"We Had an Awful Time with Our Women": Iowa's United Packinghouse Workers of America, 1945-75

"We Had an Awful Time with Our Women": Iowa's United Packinghouse Workers of America, 1945-75 Dennis A. Deslippe //T'll tell you the biggest trouble about the women," retired United A Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) officer Virgil Bankson said in a 1978 interview, "was after the Civil Rights Law was signed. Thaf s when we had trouble with women."1 Bankson's observation was accurate. His Ottumwa, Iowa, union local was one of hundreds across the country charged with violating Title VTi of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The law, banning sex cascrimination in the workforce, challenged employment arrangements by which women were discriminated against in wages, layoffs, and seniority. Women's response to the law's passage was dramatic and unexpected: by August 1967,2,500 sex discrimination complaints had been filed by women workers against unions and employers.2 Whüe all unions were affected by Title VII, its impact on each varied widely. Some industrial unions, among them the UPWA, the United Rubber Workers, and the International Chemical Workers, were embroiled in lawsuits; others, such as the United Automobile Workers (UAW), not only faced fewer charges but actually joined with women unionists to fight for vigorous Title VfI enforcement.3 Such differences suggest that Ruth Milkman's call for scholars to examine the historically specific economic, political, and social factors that molded the industrial workforce structure ought to be heeded. "The interests of male workers," she notes, "rather than being determined outside the workplace by a hegemonic patriarchy can work for or against women workers depending upon the characteristics of the industrial setting."4 Ascribing women's subordinate status to patriarchy, Milkman claims, offers too fixed and static a picture of a male-dominated labor movement that dealt with women's issues unevenly. Instead, historians of the working class have begun examining the fluid and varied ways women and men relate to each other through the lens of gender, which is integrated into scholarship as an analytic tool. They have found, for example, that sometimes men supported gender equality while working women, on other occasions, demonstrated class loyalty to the exclusion of advancing women's gender equality or forming alliances with non-working-class feminists.5 The key to examining this © 1993 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 5 No. ι (Spring)_____________ 1993 Dennis A. Deslippe U subject, Ava Baron reminds us, lies in "thinkfing] of gender not only as a noun but also as a verb."6 Close examination of the UPWA in Iowa from Title VII's passage through the mid-1970s, when most obvious forms of sex oliscrimination had been eliminated, reveals the complex nature of the issue. Most sex cosoirnination charges against the UPWA came from the large Iowa locals that made up the core of the union's membership. The UPWA's history and organizational structure explain in large part the establishment and maintenance of gender inequality within its ranks. Strong, militant locals experienced divisiveness between rank-and-file men and women after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. This contrasted sharply, for instance, with the UAW where the Women's Bureau joined forces with a powerful international office against discrimination.7 In addition to the legacy of local autonomy in the UPWA, economic woes and managerial offensives against the union in the meatpacking industry made jobs scarce, pitting men and women workers against each other. The international leadership's continued belief in the necessity of protective labor laws for women also helped create a high level of hostility on the part of men to implementing Title VII fully. While not offering a mechanistic model-building or an ahistorical explanation for such a phenomenon, this essay suggests research questions scholars should be asking in helping to create a composite picture of the post-1945 gendered labor movement. As such, the history of UPWA women's encounter with Title VII during the law's first decade illustrates the way women "consumed" the law as well as the uneven process of change. Even in the midst of active federal government pressure on unions to end discrimination after 1964, sex-segregated packinghouses remained. Employers and union leaders in Iowa packinghouse...