cutters. Arguments
were “almost endless.”90 But the conflicts involved the retail butchers — not
packinghouse workers. At mid-century, however, conditions began to change as
meat (with poultry and fish) came into the markets pre-packaged — largely
eliminating the need for skilled butchers and replacing them with food handlers.
Disputes continued as “the increasingly industrial structure of retailing” shifted work
from butchers to clerks.91
A Merger Is Consummated (1979). When the Amalgamated and the RCIU
merged in 1979 becoming the UFCW, the new union had an initial membership of
1.2 million: 525,345 members of the Amalgamated and 699,057 from the Clerks.92
The merger may have made sense for the old Amalgamated (pre-1968) and the
RCIU. Whether it was similarly advantageous for the remnants of the UPWA
remained an issue. The UPWA now “represented less than 10 percent of the UFCW
membership.” Institutionally, it was the retail clerks who would dominate the new
union — and they had “even less experience with industrial unionism than the
Amalgamated.” If the UPWA rank-and-file had felt somewhat isolated within the
post-1968 Amalgamated, that sense of distance may now have been compounded.
UFCW headquarters were in Washington, DC, far removed from the packing
88 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 264.
89 Fink, Labor Unions, p. 329.
90 Martin Estey, “The Retail Clerks,” in Albert A. Blum, et al., White Collar Workers (New
York: Random House, 1971), pp. 48 and 56.
91 Michael Harrington, The Retail Clerks (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1962.) pp.
70-73. (Hereafter cited as Harrington, The Retail Clerks.)
92 Bureau of National Affairs, Daily Labor Report, June 4, 1979, p. A7-A8. (Hereafter cited
as DLR.) See also DLR, June 5, 1979, pp. A11-A12.

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industry. William Wynn, UFCW president, had joined the RCIU while in high
school and had moved up through the union hierarchy to become president in 1977.93
Industrial Restructuring and Its Impact on Labor
“The 1980s,” suggests historian Peter Rachleff, “was arguably the bleakest
decade in the entire history of the U.S. labor movement.”94 Bleakness is clearly a
relative concept: what is bleak for labor may well be bright for industry.
Conditions, assert economists Charles Perry and Delwyn Kegley, “were nothing
short of chaos for the UFCW and for the industry.” It was a time of “Chapter 11
filings and the scrapping of labor agreements, plant closings, strikes, lockouts,
rebellious local unions, [and] corporate campaigns....” Master agreements, a fixture
in the industry since World War II, “virtually disappeared, to be replaced almost
entirely by individual plant bargaining.” The once high wages in meat packing
declined significantly. Old-line companies “were transformed and became virtually
unrecognizable.” Conglomerates that had acquired packing and processing
companies during the 1960s and 1970s “became disenchanted with the meat business
and began divesting themselves of those businesses in the 1980s.”95 Through it all,
it was reported, there was “steadily declining union strength.”96
The UFCW was sometimes viewed as a “labor conglomerate.”97 Within the
UFCW, Horowitz notes, the packinghouse workers became “a dwindling minority
in large, multi-unit locals covering entire states and headed by local union leaders
who came from completely different trades.”98 Increasingly, its focus seems to have
shifted away from the individual plant as UFCW leaders began “reorganizing locals
into larger, amalgamated districts.”99 While consolidation, arguably, may have been
appropriate, it may also have created a situation in which packinghouse workers felt
divided from the UFCW’s national leadership.
93 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 265. Wynn continued as president of the UFCW until
1994, being succeeded by Douglas Dority (1994-2004), and by Joseph Hansen (2004 ff.).
See, also, John Breuggemann and Cliff Brown, “The Decline of Industrial Unionism in the
Meatpacking Industry ... 1946-1987,” Work and Occupations, Aug. 2003, pp. 336 and 348.
The May 1999 issue of Labor History presents a “Symposium on Halpern and Horowitz:
Packinghouse Unionism.” See, also, Joe W. Trotter, “The Continuing Transformation of
Labor and Working-Class History: A Review Essay,” The Annals of Iowa, Winter 1999, pp.
78-86.
94 Rachleff, Hard-Pressed, p. 3.
95 Charles R. Perry and Delwyn H. Kegley, Disintegration and Change: Labor Relations
in the Meat Packing Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), pp.
165, 183, and 151. (Hereafter cited as Perry and Kegley, Disintegration and Change.)
96 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 266.
97 Perry and Kegley, Disintegration and Change, p. 116.
98 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 247.
99 Warren, Struggling with “Iowa’s Pride”, p. 125. The issue of size and consolidation, in
a later context, is discussed by labor columnist Steven Greenhouse, New York Times, Nov.
10, 2004, p. A16, and Nov. 18, 2004, p. A24.

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Managerial Churning and Collective Bargaining. In some measure, the
climate of labor-management relations in America changed during the Reagan/Bush
era, Horowitz suggests, with the President’s “dismissal of striking air traffic
controllers in 1982" which, he states, “encouraged employers to resist the demands
of labor organizations.” It was a time of concession bargaining, give-backs, and the
hiring of permanent replacements for workers who struck. Coupled “with steadily
declining union strength,” the period, he argues, “would end in a catastrophe for
American’s packinghouse workers.”100
By 1980, with IBP and other new breed packers in control of a significant
segment of the industry, old firms argued “that production and employment at [their]
plants would decline or cease altogether unless local unions agreed to various cost
concessions to help firms deal with the low-cost competition.”101 Others hinted that
work might be shifted to newer plants in remote areas — that happened to be
nonunion. Clearly, future bargaining would be fierce: potentially involving strikes
or lockouts — certainly loss of wages and possibly loss of employment.
Two options were at least theoretically available to the union: organize the
nonunion firms and bring their labor standards up to the level of those under the old
master agreements; or, grant concessions in terms of wages and/or work rules to the
older union firms. Over the objections of many packinghouse workers, it appears,
the UFCW began concession bargaining in the early 1980s.102
Closures and Concessions. The UFCW was confronted with demands for
concessions.103 Under pressure, the union entered upon a process of controlled
retreat that “quickly disintegrated into a rout that not only lowered wage rates ... but
also shredded the master agreements and de-unionized the core firms of the
industry.”104
100 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 266. Concerning the air traffic controller issue and its
impact, see Willis J. Nordlund, Silent Skies: The Air Traffic Controllers’ Strike (Westport,
CT: Praeger, 1998); and Herbert R. Northrup, “The Rise and Demise of PATCO,” Industrial
and Labor Relations Review, Jan. l984, pp. 167-184.
101 Peter Cappelli, “Plant-Level Concession Bargaining,” Industrial and Labor Relations
Review, Oct. 1985, pp. 92-93. See also Audrey Freedman and William Fulmer, “Last Rites
for Pattern Bargaining,” Harvard Business Review, Mar./Apr. 1982, p. 31. (Hereafter cited
as Freedman and Fulmer, Last Rites.)
102 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 266. It was the firm view of the UFCW’s packinghouse
segment, state Perry and Kegley, Disintegration and Change, p. 182, that “wage concessions
do not save plants but only buy a small amount of time before the closing....”
103 Freedman and Fulmer, Last Rites, pp. 42 and 44.
104 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 267. See Patrick Houston and Aaron Bernstein, “The
Pork Workers’ Beef: Pay Cuts That Persist,” Business Week, Apr. 15, 1985, p. 74 (Hereafter
cited as Houston and Bernstein, The Pork Workers’ Beef.); and Horowitz, The Decline of
Unionism, p. 35. Charles Craypo, The Economics of Collective Bargaining: Case Studies
in the Private Sector (Washington: The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., 1986), p. 72, states:
“By mid-1983 only one-third of the union’s members in meatpacking were still working
under the master agreement, down from 55 percent when the 1981 concessions were made.”

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The industry side, however, was even more complex. While the union may
have tended to react, it was management that led. Some older family-owned and
managed firms changed policy with generational shifts in management. Some sold
out. Others merged or, retaining their corporate identity, were subsumed into larger
entities. In some cases, corporate officers promoted splits and spin-offs with new
more focused firms emerging from older enterprises. Some, even very large firms,
were acquired by conglomerates — only to be sold again or simply closed as
conditions warranted. With each change of corporate control, there were usually
changes in labor-management policy — often with demands for concessions and, in
some cases, with closings and relocations of plants, consolidation of redundant
facilities, and dismissal of superfluous workers.
Some observers believed this churning was purposeful beyond immediate
profitability. Management was able to dispose of union agreements, restructure work
processes, and hire less skilled (and cheaper) workers. It bargained with
employment-desperate communities for concessions: tax reductions, subsidies, and
exemptions from local ordinances.105
The Ascendance of the New Breed. Increasingly through the late 20th
century, restructuring was seem as part of a business strategy. Both industry and the
union had moved, in some measure, from the world of the creators to that of the
managers — albeit in somewhat different contexts.
A certain mutual distrust persisted: perhaps a mixture of hostility or disdain and,
more important, of indifference. Of industry, it was said, an “influx of executives
who had never sliced a hog” had led to management “that was alienated from the
product and the workers.”106 Of labor, one worker reportedly quipped: “Why do I
need a union to negotiate a wage cut for me? I can do that just fine for myself.”107
Lower Wages. The essential elements of conflict between labor and
management remained the same. While the workers sought higher wages and
improved conditions of work, industry was pursuing enhanced profitability through
a lower wage strategy. Consolidation would be paramount.108
105 Corporate restructuring has been enormously complex. See, for example Warren,
Struggling with “Iowa’s Pride”; Harold B. Meyers, “For the Old Meatpackers, Things Are
Tough All Over,” Fortune, Feb. 1969, pp. 89-93, 134 and 136 (Hereafter cited as Meyers,
Things are Tough All Over); Business Week, “The Slaughter of Meatpacking Wages,” June
27, 1983, p. 71; Steve Bjerklie, “‘A Classic Tragedy’,” Meat & Poultry, Jan. 1995, pp. 44-
45, 47-48, 51; Perry and Kegley, “The Rath Experiment,” in Disintegration and Change,
pp. 221-233; “Wilson Foods: Nine Days to Chapter 11,” Business Week, May 30, 1982,
pp. 68, 70, and 72; and Steve Kay, “Beef Woes Bedevil ConAgra,” Meat & Poultry, June
1998, pp. 42, 45, 47-48. The literature is extensive.
106 McNaughton, “Like a Civil War Town,” Meat & Poultry, Sept. 1995, p. 51.
107 Rachleff, Hard-Pressed, pp. 11-12.
108 Data on wage rates, profitability, and related elements in this section are drawn from the
cited published sources. Further verification would require access to corporate records.

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Contesting with Hormel. The Hormel case, perhaps, was the most dramatic
of the packinghouse conflicts of the late 20th century. It was at Hormel that the
Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW) had been organized. The IUAW had,
in some respects, provided the philosophical core for the PWOC and, later, the
UPWA. A strong labor tradition, it appears, remained among the Hormel workers
although relative labor-management peace seems to have prevailed after the initial
confrontation of the early 1930s.
Jay Hormel, son of the company’s founder, had negotiated the initial agreement
with the IUAW. But, Hormel, who enjoyed a reputation for enlightened labor-
management relations, died in 1954. Gradually, through attrition, new management
had come to control the company which then encompassed a number of plants spread
over several states. Similarly, a new leadership had emerged within the union.
By the mid-1970s, the original Austin, Minnesota, plant was old and in need
of replacement; and, after negotiations between management and the union, it was
agreed that a new facility would be built in Austin. The workers would make a
number of concessions in order to assure its economic viability. Certain work rules
and production standards would be altered and the union accepted a no-strike
provision to last through three years from completion of the new plant.109
Various factors led to collapse of the agreement. Protracted negotiations
between Hormel, the local union (Local P-9), and the UFCW, seem to have resulted
in disagreement between Local P-9 and the international union (ultimately, with the
AFL-CIO) — and in a contentious strike, the latter commencing in August 1985. In
May 1986, the UFCW’s Executive Committee imposed a trusteeship on Local P-9
and settled the strike. The provisions accepted by the national UFCW were,
reportedly, “very close to the terms Hormel demanded” prior to the strike. It made
no provision for re-employment of workers still out when the strike ended.110
With the end of the strike at Hormel (the mid-1980s), new officers took control
of the local and the labor-management relationship was resumed. But, the tone of
that relationship appears to have been quite different from that which preceded the
strike and, some noticed, bitterness would linger.111
109 Perry and Kegley, Disintegration and Change, pp. 198-199. See also Marie
McNaughton, “Like a Civil War,” Meat & Poultry, Sept. 1995, p. 51; and Rachleff, Hard-
Pressed, pp. 48-50.
110 DLR, May 12, 1986, pp. A2-A4. See also Rachleff, Hard-Pressed, pp. 52-60; Horowitz,
Negro and White, pp. 271-273; Jeremy Main, “The Labor Rebel Leading the Hormel
Strike,” Fortune, June 9, 1986, pp. 105-106, 108-110; Houston and Bernstein, The Pork
Workers’ Beef, p. 76; and DLR, Dec. 24, 1984, pp. A1-A2; Feb. 2, 1986, A7-A9; Mar. 17,
1986, pp. A10-A12, E1-E5; May 12, 1986, pp. A12-A13; and July 22, 1987, p. A4.
111 On the Hormel strike at large, see Marie McNaughton, “‘Like a Civil War Town’: Austin
Minnesota, 10 Years Later,” Meat & Poultry, Aug. 1995, pp. 56-62, and Sept. 1995, pp. 50-
64; Dave Hage and Paul Klauda, No Retreat, No Surrender: Labor’s War at Hormel (New
York; William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1989); and Hardy Green, On Strike at Hormel:
The Struggle for a Democratic Labor Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
(continued...)

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An Emerging Pattern. In 1960, the Monfort’s opened a packing plant in
Greeley, Colorado. It was a pioneering effort that originally operated on a union
basis. Faced with increasing competition from other new breed firms, Monfort
sought, in 1979, “a three-year wage freeze and operational changes.” A strike
followed. In March 1980, the plant was closed — but reopened two years later
without a union contract. Some estimated that total labor costs would be reduced by
25%.112 Monfort recovered, acquired ValAgri of Garden City, Kansas, and in 1987
merged into ConAgra: soon to become “the second largest food-processing firm in
the United States and the fourth largest in the world.”113
With the purchase of Singleton Seafood and Sea Alaska Products (1982),
ConAgra had become the “largest U.S. shrimp processor.”114 In 1984, Greyhound,
which had acquired Armour in 1970, sold the packing firm to ConAgra which
reopened 17 plants that Greyhound/Armour had closed, reportedly hiring a nonunion
workforce. ConAgra also acquired Beatrice Foods and Swift Independent Packing
Company (SIPCO, spun off from Esmark, Inc., by a leveraged buy-out in 1981).115
Merging the corporate cultures of the several firms (and dealing with various
executives acquired in the process) proved to be a challenge. By the mid-1990s,
ConAgra was itself in the process of reorganization.116 The Omaha-based firm
announced “plans to strengthen and improve profitability by significantly
reconfiguring 29 production plants and exiting or restructuring nine smaller
businesses.” A report in Meat & Poultry observed: “Those most immediately
affected are the 6,300 employees who will lose their jobs within the year.”117
The process would be repeated by other firms. In 1979, Missouri Beef Packers
(with IBP, one of the early new breed firms) was acquired by Cargill and, in 1982,
renamed Excel.118 Based in Wichita, Kansas, Excel would lease (1987) a plant in
111 (...continued)
1990).
112 “Monfort: A Meatpacker Tries a Comeback by Trimming Labor Costs,” Business Week,
Mar. 15, 1982, pp. 52 and 54. Perry and Kegley, Disintegration and Change, p. 155, state
that the reopened plant went from “a former base rate of $7.98 per hour to $5.00 per hour.”
113 Andreas, Meatpackers and Beef Barons, pp. 42-43.
114 Michael J. Broadway, “From City to Countryside: Recent Changes in the Structure and
Location of the Meat- and Fish-Packing Industries,” in Stull, et al., Any Way You Cut It,
p. 23. (Hereafter cited as Broadway, From City to Countryside.)
115 Craypo, Strike and Relocation, p. 189; “Meatpackers that Bounced Back,” Business
Week, Aug. 16, 1982, p. 103; “The Slaughter of Meatpacking Wages,” Business Week, June
27, 1983, p. 71; Horowitz, The Decline of Unionism, p. 35; and Andreas, Meatpackers and
Beef Barons, p. 43.
116 Steve Kay, “Beef Woes Bedevil ConAgra,” Meat & Poultry, June 1998, pp. 42, 45, 47-
49. See Mark Ivey, “How ConAgra Grew Big — and Now, Beefy,” Business Week, May
18, 1987, pp. 87-88.
117 Valerie Freeman, “ConAgra Restructures,” Meat & Poultry, June 1996, p. 12.
118 Based in Minneapolis, Cargill is “an international processor, marketer and distributor of
(continued...)

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Ottumwa, Iowa, that Hormel had closed and, within “a few days of its closing,”
reopen it reportedly with a two-tier pay system: “$5.50 per hour for new workers and
$6.50 for workers with Hormel experience.”119 Again, in 1982, Rodeo Meats, a
Morrell subsidiary, closed its Arkansas City, Kansas, plant but reopened it nine
months later “as Ark City Packing Company, offering wages at $5 an hour instead
of the previous union wage of $11 an hour.” During the same period, IBP bought an
Oscar Mayer plant in Perry, Iowa, and reopened it reportedly at “a starting wage of
$5.80 an hour ... nearly $4.00 less than Oscar Mayer’s starting wage.”120
The Case of Storm Lake Packing. In 1935, Storm Lake Packing opened in
Storm Lake, Iowa. For nearly 20 years, it served the local community becoming
Hygrade Food Products in 1953. In 1978, in the context of restructuring, Hygrade
“announced the plant would close permanently” if the UFCW “did not accept
contract concessions.” The workers refused but the plant remained open.
Two years later, Hygrade again demanded concessions. Once more, plant
management and the union worked out a compromise; but, this time, Hygrade’s
parent company, Hanson Industries, demurred. Negotiations continued with the city,
heavily dependent on the packing plant, offering concessions. “In October [1981],
Hygrade demanded a $3.00 per hour pay cut in all Hygrade plants as a prerequisite
for keeping the Storm Lake plant open. The UFCW refused...” and the plant closed.
As a result, “some 500 relatively high-wage unionized jobs that formed the backbone
of a stable local workforce” were lost, along with 50 management jobs. In April
1982, IBP bought the Storm Lake facility, reopening it with what was, allegedly, a
substantially reduced wage structure. The new IBP plant was said to have operated
with about a 10% monthly turnover.121
Some Diverse Impacts. Relocation sites associated with restructuring varied.
Most often, they were small towns where the economic impact of a plant closing
118 (...continued)
agricultural, food, industrial and financial products.” Excel is a “wholly owned subsidiary”
o f C a r gi l l . S e e [ h t t p: / / www.excel meat s.com/ about / hi st or y.h t m] a n d
[http://www.cargill.com].
119 Warren, Struggling with”Iowa’s Pride,” p. 128.
120 Broadway, From City to Countryside, p. 22-23. See also DLR, June 3, 1981, pp. A5-A8;
Sept. 15, 1982, pp. A4-A5; July 27, 1983, pp. A1-A3; Feb. 17, 1984, pp. A9-A11; Oct.,
pp. A2-A3; George Ruben, “Problems Continue in Meat Processing Industry,” Monthly
Labor Review, Sept. 1983, p. 40; and Steve Kay, “Merger Madness,” Meat & Poultry, Mar.
2002, p. 21, 24-26.
121 Mark A. Grey, “Pork, Poultry, and Newcomers in Storm Lake, Iowa,” in Stull, et al., Any
Way You Cut It, pp. 109-113. (Hereafter cited as Grey, Pork, Poultry, and Newcomers.)
See, also, Steve Bjerklie, “No Way Up? Pork, Poverty and IBP in Storm Lake, Iowa,” Meat
& Poultry, Sept. 1992, pp. 39-40, 42, 44, and 46; and Eric Hake and Martin King, “The
Veblenian Credit Economy and the Corporatization of American Meatpacking,” Journal of
Economic Issues, June 2002, p. 497. (Hereafter cited as Hake and King, The Veblenian
Credit Economy.) See, also, Grey’s “Turning the Pork Industry Upside Down: Storm
Lake’s Hygrade Work Force and the Impact of the 1981 Plant Closure,” The Annals of Iowa,
Summer 1995, pp. 244-259.

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would be severely felt. In 1992, for example, Morrell had closed its beef packing
plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, eliminating 400 jobs. Thus, when it threatened
to close its pork processing plant in Sioux City, Iowa, in fall 1993 (with 1,300 jobs
at issue), the threat was taken seriously. As closure neared (December 1993),
“Morrell received a combination of state and local incentives and a new five-year
labor agreement with the union” — the plant remained open.122
Again, in the early 1980s, General Host (which had bought Cudahy packing a
decade earlier) announced its decision to “get out of the meat processing business.”
Closure was averted (and, potentially, the loss of 1,500 jobs) when General Host sold
four plants “to a management group.” However, during an interim closure and
reopening under a new name, “unionized production workers [were] terminated” and
a new wage structure imposed.123 The practice extended into other segments of the
industry — and to other regions — as well.124
“If there was any remaining question over organized labor’s influence in the
beef industry,” stated IBP historian Jeffrey Rodengen, “the issue was put to rest in
the early 1980s when a wave of wage reduction swept through America’s packing
houses.” He added: “This wage depression represented packers’ efforts to bring
wages down from among the highest in America to a level more in line with the rest
of industry.”125
Expansion as a Strategy. Plant closing, consolidation and/or restructuring
inevitably affects workers. Similarly, however justified in terms of efficiency, it also
affects the communities from which a facility moves and into which it relocates.
The Emergence of IBP. Among the new breed packers, Iowa Beef Processors
may have had the greatest impact upon the industry — and, thus, upon workers.
From its beginnings in the early 1960s, IBP appears to have made clear that it
intended to operate, as nearly as possible, in a non-union environment and it
developed a low-wage strategy. “If we paid the base rate the union wants,” an IBP
official reportedly stated, “our whole program would fail.”126
122 Donald Stull “Of Meat and (Wo)Men: Meatpacking’s Consequences for Communities,”
The Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy, spring 1994, p. 116. (Hereafter sited as Stull,
Of Meat and (Wo)Men.) Stull states that “the city’s portion [of the settlement] alone is
worth $l.3 million.” See, also, Strausberg, From Hills and Hollers, pp. 76-78.
123 Perry and Kegley, Disintegration and Change, p. 90.
124 Bob Hall, “Chicken Empires,” Southern Exposure, summer 1989, p. 17. (Hereafter cited
as Hall, Chicken Empires.)
125 Rodengen, The Legend of IBP, p. 122. Roger Horowitz, in Putting Meat on the American
Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2006), p. 151, states that by the 1990s, “... labor organizations had little power in the meat-
processing industry.” Further: “Without labor organizations to exert upward pressures on
wages and to influence shop floor relations, workers had to accept companies’ terms or go
elsewhere.”
126 The comment is attributed to Arden Walker, IBP vice president for industrial relations,
(continued...)

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The first clash between IBP and the UPWA appears to have been at its Fort
Dodge, Iowa, plant in 1965. The contest was relatively brief, ending with the
intercession of Iowa’s Governor.127 More critical was a 1969 contest, soon after the
UPWA/Amalgamated merger. The union had won certification to represent workers
at the IBP flagship plant at Dakota City, Nebraska.128 A contract would be more
difficult to secure. With the plant structured to accommodate less-skilled workers,
the company “claimed the union was trying to force skilled rates for relatively
unskilled jobs.”129 A strike was called. IBP imported strikebreakers: some, it
appears, “of Mexican descent recruited from the Southwestern United States.”
Violence erupted.130 Ultimately, the Amalgamated secured a contract that “allowed
IBP to keep its pay rates far beneath the master agreement levels.”131
IBP may have been aware of philosophical and policy divisions within the union
following the UPWA/Amalgamated merger and it may have utilized them to its
advantage.132 Then, in 1979, the second merger occurred, producing the UFCW. By
the 1980s, IBP (then owned by Occidental Petroleum) “had become the pattern
setter” in the industry both for operations in general and for “wages and working
conditions.” It still “operated union-free in ten of its thirteen plants.”133 Ever
watchful of the union, IBP built new facilities at Amarillo, Texas, and Emporia,
Kansas, with the expectation, some contented, that the facilities could be played off
against each other to limit the strength of the union were further strikes to occur.134
On an expansion course, IBP moved gradually from beef to pork and on to “pre-
cooked pizza toppings, taco fillings” and “a range of deli meat products.”
126 (...continued)
quoted in Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 261.
127 Rodengen, The Legend of IBP, pp. 41-42.
128 Ibid., pp. 47, and 59-60.
129 Perry and Kegley, Disintegration and Change, p. 136. See also Rodengen, The Legend
of IBP, p. 60.
130 Rodengen, The Legend of IBP, p. 61.
131 Horowitz, Negro and White, pp. 262-263.
132 Ibid., pp. 262-263.
133 Craypo, Strike and Relocation, p. 188-190. See also “Meatpackers that Bounced Back,”
Business Week, Aug. 16, 1982, p. 105; and DLR, Dec. 16, 1986, pp. A2-A3. IBP, acquired
by Occidental Petroleum in 1981, was spun off in stages commencing in 1987 and
concluding in 1991. See Rodengen, The Legend of IBP, pp. 118, 137, and 148-150; and
Steve Kay, “Light at the End of the Tunnel?” Meat & Poultry, Jan. 1992, pp. 28-29, 31-32,
36, 38-40.
134 Horowitz, Negro and White, pp. 262-263. Freedman and Fulmer, Last Rites, p. 44,
theorize that “fragmentation of pattern bargaining” would allow management “more easily
[to] shift production from plants that are on strike to plants that are no longer part of a
master agreement and therefore not on strike.”

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Reasonably, it developed a tannery processing leather goods.135 With passage of
NAFTA, American packers moved into the Canadian market. Cargill had bought
Canada’s largest beef packing plant. In late 1994, IBP bought Canada’s second
largest beef packing plant.136 Simultaneously, it reportedly was developing a joint
venture with China “to raise, process and market hogs” to begin in 1997.137 In spring
1997, IBP acquired Foodbrands America (Oklahoma City) for “$640 million and
assumption of ... $348 million debt.”138
The Growth and Development of Tyson Foods. Poultry had been largely
a small farm operation until World War II with production oriented mainly to local
markets. In the mid-1930s, John Tyson of Springdale, Arkansas, began trucking
poultry to markets in Chicago and other midwestern cities. Initially, he hauled
poultry and produce for local growers; but, gradually, he entered the business on his
own. Tyson Feed and Hatchery was incorporated in 1947. By 1950, it “was
processing about 96,000 broilers a week.” The company went public in the early
1960s.139
Serious expansion had commenced in 1963 with the purchase of Garrett Poultry
of Rogers, Arkansas. By 1977, Tyson had moved into pork production, acquiring
facilities in North Carolina and handling 7,500 hogs a week. In 1983, it purchased
a Mexican food company (Mexican Original) and moved into corn and flour tortilla
products. In 1989, it acquired Holly Farms, then the nation’s third largest poultry
firm with interests in beef and pork: reportedly a $1.4 billion deal.140 In 1992,
135 Steve Kay, “IBP Leader Dictates His Vision of the Future: $20 Billion by 2001,” Meat
& Poultry, July 1996, p. 18. (Hereafter cited as Kay, IBP Leader Dictates.)
136 Patrick Gallagher, “IBP Invades Alberta,” Meat & Poultry, Jan. 1995, p. 12. The
Canadian firm, Lakeside Farm Industries, Ltd., was said to have annual sales of $500
million. See Kay, IBP Leader Dictates, p. 20. The meat and poultry industry of Canada
appears to have followed roughly the same pattern as that of the United States. See, for
example, Ian MacLachlan, Kill and Chill: Restructuring Canada’s Beef Commodity Chain
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 245-288; Michael J. Broadway, “Bad to the
Bone: The Social Costs of Beef Packing’s Move to Rural Alberta,” in Roger Epp and Dave
Whitson (eds.), Writing Off the Rural West (Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press,
2001), pp. 39-51; Leo Quigley, “Canadian-style Case Ready,” Meat & Poultry, Feb. 2002,
pp. 30-36; and Quigley, “Retail Ready: Canada West Scores with Case-Ready Programs,”
Meat & Poultry, Feb. 2003, pp. 36-38.
137 Kay, IBP Leader Dictates, p. 24.
138 “IBP Acquires Foodbrands America; $20 Billion Vision Comes into Focus,” Meat &
Poultry, Apr. 1997, p. 3. Foodbrands, Meat & Poultry reported, “... processes pizza
toppings, pizza crusts, burritos, stuffed pastas, breaded appetizers, soups, sauces and side
dishes as well as deli meats and processed beef, poultry and pork.”
139 For the history of Tyson Foods, see [http://www.tysonfoodsinc.com].
140 Stephanie A. Forest, “Tyson Is Winging its Way to the Top,” Business Week, Feb. 25,
1991, pp. 57 and 60. See also Steve Bjerklie, “Tyson’s New Speciality,” Mean & Poultry,
June 1995, pp. 22-23.

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Tyson’s purchased Arctic Alaska Fisheries, Inc., and Louis Kemp Seafood;141 in
1997, Mallard’s Food Products (Modesto); in 1998, Arkansas-based Hudson Foods.
By the late 1990s, IBP was considering various restructuring initiatives:
possibly going private, a leveraged buy-out, or another business arrangement.
Instead, in 2001, Tyson acquired IBP reportedly for $4.7 billion and became “the
largest meat and poultry company in the world.”142 By spring 2002, Tyson Foods had
“proforma revenues of about $25 billion and more than 300 facilities and offices in
32 states and 22 countries.”143
The combined company, it was said, would “provide an estimated 23 percent
of the U.S. meat and poultry supply while employing 120,000 people.” But, it would
also have a “total debt of approximately $5 billion” in 2002.144 And, it would be
necessary to integrate two very large companies and the component parts of each.
Labor Problems and Profit Margins. Despite sizeable expenditures by both
IBP and Tyson Foods (and, perhaps, because of them), the firms would be concerned
with savings. “Put simply,” observed analyst Nicholas Stein, “Tyson is struggling
to find enough cheap, unskilled labor to staff its processing plants.” Stein pointed
to employee turnover, “between 40% and 100% annually, meaning each of the
company’s 83 plants needs between 400 and 2,000 new workers every year.”145
IBP’s Bob Peterson considered automation. “IBP will save more than $50 million
because of automation this year [2001],” he stated. But, he conceded, “we will
always have to have people.”146
141 Keith Nunes, “Chicken of the Sea,” Meat & Poultry,” July 1992, p. 9; and Kris Freeman,
“‘Chicken and the Sea’: What’s Tyson up to with Arctic Alaska and Louis Kemp?” Meat
& Poultry, Mar. 1993, p. 16-17, 20 and 22.
142 Negotiations are summarized in Steve Kay’s, “We’re More than Chicken,” Meat &
Poultry, Mar. 2001, pp. 48-51. Figures vary somewhat. See also “Tyson Foods Shells Out
Billions to Acquire IBP, Inc.,” Meat & Poultry, Jan. 2001, pp. 3-4.
143 “Tyson Plans ‘Value-Added,’” Nation’s Restaurant News, Apr. 1, 2002, p. 40. See also
“Tyson Foods, Inc.,” Meat & Poultry, Sept. 1998, p. 26; Nicholas Stein, “Son of a Chicken
Man,” Fortune, May 13, 2002, pp.136-138, 140, 142, 144, 146 (Hereafter cited as Stein, Son
of a Chicken Man); and Steve Kay, “Bob Peterson: The End of the Line,” Meat & Poultry,
Oct. 2001, p. 32. (Hereafter cited as Kay, The End of the Line.)
144 Steve Kay, “From IBP to ‘TyBP’: Will This Marriage Work?” Meat & Poultry, Dec.
2001, p. 26.
145 Stein, Son of a Chicken Man, p. 142.
146 Kay, The End of the Line, p. 36. Scott Kilman, “Moving On Up,” The Wall Street
Journal, Oct. 25, 2004, p. R10, reports: “Over the past three years, machines have replaced
one-third of the jobs” at the Tyson chicken processing plant at Noel, Missouri. Kilman adds
that the plant “... now has about 800 workers earning about $9 an hour on average. Some
Tyson managers believe it will be possible to have a fully automated chicken plant within
15 years.” See also Jane Kelly, “Perdue: New Processing Plant Is Strictly for the
Foodservice Market,” Meat & Poultry, Dec. 1992, pp. 14-15; Steve Kay, “Beef: The Next
Generation,” Meat & Poultry, Jan. 2002, pp. 40-44; and “Tyson Continues Focusing on
Efficiencies,” Meat & Poultry, Dec. 2003, p. 3.

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But, which people? The industry had been characterized as “difficult, dirty, and
dangerous” with employees struggling “to keep up with the production line.” The
new breed restructuring had brought with it a workforce that was paid relatively low
wages and was subject to high rates of turnover. “Increasingly,” Stein states, “both
Tyson and IBP came to rely on immigrants — mainly from Mexico and Central
America.” (Southeast Asia was another source of low-wage labor for the industry.)
“By the late 1990s the Tyson work force was very heavily Hispanic — 40%
according to Tyson, 60% or more according to union officials.”147
Areas of Economics and Public Policy
“We did what we had to do,” IBP’s Peterson reflects. “We are not
unreasonable, but we are not patient people, and we are not gentle.” The meat
processing industry is highly competitive and, like the economy at large, profit
motivated. “We don’t want to be tough and ornery, but if you want to be the best,
and we are going to be the best, you need to have quality and consistency and be the
low-cost producer.”148
Labor-management policy in the meat and poultry industry has not evolved by
chance.149 For the most part, it has been successful from industry’s perspective —
but success has not been without costs. Because of competition, firms have tended
to seek the cheapest labor available that could meet their needs: often, racial/ethnic
minorities. Early in the century, employers pitted workers against each other,
separating them by nationality, religion, and culture in an apparent effort to keep the
cost of labor low and to prevent trade unionization.150 Through recent decades,
waves of Hispanics, Vietnamese, Laotians, and refugees from the Balkans have taken
147 Stein, Son of a Chicken Man, p. 144. For a general survey of consolidations, see Jon K.
Lauck, “Competition in the Grain Belt Meatpacking Sector after World War II,” The Annals
of Iowa, Spring 1998, pp. 146-159.
148 Rodengen, The Legend of IBP, p. 193. The spring l996 issue of Culture & Agriculture
has a collection of essays by academic and public policy writers dealing with the varied
impacts of the meatpacking and poultry processing industry.
149 Rachleff, in Hard-Pressed, p.10, states that by the early 1980s, employers “were
buttressed by the emergence of a veritable industry of ‘management consultants’ who
preached the virtues of a ‘union free’ environment.”
150 Stromquist, Solidarity & Survival, pp. 84-85. Concerning the general employment of
racial/ethnic minorities and immigrant workers, in addition to sources cited elsewhere in this
report, see The Work Experience: Labor, Class, and Immigrant Enterprise (New York:
Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991) and Unions and Immigrants: Organization and Struggle
(New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991), both edited by George E. Pozzetta. As case
studies in two very different settings, see also: Edward D. Beechert, Working in Hawaii: A
Labor History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), and Allan Kent Powell, The
Next Time We Strike: Labor in Utah’s Coal Fields, 1900-1933 (Logan: Utah State
University Press, 1985). There were, of course, different realities (and reactions, both from
labor and from employers) in every area and across time.

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jobs in packing and processing plants.151 Because of their social, economic, and, in
some cases, immigration status, they have willingly accepted hard, dirty, and
sometimes dangerous work at low wages — at least in the short term — as had other
racial/ethnic minorities and new immigrant groups before them.
Assembling a Workforce
The movement of the packing industry to rural America (where the poultry
industry was already sited) brought to it a new workforce. What would be the nature
of the new workforce? And how would it be managed?
Recruitment and Characteristics. New breed packers, some have
suggested, chose to relocate in rural areas and to recruit a workforce locally. And,
some pledged to do so in exchange for concessions from communities eager for
growth.152 Andy Anderson, co-founder of IBP, explained his vision of the new
workforce. “We’ve tried to take the skill out of every step,” Anderson explained to
a Newsweek reporter in early 1965. “We wanted to be able to take boys right off the
farm and we’ve done it.”153 Relocation and recruitment of boys (and girls) “right off
the farm,” however, could have collateral benefits for companies: i.e., escape from
unionized urban labor markets with collective bargaining, high wages, and existing
work rules.
But, local recruitment — even for firms disposed to recruit locally — proved
difficult. A new plant, requiring hundreds of workers, could quickly exhaust the
local labor supply. Thus, outside recruitment was almost inevitable.154
For an employer, hiring locally may not have been desirable. A successor firm,
retaining a predecessor’s workforce, could be inviting trouble — especially where the
old firm had operated under a union contract. Since some new breed firms sought
to operate non-union and to pay low-wages, a clash would be almost assured.
151 Stull and Broadway, “Killing Them Softly: Work in Meatpacking Plants and What it
Does to Workers,” in Donald D. Stull, et al., Any Way You Cut It, p. 62. (Hereafter cited as
Stull and Broadway, Killing Them Softly.)
152 See, for example Mark A. Grey, “Pork, Poultry, and Newcomers in Storm Lake, Iowa,”
in Stull, et. al., Any Way You Cut It, pp. 113-115; Griffith, Hay Trabajo, pp. 132-133;
Donald D. Stull and Michael J. Broadway, “The Effects of Restructuring on Beef-Packing
in Kansas,” Kansas Business Review, 14(1), 1990, p. 12; and David L. Ostendorf,
“Packinghouse Communities: Exploiting Immigrant Workers,” Christian Century, May 5,
1999, pp. 492-493. (Hereafter cited as Ostendorf, Packinghouse Communities.)
153 Newsweek, Mar. 8, 1965, p. 76.
154 See Warren, Struggling with “Iowa’s Pride”, pp. 128-129; and Robert A. Hackenberg,
et al., “Creating a Disposable Labor Force,” The Aspen Institute Quarterly, spring 1993, pp.
93-94. (Hereafter cited as Hackenberg, Creating a Disposable Labor Force.) See also
Steve Bjerklie, “The Tip of the Iceberg,” Meat & Poultry, Nov. 1992, p. 4.

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Experienced employees would likely resist change. A workforce of newcomers (new
to the area and, perhaps, to the world of work) would allow greater flexibility.155
The demographics and character of the post-1960s meatpacking workforce seem
to have differed from that of mid-century. With unionization, the old workforce
(prior to the 1960s) had shifted from transient (largely immigrant) to greater stability:
permanent residents with roots in the community. There was also a shift from a
mainly white workforce to one more heavily African-American. Women had always
worked in the packing industry; but, with new technology and systematic de-skilling,
they would come to be more widely employed.156
Several changes in the relocated industry (poultry presents some exceptions)
seem evident from the literature dealing with the post-1960s era. First. The
packinghouse workforce seems to have become less black. There were few African-
Americans in the rural midwestern communities to which the industry migrated: few
urban workers — either whites or African-Americans — appear to have followed the
migrating industry.157 Second. Increasingly packers (and, later, poultry processors)
began recruitment from outside the area of production: largely Southeast Asians and
Hispanics — but other immigrants as well. These recruits, often unfamiliar with
American labor law, lacked personal resources and community ties and, if
unauthorized to be employed, were vulnerable to exploitation. Third. Where these
newcomers were from pre-industrial societies, they tended to be unfamiliar with
unions and may have been uncomfortable with trade unionization. Where they were
transient, as many were, there was little incentive to think of long-term socio-
economic advancement through organization.158 Fourth. Although African-
Americans have continued to be employed (in poultry processing, value added work,
and the seafood industry), they have tended to be working women. The urban-to-
rural shift seems frequently to have been both of race and gender: often from
155 See Craypo, Strike and Relocation, pp. 201-202; and Donald D. Stull and Lourdes
Gouveia, “Dances with Cows: Beefpacking’s Impact on Garden City, Kansas, and
Lexington, Nebraska,” in Donald D. Stull, et al., Any Way You Cut It, pp. 85-107.
(Hereafter cited as Stull and Gouveia, Dances with Cows.)
156 Janet E. Benson, “The Effects of Packinghouse Work on Southeast Asian Refugee
Families,” in Louise Lamphere, et al., eds., Newcomers in the Workplace: New Immigrants
and the Restructuring of the U.S. Economy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994),
pp. 103-104. (Hereafter cited as Benson, The Effects of Packinghouse Work.) The value
added product line (pre-cooked meals, case ready meats, etc.), though labor-intensive,
requires less strength. See also Barrett, Unity and Fragmentation, pp. 38-39.
157 See Fogel, The Negro in the Meat Industry, pp. 8 and 124. In “‘I Come to the Garden’:
Changing Ethnic Relations in Garden City, Kansas,” Urban Sociology, 1990, pp. 310-311,
Stull discusses the Garden City packing industry in terms of Anglos, Hispanics and
Southeast Asians. He adds: “Blacks might be said to occupy a third rung on the social
ladder, but their population remains too small to be accorded a separate group status.”
(Hereafter cited as Stull, I Come to the Garden.)
158 Benson states in “Households, Migration, and Community Context,” Urban
Anthropology, spring-summer 1990, p. 25, that given “the dead-end nature” of line work,
“few Southeast Asians expect to spend more than five years or so in Garden City,” Kansas.

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relatively highly paid black males to lower paid black females.159 Fifth. The post-
1960s workforce (the lower tier) appears to have been heavily transient, whether in
industrial or geographical terms — and, perhaps, both.160
In general, the post-1960s lower tier workforce in packing and processing might
be characterized as unskilled, mobile, and sometimes lacking in strong labor-market
attachment. These were workers in whom employers had little invested, given the
churning within the industry and the nature of the drive for enhanced profitability.161
Turnover and Worker Retention. Nicholas Stein in Fortune suggests that
it is “difficult” to find workers for processing plants at $7 an hour “when they could
earn the same or more at McDonald’s.”162 But for some, there may be few options:
i.e., economic necessity or time to learn English and to develop skills.
Rates and Costs. While the packing and processing industry is said to have
a high rate of worker turnover, it may not be entirely clear what is meant by turnover.
Are seasonal workers, employed regularly year after year, included in the concept?
How about the part-time employee who works when demand is sufficient — but who
is not kept on the rolls through the intervening periods? And, when does one become
an employee for turnover calculation? When he or she accepts employment? Shows
up for work? Completes an orientation program?163
159 Fogel, The Negro in the Meat Industry, pp. 1-2, and 14. Broadway, From City to
Countryside, pp. 36-37, states that most workers in catfish processing are black women.
160 See Broadway, From City to Countryside, pp. 36-37; Ken C. Erickson, “Guys in White
Hats: Short-Term Participant Observation Among Beef-Processing Workers and Managers,”
in Louise Lamphere, et al., Newcomers in the Workplace (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1994), p. 89 (Hereafter cited as Erickson, Guys in White Hats); David Griffith,
“Consequences of Immigration Reform for Low-Wage Workers in the Southeastern U.S.:
The Case of the Poultry Industry,” in Urban Anthropology, spring-summer 1990, pp. 165-
173 (Hereafter cited as Griffith, Consequences of Immigration Reform); Ken Lawrence and
Anne Braden, “The Long Struggle,” Southern Exposure, Nov./Dec. 1983, p. 86; and Steve
Striffler, “Inside a Poultry Processing Plant: An Ethnographic Portrait,” Labor History,
Aug. 2002. (Hereafter cited as Striffler, Inside a Poultry Processing Plant.)
161 See Karen Olsson, “The Shame of Meatpacking,” The Nation, Sept. 16, 2002, p. 12;
(Hereafter cited as Olsson, The Shame of Meatpacking.); Griffith, Consequences of
Immigration Reform, p. 156; Hackenberg, Creating a Disposable Labor Force, pp. 78-79;
Fink, The Maya of Morganton, p. 180; and Edna Bonacich, “A Theory of Ethnic
Antagonism: The Split Labor Market,” American Sociological Review, Oct. 1972, pp. 547-
559.
162 Stein, Son of a Chicken Man, pp. 142-144. Fogel, The Negro in the Meat Industry, p. 18,
argues that workers with “skills and a moderate amount of formal education would not work
in meat packing at common labor wages.” See also Michael Broadway, “Meatpacking and
Its Social and Economic Consequences for Garden City, Kansas, in the 1980s,” Urban
Anthropology, winter 1990, p. 323.
163 There seems to be a relative high attrition rate early in the employment process when
recruits learn what the work involves. See Steve Kay, “The Nature of Turnover,” Meat &
Poultry, Sept. 1997, p. 32. (Hereafter cited as Kay, The Nature of Turnover.) See also
(continued...)

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Estimates of turnover are difficult to assess.164 Steve Kay of Meat & Poultry
states: “No major packer will disclose their current turnover rates” — which he
estimates “may range from 50 percent to 70 percent for most large packers.”165
Again, what is included within an estimate may not always be clear.
The impact of high turnover for employers varies from one observer to the next.
Raoul Baxter, Smithfield International, Inc., argues that new cuts of beef and
products for the international market “require the most skilled workers in the history
of the meat industry.” Such skills require, he states, “a three-month learning
curve,”arguably making employee retention desirable.166 There are also direct dollar
costs associated with recruitment, training, and acclimation to the workplace and to
the specific tasks. Documentation of such costs appears to be somewhat elusive, but
they could be substantial.167
Some Implications. During field research, Stull and Broadway asked an
interviewee with wide experience in the industry: “[D]o you think it pays the packer
to turn over the workforce rapidly?” He replied: “It must or he wouldn’t do it.”168
Turnover rate is critical in assessing other aspects of the labor-management
relationship. In a carefully structured and highly competitive industry, high turnover
may not be accidental. Some would argue that worker retention may be neither
desirable — nor profitable. “Ultimately, their concern is not about a stable work
force,” states Mark Grey of the University of Northern Iowa, “but maintaining a
transient work force.”169
Since both poultry and beef processing have become extremely competitive, it
may not be surprising that firms would seek to cut costs wherever such economies
163 (...continued)
Hackenberg, et al., Creating a Disposable Labor Force, p. 79.
164 See Jacqueline Nowell, “A Chicken in Every Pot: At What Price?” New Solutions, vol.
10(4), 2000, p. 329. (Hereafter cited as Nowell, A Chicken in Every Pot.)
165 Kay, The Nature of Turnover, pp. 31-32. Kay states: “There appears to be no published
data on labor turnover or the cost to the industry as a whole.” See also Stull and Broadway,
Slaughterhouse Blues, p. 80, for a discussion of turnover rates in the industry.
166 Raoul Baxter, “Labor’s Role in Exports,” Meat & Poultry, Nov. 1997, p. 14.
167 See, for example, Kay, The Nature of Turnover, pp. 31-34; and Richard Alaniz,
“Avoiding Rehiring Costs by Retaining Good Employees,” Meat & Poultry, May 1999, p.
80.
168 Stull and Broadway, The Effects of Restructuring, p. 15. See also, Hackenberg, et al.,
Creating a Disposable Labor Force, p. 79; and Lourdes Gouveia and Stull, “Latino
Immigrants, Meatpacking, and Rural Communities: A Case Study of Lexington, Nebraska”
(East Lansing: Michigan State University, Julian Samora Research Institute, Aug. 1997),
Research Report No. 26, p. 15.
169 Quoted in Christopher Cook, “Hog-Tied: Migrant Workers Find Themselves Trapped
on the Pork Assembly Line,” Progressive, Sept. 1999, p. 32. (Hereafter cited as Cook, Hog-
Tied.)

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are possible. A low wage and often non-union workforce would seem, some suggest,
a likely context for such cost-cutting.
Some observers report that industry employers “aggressively recruit Mexicans
and Southeast Asians” and supplement them with “growing numbers of single
mothers from rural areas.” Such practices, it is argued, have “impeded unionization”
and promoted workforce instability.170 Firms may “cut costs with low wages,
minimum benefits, and, critics argue, ... high turnover.” Some companies offer
“yearly bonuses” but these are, often, “not paid until employees have worked for a
full calendar year.” The same can be said of paid vacations. With the reportedly
high turnover rate, some workers “do not make it” long enough to qualify.171
Healthcare may pose a similar problem. Some workers “cannot enroll until four
to six months (depending on the plant) after they are employed.” With high turnover,
some may never qualify. “To avoid employee insurance claims, companies
commonly find excuses to fire workers who show signs of debilitating injury,”
according to critic Janet Benson.172 With high turnover, some assert, responsibility
for work-related disability can be shifted “to the workers’ home country” since the
workers may have left the United States before serious conditions develop.173 Some
conditions may simply go unreported and untreated.174
Union avoidance may also result from high turnover. With a rotating
workforce, many employers acquire no continuing obligation to their employees; but,
workers, some suggest, may be similarly affected. They may view their work as
temporary, not as a career. Their immediate concern is “economic survival and, if
170 Horowitz, Black and White, p. 277. There may be other interpretations.
171 Stull and Broadway, The Effects of Restructuring, pp. 13-14. In “Introduction: Making
Meat,” Any Way You Cut It, p. 5, Donald D. Stull, et al., point to “workers from Mexico who
migrate between different agricultural sectors: between agricultural harvest work, fruit, and
vegetable packing, and meat and poultry processing....”
172 Janet E. Benson, The Effects of Packinghouse Work, pp.119-120. See also, Kay, The
Nature of Turnover, p. 31; Warren, Struggling with “Iowa’s Pride”, p. 129-130; and
Stephen J. Hedges, Dana Hawkins and Penny Loeb, “The New Jungle,” U.S. News and
World Report, Sept. 23, 1996, pp. 42-43. (Hereafter cited as Hedges, et al., The New
Jungle.) Bob Hall, in The Kill Line, p. 220, suggests that some workers who do qualify for
benefits may not utilize them through fear of losing their jobs.
173 Cook, Hog-Tied, p. 32.
174 Jenny Schulz, “Grappling with a Meaty Issue: IIRIRA’s Effect on Immigrants in the
Meatpacking Industry,” The Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, fall 1998, p. 156.
(Hereafter cited as Schulz, Grappling.) See also Stull and Broadway, Slaughterhouse Blues,
p. 75; and Hackenberg, et al., Creating a Disposable Labor Force, p. 79. Mike Wilson, in
an Associated Press article, Illegal Immigrants in Nebraska, Iowa[,]Complain of Abuses,
Sept. 10, 2003, reported, citing Jose Luis Cuevas, Mexican consul in Omaha as his source,
that “companies frequently fire workers when they’re injured on the job.” Cuevas
reportedly stated: “They’re using undocumented workers as disposable workers.”

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CRS-37
possible, capital accumulation.”175 Mexican workers, observes Arthur Campa, are
not only “isolated from mainstream Anglo American life, but they are separate from
the native Mexican American community as well.” When they lose their jobs they
move on, sometimes returning to Mexico.176 Their awareness of their rights may be
slight and contacts with trade union or social service workers lacking.177 In this
situation, workers may not “identify with traditional union concerns such as pension,
medical care, and wage increases when they have no expectations of continued
employment?”178
Arden Walker, former head of labor relations for IBP, summarized his
perspective on the implications of worker turnover at an NLRB hearing in 1984:
COUNSEL: With regard to turnover, since you are obviously
experiencing it, does that bother you?
Mr. WALKER: Not really.
COUNSEL: Why Not?
Mr. WALKER: We found very little correlation between turnover
and profitability. An employee leaves for whatever reason.
Generally, we’re able to have a replacement employee, and I might
add that the way fringe benefits have been negotiated or installed,
they favor long-term employees. For instance, insurance, as you
know, is very costly. Insurance is not available to new employees
until they’ve worked there for a period of a year or, in some cases, six
months. Vacations don’t accrue until the second year. There are
some economies, frankly, that result from hiring new employees.179
But some industry leaders deny that workers are transient. “We have no migrant
workers at all,” states Richard Lobb of the National Chicken Council. When people
175 Janet E. Benson, “Households, Migration, and Community Context,” Urban
Anthropology, spring-summer 1990, p. 25.
176 Arthur Campa, “Immigrant Latinos and Resident Mexican Americans in Garden City,
Kansas: Ethnicity and Ethnic Relations,” Urban Anthropology, winter 1990, p. 351.
(Hereafter cited as Campa, Immigrant Latinos.)
177 See Janet E. Benson, “Good Neighbors: Ethnic Relations in Garden City Trailer Courts,”
Urban Anthropology, winter 1990, pp. 361-386.
178 Horowitz, Black and White, p. 277.
179 The exchange is quoted in Stull and Broadway, Killing Them Softly, p. 70. Labor
historian Dana Frank, in her study, “... The Detroit Woolworth’s Strike of 1937,” in Frank,
Robin Kelley and Howard Zinn, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the
Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Boston, Beacon Press, 2001), p. 70, observed of
1930s retailing, “... if turnover rates are high, so much the better — managers can then pick
and choose the pliant, the eager, and the charming.”

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CRS-38
are given a job in a poultry plant, it is expected that it is a permanent full-time
position.... They are not migrant, they are not seasonal.”180
The Immigration/Alien Worker Factor
The workforce in the packing/processing industry has been characterized as
immigrant (some, already citizens) and it has been observed that “the meat industry
had always been a point of entry for immigrants joining American society.”181 That
may have been true up to World War I when industry had at its disposal “a ready
supply of cheap labor.”182 Edna Bonacich recalls: “Europeans had also played a
‘cheap labor’ role.”183
During mid-century, things changed. Unions demanded and secured better
wages and working conditions: employment became more stable. Workers came to
identify with their unions and their employers. They put down roots, bought homes,
and raised families. Then, in the 1960s, things changed again. Newcomers, largely
immigrant, were again actively recruited. Often with few marketable skills and/or
otherwise disadvantaged, they were willing to work long hours at hard and
disagreeable work for low wages — and, possibly, not join a union.184
“No one could have guessed,” mused Steve Bjerklie, “that people from nations
we had barely heard of in 1955 — Cambodia, Thailand, Vietnam — would one day
comprise a significant percentage of our industry’s workforce.”185
A Shortage of Labor? In the 1990s, University of Arkansas anthropologist
Steve Striffler applied for work on the production line (poultry processing) at the
Tyson plant in Springdale, Arkansas. He recalls, entering the personnel office:
The secretary and I are the only Americans, the only white folk, and the only
English speakers in the room. Spanish predominates, but is not the only foreign
language. Lao is heard from a couple in the corner, and a threesome from the
Marshall Islands are speaking a Polynesian language.
180 Lobb is quoted in The Christian Science Monitor, Apr. 28, 1999, p. 3. See also Horowitz,
The Decline of Unionism, pp. 35-36; and Richard Alaniz, “Multiple Factors Influence
Declining Union Membership,” Meat & Poultry, May 1998, p. 68.
181 Rodengen, The Legend of IBP, p. 181. The African-American experience must be viewed
somewhat differently.
182 Ostendorf, Packinghouse Communities, p. 492.
183 Edna Bonacich, “Advanced Capitalism and Black/White Race Relations in the United
States,” American Sociological Review, Feb. 1976, p. 38. (Hereafter cited as Bonacich,
Advanced Capitalism.) See also Bjerklie, On the Horns of a Dilemma, p. 50.
184 Rodengen, The Legend of IBP, pp. 163-164, and 64; and Hake and King, “The Veblenian
Credit Economy,” p. 503.
185 Bjerklie, “Revelations: The Industry in the Year 2035,” Meat & Poultry, Jan. 1955, p.
15.

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Striffler would later observe: “... about three-quarters of plant labor force are Latin
American, with Southeast Asians and Marshallese accounting for a large percentage
of the remaining workers. U.S.-born workers,” he adds, “are few and far between.”186
When operating a labor-intensive facility in a sparsely populated area, labor
scarcity might be anticipated.187 If an employer has determined, in so far as possible,
to work union-free (and to avoid hiring workers with trade union backgrounds), that
might further reduce the pool from which a firm can recruit. The recruiting process
may be further limited (and focused) by a policy of payment of low wages for work
that is unpleasant, dirty, and dangerous. If recruitment for such jobs is directed
toward persons of limited work experience, few marketable skills, and slight English
language proficiency, then a demographic shift may not be unexpected. In pursuit
of such a strategy, critics suggest, firms “deliberately recruit ... immigrants” who
“almost universally lack any knowledge of U.S. working conditions, labor practices,
or of their legal rights.”188 At the same time, some suggest that with active
recruitment and serious retention efforts American workers could be found.189
The issue may have been one of definition: of distinguishing between shortages
that are absolute and those that may be reflective of employer policies.190
Actively Seeking the Foreign Worker. Immigrant (or other alien) workers
normally enter the United States with the intention of working.191 Even adverse
working conditions and low wages may be better than those offered in the
immigrant’s country of origin. As a result, new arrivals may have low expectations
and be willing to endure conditions, both at work and of home life, that American
workers would not willingly tolerate.192
186 Striffler, Inside a Poultry Processing Plant, p. 305.
187 For example, Elzbieta M. Gozdziak and Micah N. Bump, “Poultry, Apples, and New
Immigrants in the Rural Communities of the Shenandoah Valley: An Ethnographic Case
Study,” International Migration, vol. 42, no. 1, 2004, pp. 149-151, observe: “Processing
companies, having relocated in small, rural communities with little local labour force, often
actively recruit immigrant workers from traditional gateway states, as well as directly from
Mexico and Central America.”
188 Nowell, A Chicken in Every Pot, p. 329. Valdes, Barrios Nortenos, p. 225, states: “In
Lexington [Nebraska], the Latino population rose from 3.3 percent of the total in 1990 to
more than 30 percent by 1996 as a result of the opening of an IBP beef-packing plant, and
an estimated 75 percent to 80 percent of the workers were from Texas and Mexico.”
189 See Grey, Pork Poultry, and Newcomers, pp. 109-116.
190 Donald D. Stull, et al., “Introduction: Making Meat,” in Any Way You Cut It, p. 3,
suggest that the stability of the labor force in the meatpacking industry “... is largely dictated
by corporate strategies.” (Hereafter cited as Stull, et al., Introduction: Making Meat.) See
also Hackenberg, et al., Creating a Disposable Labor Force, pp. 83-84; and Valdes, Barrios
Nortenos, pp. 230-231.
191 Erickson, Guys in White Hats, p. 89.
192 See Griffith, Consequences of Immigration Reform, pp. 164-165.

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The presence of Hispanics in the meat processing workforce, according to
Griffith, “is correlated with lower wage rates” and lower numbers of African-
American workers. While Asians “occupy a small place in most work forces,” he
observes, “they occupy a revered position, in many processor’s minds, as embodying
the quintessential work ethic.” But, he states, Asians are “more upwardly mobile,
taking advantage of refugee services to improve English skills and move into better
paying jobs.”193
From interviews with plant managers and personnel officers, Griffith found the
“clearest theme” was “the belief that Hispanics and Asians have superior work
habits” while those of blacks and whites have “been deteriorating.” It may be that
white and African-American workers, from experience in the industrial workforce,
are less willing to adhere to managerial preferences. Conversely, those less familiar
with American work practices (and labor law) may be less demanding. As
immigrants become acclimated, they can be expected to move on to better jobs,
creating a continuing demand for replacements. Some assert that this provides an
incentive for employers to hire unauthorized immigrants who may more willingly
cooperate with employers because they cannot legally work in the United States.194
Newcomers to the American workplace, Stull concurs, may be “more
susceptible to labor-control mechanisms simply because they haven’t had time to
interpret the industry’s behavior or to calculate the costs of resistance or
militancy.”195
Only Jobs That Americans Don’t Want? “American companies can’t find
enough workers in the United States to meet their needs,” observed business
spokesman Al Zapanta — reflecting what seems to be a widely held belief among
employers: “We’re [Americans] not willing to do these jobs anymore, but
immigrants, like always, are willing to do it to provide for their families.”196
The reality may be more complex. Some have argued that work involving
“blood, unpleasant odors and repetitive tasks, is not attractive” to U.S. workers.197
But other factors including low wages, high line speeds, little job security, rural-sited
facilities, and diminished union protection may also make domestic recruitment
difficult. “A decline in wage levels,” together with other workplace considerations,
193 Ibid., pp. 165-168.
194 Ibid., pp. 168-173. See also Robert Lekachman, “The Specter of Full Employment,”
Harper’s, Feb. 1977, pp. 36 and 38.
195 Stull, et al., Introduction: Making Meat, p. 7. See also Barrett, Unity and
Fragmentation, p. 48.
196 Kirstin Downey Grimsley, “Tyson Foods Indicted in INS Probe,” The Washington Post,
Dec. 20, 2001, p. A13. Zapanta is identified as president of the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of
Commerce.
197 Ibid.

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Broadway says, “... has served to make meatpacking an unattractive employment
option for many Americans.”198
The issue may not be reluctance of Americans to work at these jobs (clearly,
many are so employed); rather it may be the terms of employment. “If the job were
‘decent,’” some critics argue, “they would willingly do it.”199 Some employers agree.
Joe Luter, CEO of Smithfield Foods, Inc., suggests that a solution to industry’s
recruitment problem may be “higher wages, which would make processing jobs more
attractive to American workers.”200
In practice, immigrants (and aliens unauthorized to work in the United States)
constitute an almost “inexhaustible supply” of low-wage labor.201 In this view, once
employers become accustomed to the “flow of new immigrants,”202 they may
continue to recruit them — often at the expense of “native workers”and of less recent
immigrants of whatever ethnic/racial background.203 Bonacich concludes that
“availability of a ‘cheap labor’ alternative” has enabled employers “to avoid
198 Michael J. Broadway, “Beef Stew: Cattle, Immigrants and Established Residents in a
Kansas Beefpacking Town,” in Lamphere, Newcomers in the Workplace, p. 25. See also
Benson, The Effects of Packinghouse Work, in Lamphere, pp. 103-104.
199 Bonacich, Advanced Capitalism, p. 48. See also Roger Horowitz and Mark Miller,
Immigrants in the Delmarva Poultry Processing Industry: The Changing Face of
Georgetown, Delaware and Environs (East Lansing: Michigan State University, Julian
Samora Research Institute, Jan. 1999), Occasional Paper No. 37, p. 5.
200 Stein, Son of A Chicken Man, p. 146. Some employers argue that “they can’t pay more
because consumers won’t buy the products if they cost more.” See Grimsley, “Tyson Foods
Indicted in INS Probe,” The Washington Post, Dec. 20, 2001, p. A13.
The General Accounting Office (now Government Accountability Office) (GAO), in
its report, Community Development: Changes in Nebraska’s and Iowa’s Counties with
Large Meatpacking Plant Workforces, GAO/RCED-98-62, Feb. 1998, pp. 4-5, explains,
citing local officials and company management, “sometimes, not enough local area
residents are available to fill plants’ openings and that at other times, not enough local area
residents are willing to fill job openings at starting pay levels.” GAO adds that plants “have
hired increasing numbers of minority and immigrant workers” from high unemployment
areas within the United States “and from Mexico, Central America, Asia, Africa, and
Eastern Europe.” GAO also reports, p. 2, that federal authorities have estimated “that up
to 25 percent of the workers in meatpacking plants in Nebraska and Iowa were illegal
aliens.”
201 Otey Scruggs, Braceros, “Wetbacks,” and the Farm Labor Problem: Mexican
Agricultural Labor in the United States, 1942-1954 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.,
1988), p. 68. See also Shawn Zeller, “Inside Job,” The National Journal’s Government
Executive, Dec. 2001, p. 47 ff. Conversely, industry analyst Richard Alaniz, in “Avoiding
Rehiring Costs by Retaining Good Employees,” Meat & Poultry, May 1999, p. 80, states:
“Recruiting and retaining employees is becoming one of the most difficult and time-
consuming aspects of running a business.”
202 Griffith, Hay Trabajo, p. 147.
203 Griffith, Consequences of Immigration Reform, p. 170.

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improving the job and raising wages.”204 “What really needs to be addressed,” argues
Joe Berra of the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, “is our
immigration policy on one hand, and workers rights on the other.”205
Meanwhile, employers have organized in order to procure more workers, “both
skilled and lesser skilled.” Banning together, they have created an interest group, the
Essential Worker Immigration Coalition (EWIC), a body “of businesses, trade
associations, and other organizations from across the industry spectrum concerned
with the shortage of both skilled and lesser skilled (“essential worker”) labor.”206
Among those associated with the EWIC was the American Meat Institute.207
Employers, Workers, and Immigration Authorities. With the prosperity
of the 1990s, according to IBP historian Rodengen, the economy “entered one of its
strongest periods on record and unemployment dropped drastically” — to below 3%
in Iowa and Nebraska. For some packers, he states, this apparently “meant dealing
with illegal immigrants who were seeking to fill the many open positions in company
plants.” Employing such workers, while attempting to secure an adequate supply of
labor, he suggests, may have been inadvertent. Further, he states, IBP had been
“... prohibited by law from asking too many questions about background, which
meant it often couldn’t get the information it needed to prevent an illegal immigrant
from getting hired.”208
During the 1990s, by estimates of a former Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) officer,209 about 25% of packing/processing workers may have been
persons unauthorized to work in the United States and employed in violation of U.S.
204 Bonacich, Advanced Capitalism, p. 48.
205 Quoted in Leon Lazaroff, “Welcome to the Jungle,” In These Times, July 8, 2002, p. 5.
206 See the website of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, [http://www.ewic.org],
visited on Nov. 28, 2003.
207 See “Essential Worker Immigration Coalition Resumes Lobbying,” National Journal’s
CongressDaily, Mar. 15, 2002. See also the DLR, July 28, 2003, p. A6. Valdes, Barrios
Nortenos, p. 249, questions the thesis that foreign workers are only taking jobs that
Americans don’t want. The theory, he speculates, does not “account for the late-twentieth-
century trend toward dominance by Mexicans in midwestern packing plants, which
European American [and, presumably, African American] workers did not want to leave.”
208 Rodengen, The Legend of IBP, p. 181. Louis Jacobson, writing in the National Journal’s
Government Executive, Feb. 2000, p. 51 ff., reports “Several big companies have even
opened recruiting offices in Mexican cities.” Jacobson continues: “The companies say
those offices are designed to attract the tens of thousands of Mexicans who possess legal
U.S. work papers.” He acknowledges that “some observers express skepticism at that
explanation...,” but adds: “The problem, sources say, is that immigrants have been getting
increasingly clever about obtaining documents ... under false pretenses. Many employers
are unable — or in some cases unwilling — to tell the difference between what is real and
what is fake.”
209 The Homeland Security Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-296) abolished INS and transferred its
functions from the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security. The
transfer occurred Mar. 1, 2003.

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immigration law.210 Some have suggested that the “largest concentration of illegally
employed persons in the U.S. work in the meatpacking industry.”211 According to
Stull, et al., this reflects both “targeted recruitment” and “the character and
enforcement of immigration laws.”212 But, even were immigration laws enforced
more strictly, compliance would be difficult. With high employee turnover rates,
varying roughly from 40% and 100% per year, effective enforcement would require
a continuing federal presence. Even a small measure of collusion between an
employer and a worker employed illegally could, arguably, defeat such efforts.213
In legislating, Congress has been concerned that prevention of the illegal
employment of foreign workers should not adversely impact U.S. citizens or others
authorized to work in the United States.214 Thus, some packing plants may have had
“to walk a fine line during the hiring process.”215 There may be a delicate balance
between laws “that protect employee rights and those that prohibit the employment
of undocumented workers.”216
Labor Standards and Working Conditions
DOL’s Bernard Anderson noted, early in 2000, that the Department had a “long-
term goal of increasing compliance with labor laws.” (Italics added.) It would focus,
he affirmed, “on the low-wage industries because they have a historically high level
of noncompliance and employ vulnerable workers who often won’t complain about
violation of their workplace rights.”217 Coping with such concerns continues to be
a Department goal, although its achievement may not be easy and may involve
prodding from sources outside the Department. It may also involve extended
210 See Schulz, Grappling, p.151; and Rebecca Gants, “I.N.S. Electronic Verification,” Meat
& Poultry, June 1996, pp. 56-58. (Hereafter cited as Gants, Electronic Verification.)
211 Ibid., p. 56, is here summarizing comments by Jerry Heinauer, district director of INS for
Omaha.
212 Stull et al., Introduction: Making Meat, p. 3.
213 Hedges et al., The New Jungle, p. 38. For a discussion of recent United States
immigration policy, see Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone, Beyond
Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration (New York:
Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), pp. 2-3, together with Vernon M. Briggs’s review of that
study in Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Jan. 2003, pp. 361-363.
214 Phil Olsson, “Employee Eligibility: Dealing with the Double-Edged Sword of
Immigration Law,” Meat & Poultry, June 1996, p. 55.
215 Rodengen, The Legend of IBP, p. 181. See Farm Bureau News, Mar. 19, 2001, p. 2.
216 Hedges, et al., The New Jungle, p. 38. Concerning the overall structure of the industry
and of the labor-management relationship, see Charles Craypo, “Meatpacking: Industry
Restructuring and Union Decline,” in Paula B. Voos, ed., Contemporary Collective
Bargaining in the Private Sector (Madison: Industrial Relations Research Association,
1994), pp. 63-96.
217 Federal News Service, Mar. 23, 2000.

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litigation. The problem is at least two-fold: defining precisely what the law provides
and, thereafter, determining the character of existing industry practice.218
A Movement for Change
During the fall of 1996, the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice
(NICWJ) issued an appeal to the Department of Labor (DOL) urging action with
respect to what it termed “agricultural sweatshops.”219 The Committee proposed:
! Investigation of alleged sweatshops in the poultry industry.
! That DOL “convene a ‘poultry summit’” to bring together the parties
at interest “to look at ways of raising wages in the industry,
providing better benefits to workers, and improving working
conditions.”
! That DOL issue “‘worker-rights guidelines’ to ensure that poultry
workers have the right to organize without fear of job loss or
harassment” and, if voting for a union, to secure a contract within a
reasonable period.
In November 1996, Secretary Robert Reich announced initiation of “a special
targeted enforcement project in the poultry processing industry.”220
A DOL survey was conducted during 1997 and 1998. It found numerous health
and safety concerns: e.g., (a) workers “stationed so close together they lacerated co-
workers with their knives, indicating a need for more space, more protective gear, or
both;” (b) “supervisors [often] ... had trouble communicating with and providing
training to workers who spoke little English”; and (c) “a number of plants were not
in compliance with OSHA’s process safety management standard.”221 Violations of
the FLSA and of the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Workers Protection Act
(MSPA) were found to be systemic. Some 60% of surveyed plants “had violations
of wage and hour and safety and health laws.”222 New inspections followed; and in
October 1999, leaders of NICWJ and the AFL-CIO called for a congressional
investigation of the poultry industry and “its abuse of workers.”223
218 See, for example, The [Raleigh] News and Observer, June 6, 2001, p. A17, and U.S.
Newswire, Inc., May 9, 2002.
219 Chicago-based, the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice has special concern
with low-wage workers in poultry processing who are “primarily African American and
Latino, [who] often toil in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, with few benefits....” See the
NICWJ website at [http://www.nicwj.org]. See also Robert Bussel, “Taking on ‘Big
Chicken’: The Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance,” Labor Studies Journal, summer 2003,
pp. 1-24; and Fink, The Maya of Morganton, pp. 121-124.
220 DLR, Nov. 27, 1996, pp. A10-A11. In November, Secretary Reich also announced his
retirement, to take effect in Jan. 1997. DLR, Nov. 12, 1996, pp. AA1-AA2.
221 DLR, Sept. 18, 1998, pp. A3-A4.
222 DLR, Jan. 12, 2001, p. A11.
223 DLR, Oct. 13, 1999, p. C4.

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A second survey conducted by the Department in 2000 disclosed violations of
the FLSA, MSPA and of the Family and Medical Leave Act.224 It found that “none
of the processing plants subject to investigation were in full compliance with all three
labor statutes.” NICWJ’s Kim Bobo declared it “shocking there has been no
improvement” since the 1997 survey. Bill Schmitz of the UFCW called poultry
processing “an outlaw industry.” But, the National Chicken Council termed the
survey results inaccurate and misleading, according to the Daily Labor Report.
Much of the problem, suggested Richard Lobb of the Council, stemmed from
confusion about the law and DOL’s questionable interpretation of it — primarily
with respect to donning and doffing.225 (See discussion below.)
FLSA Coverage and Related Issues
The Fair Labor Standards Act is the primary federal statute dealing with
minimum wages, overtime pay, and related matters. FLSA violations were a central
theme in DOL’s 1997 and 2000 surveys, noted above.
Donning and Doffing. Whether working with large animals (cattle, hogs,
sheep) or with poultry, the slaughtering and packing process involves contact with
potentially hazardous substances: blood, feces, intestinal juices, etc. Thus, workers
in the industry wear protective gear varying in heft and complexity with the task to
be performed. During a visit to IBP’s beef plant at Finney County, Kansas, in the late
1980s, Donald Stull (with other tourists) reportedly was advised by a plant guide:
Depending on their job, each worker may wear as much as $600 worth of safety
equipment — hardhat, earplugs, cloth and steel mesh gloves, mail aprons and
leggings, weight-lifting belts, or shin guards. They don’t have to buy any of this
equipment.226
Poultry processing requires less substantial equipment but what is used is,
nonetheless, essential: protective hand gear, smocks, hairnets, face masks, etc.
The more complicated the equipment, the more time is consumed in preparing
for work, for breaks, and in cleaning up afterward. During recent years, a question
has arisen: Should the employer be required to compensate workers for time spent
in pre- and post-production activities such as “donning” protective garb and, at shift’s
end, “doffing” garments. Is time so spent included in the concept of hours of work?
How hours of work is defined for implementing the FLSA would seem to fall to the
Department of Labor.
224 See The Washington Times, Jan. 15, 2002, p. D3. A summary of the survey report can
be found at [http://www.nicwj.org].
225 DLR, Jan. 12, 2001, p. A11.
226 Donald D. Stull, “Knock ‘Em Dead: Work on the Kill Floor of a Modern Beefpacking
Plant,” in Lamphere, et al., Newcomers in the Workplace, p. 47.

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Commonly, industry has not compensated workers for donning and doffing
time.227 But, through recent years, the issue has been the subject of extended
compliance action by DOL — and of litigation. The courts have divided on the
question, but some penalties imposed upon industry have been substantial. In 2005,
the broader issue of donning and doffing was unresolved — and the time actually
spent by workers in such activities similarly remained in dispute.228 Reportedly,
delegations from industry and the UFCW have met with Secretary Chao, stating their
respective interpretations of the law, and DOL has commenced a review of the issue.
Although it continues to enforce the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime pay
requirements in the poultry industry, DLR reported, “it no longer is targeting the
industry for special compliance scrutiny.”229
Chicken Catchers. The term, chicken catcher might be misleading. The
chicken catchers, considered here, work in teams in association with corporate
processors. They may, as a team, handle as many as 30,000 to 50,000 live chickens
per shift.230 It is unpleasant work. Jacqueline Nowell of the UFCW explains: “They
collect the birds by hand” for transport to a processing plant. “Chicken catchers are
exposed to airborne contaminants — skin debris, broken feather barbules, insect
parts, aerosolized feed ... poultry excreta ... bacteria” and “dangerous gases.”231
The status of these workers has long been a source of contention. For example,
how are such workers classified for wage/hour and labor-management relations
purposes? Are they farm workers or industrial workers? The two classifications are
treated differently under the FLSA and the National Labor Relations Act. Or are they
independent contractors — and, thus, free from wage/hour requirements and
collective bargaining protection?
At least since the late 1980s, the treatment of chicken catchers has been a focus
of labor-management dispute and of litigation. As the century closed, the issue was
still before the courts. But gradually, the status of the workers has become clearer.
Judge William Nickerson (the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland) found
that the processor “... controls every significant aspect of the chicken catching
operation.” DLR summarized: “The company owns the chickens ..., it owns the
trucks on which they are transported, and it determines from which farm and how
227 Industrial Safety & Hygiene News, July 2002, p. 14.
228 DLR, Sept. 17, 2002, p. A1. Under date of June 3,2003, the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the First Circuit ruled that “[w]alking to obtain uniforms and equipment and waiting in line
are not compensable time” under the FLSA (Tum v. Barber Foods Inc. d/b/a Barber Foods,
1st Cir., No. 02-1679). Then, on Aug. 5, 2003, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth
Circuit ruled that “[m]eatpacking employees must be compensated” under the FLSA “from
the moment they begin putting on safety gear required for their jobs until they take the gear
off.” (Alvarez v. IBP Inc., 9th Cir., No. 02-35042). This latter case is under appeal.
229 DLR, July 24, 2001, pp. C1-2.
230 DLR, May 5, 2000, p. A8.
231 Nowell, A Chicken in Every Pot, p. 329.

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many chickens are to be brought in each day.”232 Judge Nickerson found: “Although
geographically their work takes them outside the processing plants, the catchers’
function, in a real sense, is simply part of the production line.”233
With time, some firms have settled disputed claims with respect to FLSA and
related coverage; others continued to challenge the Department’s interpretation of the
law. The contests, in varying forms and jurisdictions, have moved slowly through
the courts — and new issues have been raised. The question of fair labor standards
for meat and poultry workers, however, has not yet been fully resolved.234
Line Speeds and Rest Breaks. For the past century, line speeds have been
a constant worker complaint. Commons, writing of the Chicago yards in 1904,
thought speed “was undoubtedly the grievance above all others.”235 With time and
union pressure, some moderation was achieved; but, some suggest, things changed
again with the advent of the new breed packers. The UFCW’s Lewie Anderson,
starting work at an older Armour plant, found “a pace that you could handle” to “do
the work ... without killing yourself.” Moving to IBP, he found the line speed “more
than twice as fast” with supervisors “in there on top of the people ... screaming at
them and pushing them, literally pushing them, to go faster and faster.”236
“Worker productivity remains the key to profits — and survival — in a fiercely
competitive business,” states Broadway. “Worker productivity is a function of line
speed; speed it up, and productivity increases.”237 Bjerklie concurs: “... the search
for faster and better ways to slaughter and process meat and livestock is relentless,
and has resulted in line (or ‘chain’) speeds of unimaginable rapidity....”238 IBP’s
Peterson sew the issue a little differently. “You can’t ever overwork anybody on a
constant basis or they’re going to quit.”239
232 DLR, Mar. 1, 2000, p. A5.
233 See Heath v. Perdue Farms Inc., D. Md., No. WMN-98-3159, Feb. 24, 2000, summarized
in DLR, Mar. 1, 2000, pp. A5-A6.
234 See DLR, May 5, 2000, p. A8, Aug. 20, 2001, p. A2, May 11, 2002, pp. A1-A2, Mar. 25,
2002, p. A8, June 5, 2003, pp. AA1-AA2, E1-E4, Aug. 6, 2003, pp. AA1-AA-2, E1-E11, and
Sept. 10, 2003, AA1-AA2, E8-E13. Concerning yet another issue, the U.S. District court
for the Northern District of Iowa, Nov. 20, 2003 (Jimenez v. Duran, N.D. Iowa, No. 01-
3068-MWB), ruled that “[e]mployees of an Iowa contracting service that vaccinated and
tended to chickens are exempt from the overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards
Act.” See DLR, Oct. 28, 2003, pp. AA1-AA2, E1-E7. See also Stull and Broadway,
Slaughterhouse Blues, pp. 47 and 50-51.
235 Commons, Labor Conditions, p. 7.
236 Horowitz, Black and White, pp. 245-246.
237 Broadway, From City to Countryside, p. 22.
238 Bjerklie, On the Horns of a Dilemma, p. 43.
239 Kay, Bob Peterson, p. 36.

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The issue is complex. At IBP in the 1960s, UFCW’s Anderson reported
“constant turnover” as a response to line speed.240 If turnover is not regarded as
entirely negative by industry, it may be a mixed blessing. Some argue that “IBP
plants were accident-prone because of their accelerated line speeds and the constant
pressure on workers to meet arbitrary production quotas.”241 This leads, others
say,”to worker turnover” and stress-induced absenteeism.242 A revolving workforce
of sometimes “untrained, inexperienced, and often young workers” may lead, some
suggest, to still higher injury rates.243 Break time and rest periods are similarly
contentious issues.244
These questions remain unresolved. How humane can the workplace be made
without unduly impacting efficiency and profitability? Though immediately of
concern for OSHA purposes, the issues raised by line speeds, break time, and rest
periods are not directly addressed by the FLSA.
Possibilities for Change in Labor Practices
It may be, after careful consideration, that workers (with their unions) and
employers are satisfied with the current state of labor practices in the packing and
processing industry. And, it may not be necessary to review enforcement of labor,
safety and health standards, immigration law, or related issues.
The course chosen will rest, largely, with the parties at interest: labor,
management, and government. How strongly does industry want a union free
environment? Does it regard labor turnover, for reasons discussed above, to be a
positive (or tolerable) part of the post-1960s workplace? Can industry secure an
adequate workforce through domestic recruitment and employment of authorized
immigrant workers?
Control of the workplace rests essentially with management — even where
there is effective collective bargaining. However, even without a formal union
presence, workers can be expected to demand reforms. Where such reforms are not
forthcoming, workers may turn to the trade union movement for assistance and
redress. At the same time, it is possible that industry will undertake changes — if
only to prevent trade union initiatives and to stave off government action. If
voluntary change is not forthcoming, given the results of the 1997-1998 and 2000
240 Horowitz, Black and White, p. 246.
241 Craypo, Strike and Relocation, p. 193.
242 Griffith, Hay Trabajo, p. 136. See also Hackenberg, et al., Creating a Disposable Labor
Force, p. 85.
243 Craypo, Strike and Relocation, p. 193. See also Nowell, A Chicken in Every Pot, pp.
327-328 and 335.
244 See Stromquist, Solidarity & Survival, pp. 97-98; and Griffith, Consequences of
Immigration Reform, p. 161.

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DOL workplace surveys, there may well be further pressure for legislative or
regulatory action.245
Looking at the Workplace
Authors, in writing of labor practices in meatpacking and poultry processing,
have suggested a variety of workplace changes that could ease the strain on workers
while, they argue, improving general efficiency and reducing certain labor-related
costs. The utility of such proposals and the validity of projected impacts may need
further study. But, they may also be worth consideration.
Reducing the line speed — sometimes associated with cumulative trauma
disorders — has been suggested.246 “If they slowed down the lines and rotated
workers, we’d have fewer problems around here,” argues Bodo Treu, workers’
compensation physician for IBP at Storm Lake.247 “Redesign tools so they, rather
than the workers’ forceful motions, do the job” — “[a]utomate or restructure
especially hazardous jobs.”248
Some workers view employment in packing and processing as incompatible
with age. Five years is “about the longest period a person could last on the slaughter
line,” some suggest.249 If retention is desired, re-engineering of the work process
could be an option. So, too, might be a seniority system that moves workers up and
into work commensurate with their experience and strength. Some suggest that a
firm, through such changes, could capitalize on its recruitment and training
investment — while workers could look forward to a career in the industry.
Small changes may help reduce work-related injuries. Increase the number of
short breaks, some have argued. Stop the line for a brief period: allowing workers
time to stretch or to rotate to slightly different jobs — to do simple aerobics, or just
to get away from the stress of a constantly moving line.250 Assigning workers to a
variety of jobs (mornings at one task; afternoons, another) has been proposed as a
way to ease muscle strain — and relieve boredom. “But, most of all,” say Stull and
Broadway, “slow down the chain.”251
245 Market power and labor/industry/community relationships are discussed in Alan
Barkema, Mark Drabenstott and Nancy Novack, “The New U.S. Meat Industry,” Economic
Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (Second Quarter, 2001), pp. 33-56.
246 Hall, The Kill Line, p. 225.
247 Hedges et al., The New Jungle, p. 39.
248 Hall, The Kill Line, p. 225.
249 Kay, The Nature of Turnover, p. 31.
250 Grey, Pork, Poultry, and Newcomers, p. 116.
251 Stull and Broadway, Killing Them Softly, p. 81. See also Jane Kelly, “Perdue: New
Processing Plant Is Strictly for the Foodservice Market,” Meat & Poultry, Dec. 1992, p. 15,
for discussion of an exercise and job rotation regime at a Perdue facility in Dillon County,
South Carolina.

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“A key element of ... employee retention,” affirms Mark Klein of Excel, “is to
offer good wages and benefits.”252 Some restructuring of the fringe benefit package,
particularly with respect to vesting (e.g., healthcare coverage) might foster workforce
stability. Enhanced portability of health and pension benefits might also be an
option.253
“Hours,” Stull suggests, “vary seasonally and even weekly depending on the
price and supply of fat cattle, consumer demand, and profit margins.”254 Currently,
it’s asserted: “Six-day weeks and mandatory overtime alternate with sudden layoffs
as the packers adjust to fluctuations in meat supply and demand.”255 Might flexibility
be built into such a system? Some urge a more family-friendly workplace:
affordable daycare, flexible workhours (an option of worker choice), and fixed
schedules that can be adjusted to accommodate a worker’s family or other
responsibilities.
IBP’s Ken Kimbro suggests that a “primary reason people leave jobs is that they
don’t feel appreciated.”256 Low esteem for workers, some argue, is reflected in high
turnover rates — and in the manner in which line workers are viewed by the
communities within which they reside.257 Increased investment in human resource
management has been suggested as one potential remedy.258 This involves “treating
people with respect and dignity,” Hall argues. “It includes training, fostering upward
mobility, maintaining a complete medical program, and disciplining line supervisors
who violate company policy. The payoff,” he states, “includes lower-turnover,
improved morale, better production, and savings on health costs....”259
252 Kay, The Nature of Turnover, p. 34.
253 See Stull, Of Meat and (Wo)Men, p. 115. Stull estimates gross annual earnings for line
workers at between $15,000 and $22,000, depending upon the grade and seniority, may
actually prevail.
254 Stull, Of Meat and (Wo)Men, p. 115.
255 Horowitz, Negro and White, p. 282. See also Benson, The Effects of Packinghouse Work,
pp. 102-103, 111.
256 Quoted in Kay, The Nature of Turnover, p. 31-32.
257 Stull et al., Introduction: Making Meat, p. 4. Griffith, Consequences of Immigration
Reform, p. 156, states: “...workers in industries like poultry processing are often somewhat
marginal to the labor force, consisting of large proportions of unskilled workers, women,
minorities, students, prisoners, and others who occupy positions in the plants seasonally or
irregularly....” See also Hall, Chicken Empires, p. 15; and Campa, Immigrant Latinos,
pp. 345-360.
258 Richard Alaniz, “Avoiding Rehiring Costs by Retaining Good Employees,” Meat &
Poultry, May 1999, p. 80.
259 Hall, The Kill Line, pp. 228-229.

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Considerations of Public Policy
General policy and practices in meat packing and poultry processing have been
debated through many years. But, there may be a number of issues that could attract
attention from policy makers.
Fair Labor Standards Act. The issue of donning and doffing is rooted in the
overtime pay provisions of the FLSA; but, the facts of the issue remain in dispute.
How much time is actually spent putting on or taking off protective clothing and
equipment? Does it vary, significantly, from one segment of the industry to another
— and between employers? Enforcement and litigation depend largely upon the
facts in specific cases.
The courts have divided on some of the overall (and specific) issues involved
in donning and doffing. Can a solution to the current dispute be effected through
regulatory reform? Through the courts? Or, should Congress define, more clearly,
its intent with respect to portal-to-portal issues? Were Congress to modify the FLSA
with respect to donning and doffing standards, would the effect be felt elsewhere:
e.g., in mining, in nuclear power, or in laboratory work?260
Treatment of chicken catchers involves both the FLSA and NLRA. For labor
standards and collective bargaining purposes, how are chicken catchers defined? Are
they agricultural employees (exempt or afforded special treatment under the FLSA
and NLRA) or are they industrial workers and protected by those statutes? Are they
independent contractors? If chicken catchers are deemed to be employees (for labor
standards and collective bargaining purposes), might grow-out farmers be similarly
protected?
National Labor Relations Act. The labor-management relationship may be
another area of concern. How high is the turnover rate in the industry? To what
extent is the workforce simply migratory or casual? Such elements would likely
impact the ability of workers to organize and to bargain collectively. In the context
of a high turnover rate, what are the effective rights of short-term workers and how
are they protected?
How well have NLRA procedures functioned in the context of the meat packing
and poultry (seafood) processing industries?261 Employers could find themselves
confronted with a continuing cycle of organizational campaigns which, whatever
their outcome, could be disruptive and costly. Where a workforce may be largely
transient, do organizational campaigns reflect the interest (real or perceived) of the
260 DLR, Jan. 9, 2003, p. A8, reported that Honda Manufacturing of Alabama “will pay $1.2
million to workers at its Lincoln, Ala., plant, after a Department of Labor investigation
found that workers there were not paid for the time they spent putting on their uniforms at
work.” The general issue is still open, DLR reports.
261 In his study, The Maya of Morganton, p. 199, Fink states: “The federal government
needs to restore the ‘right to organize’ by strengthening penalties for infringement of the
labor law....” And, he says: “Current U.S. policy attracts foreign workers but stifles them
once they have arrived.”

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CRS-52
workers? Does the transnational movement of workers suggest a need to reconsider
aspects of the NLRA?
Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Workers’ Protection Act (MSPA).
The siting of industry in rural areas may have increased the necessity for recruitment
of workers from outside the areas of production. In some cases, such recruitment has
involved groups of workers, transported by bus or auto, and traveling long distances
for work. Reportedly, by the 1990s, it had become “standard industry practice to
import workers through border-state labor recruiters.”262 Given the high turnover
rates, are such workers, in fact, seasonal or migratory?
Immigration issues aside, are such workers covered under the MSPA?263 If not,
should they be? What is their relationship of these workers with the agent who
arranges their transportation, employment, and possible housing? If women (and
potentially children) are part of this movement of workers, are special problems
raised? Where they enter the country illegally, are they likely targets of extortion by
labor merchants and recruiters? Are they susceptible to other forms of violence?
Administration and Enforcement Policy. Ordinarily, DOL enforcement
of labor standards has been complaint based: that is to say, in response to a
complaint from an aggrieved worker. But, complaints may not be frequent where the
workforce, as in poultry processing and some aspects of meat packing, is frequently
immigrant (or composed of foreign workers unauthorized to work in the United
States) and where the workers may not be aware of their rights under law. At the
same time, DOL and immigration authorities have sometimes adopted strategies of
targeted enforcement of labor standards and immigration law: focusing upon a
specific industry and/or geographical location.
Such initiatives (targeted enforcement) may be a response to staff and resources
too limited for more uniform for more systematic policies. However, such a system,
essentially intermittent and sporadic, could produce enforcement that is perceived
to be unfair and/or unequal. Are strike forces and sting operations appropriate for
enforcement of labor standards?
Some have suggested a more cooperative policy between employers (and
unions) and enforcement staff. But, what is the proper balance between outreach (or
education) and enforcement, per se?264
262 Cook, Hog-Tied, p. 28. See also Fink, The Maya of Morganton, pp. 17-18; and Stephanie
Simon, “Latinos Take Root in Midwest,” The Los Angeles Times, Oct. 24, 2002, Part 1, p.
1 ff.
263 Signed into law in Jan. 1983, MSPA (P.L. 97-470; 20 U.S.C. 1801-1872) provides basic
labor protections for migrant and for seasonal agricultural workers and deals, inter alia, with
transportation safety and, where appropriate, the safety and health of housing. It also
provides a system of registration for persons engaged in agricultural labor contracting
activities.
264 In Slaughterhouse Blues, p. 153, Stull and Broadway review recent litigation involving
the meatpacking and poultry processing industry and state the opinion that “This litany of
(continued...)

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CRS-53
Concluding Comment
Change in the meatpacking and poultry processing industries impacts a wide
range of public policy areas. Labor practices have been, through a number of years,
a focus of Department of Labor attention. They have also been a subject of major
and continuing litigation, and of a variety of enforcement campaigns.
At issue are a number of federal statutes: most notably, the Fair Labor Standards
Act and the National Labor Relations Act, but of others as well. Workforce
recruitment has affected (and been affected by) federal immigration policy.
Implementation of existing statutes has been a continuing issue for administrative
agencies.
As the industry changes, one may expect to see changes in the labor-
management relationship. What their character will be may depend upon the
perception of current problems and challenges.
264 (...continued)
court cases and settlements suggest that for many companies, fines are just another cost of
doing business. When lawyers’ fees, court costs, and fines exceed the price of improving
working conditions, paying a fair wage, and preventing environmental damage, meat and
poultry companies may change their ways. Until then, it will be business as usual.”

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CRS-54
Appendix: Abbreviations
AFL = American Federation of Labor (1881-1955)
AFL-CIO = American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations
(1955 ff.)
AMCBW = Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen (1897-1979)
CIO = Committee for Industrial Organization (1935-1938)
CIO = Congress of Industrial Organizations (1938-1955)
EWIC= Essential Worker Immigration Coalition
FLSA = Fair Labor Standards Act (1938)
IBP = Iowa Beef Packers (later, Iowa Beef Processors and IBP)
IUAW = Independent Union of All Workers (1933-1936)
IWW = Industrial Workers of the World (1905 ff.)
NICWJ = National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice
NIRA = National Industrial Recovery Act (1933-1935)
NLRA = National Labor Relations Act (1935)
NLRB = National Labor Relations Board (1935 ff.)
PWOC = Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (1937-1943)
RCIU = Retail Clerks International Union (1890-1979)
UFCW = United Food and Commercial Workers (1979 ff.)
UPWA = United Packinghouse Workers of America (1943-1968)

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