Tied to the Great Packing Machine: The Midwest and Meatpacking

CHAPTER 6 With All Her Soul upon Her Work

MOST PEOPLE ASSUME meatpacking is a male-only industry.Yet in one of many moving passages from The Jungle, Upton Sinclair testifies to the fact that women have been employed in packing plants for the last one hundred years when he describes an anonymous sausage maker: “She stayed right there—hour after hour,day after day, year after year, twisting sausage-links and racing with death . . . she was apt to have a family to keep alive; and . . . she could only do this by working just as she did, with all her soul upon her work,and with never an instant for a glance at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her,as at some wild beast in a menagerie.”1 Since the turn of the twentieth century,women have steadily expanded their presence in packing plants. Although the physically demanding nature of packinghouse work contributed to men’s dominance in the industry, the traditional dividing line between men’s and women’s positions was skilled knife work in departments that produced the primary and fresh cuts of meat; men were allowed to practice such work, while women were not. Instead, through World War II, women worked in ancillary departments that produced processed meat products.2 When change came,it did so with considerable conflict between men and women and only for about a decade,for, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, much skilled knife work by both men and women was replaced by machines.Since the 1960s,women have been able to take on a wider variety of work in packing plants,but,due to the deskilling process and undercutting of union power,this work has become equally low paying for both men and women. Women’s Workplace Roles Until about 1890, men dominated virtually all positions in meatpacking plants. In that year, women filled just over 2 percent of the industry’s positions, with most CHAPTER 6 With All Her Soul upon Her Work Women and Packing Employment working in by-products and canning. This figure increased to just over 4 percent one decade later. In 1904, economist John R. Commons reported that in 1898 and 1899, women and girls started “taking the places of men in [the sausage] department ” and of “older men who were kept as sort of pensioners” in pork-trimming departments, apparently because girls were able to work faster. Despite the fact that pork trimming required knife work and relatively heavy lifting—women had to move forty-to fifty-pound buckets filled with meat trimmings—neither the meatpackers nor other men in the packing plants considered this type of knife work to be skilled. Further, because the women worked in an ancillary part of the plant, they were considered subordinate to men.Nevertheless,pork trimming during the early twentieth century became one of the highest-paid jobs open to women and generally was dominated by middle-aged East European women in Chicago’s plants. Work in sausage departments through the 1920s also required skills, including rapid linking of sausages. Older East European women generally held these positions, while men filled the sausage casings. Commons claimed that between 1900 and 1904, the proportion of women in Chicago’s meatpacking plants jumped from just over 5 percent to about 9 percent. In addition to work in the sausage and trimming departments, women painted and labeled cans, soldered and stuffed cans, sewed bags used for holding meat, and packed chipped beef and butterine. The majority of women and girls employed in meatpacking were paid by the piece.3 In 1911, Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge noted that women held 11 percent of Chicago’s slaughtering and meatpacking positions by 1905. This proportion was considerably higher than the 3.8 percent of women in meatpacking elsewhere in the United States. The authors pointed out that these employment figures were subject to seasonal variations and fluctuated considerably during the year. Focusing on one large Chicago packing plant, they reported that women held no jobs in the kill or cut rooms, which meant that men thoroughly dominated the bestpaid positions in the plant. Women, however, were employed in the pork-trimming department, where pay was better than average. Abbott and Breckinridge described the resistance of many in the “community” to women doing any sort of knife work, even this quite unskilled type, because it was thought to be unpleasant; only “European peasant type” women, typically of Slavic descent, took these jobs. Recently immigrated women...