Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century (review)

At the middle of the twentieth century, three large employers—RCA, Campbell Soup, and the New York Shipbuilding Company—dominated Camden's waterfront. By the time salvagers demolished Campbell Plant No. 1 in 1991 with a spectacular implosion, the city, too, was in shambles. Even by 1970, Camden had twenty-two thousand fewer manufacturing jobs than two decades earlier. New York Ship went out of business after launching its last vessel in 1967, while RCA had left town in a "quest for cheap labor" first to Bloomington, Indiana and eventually to Juárez, Mexico. The Campbell plant, on the other hand, continued to employ thousands of manufacturing workers through most of the postwar period. While keeping its main manufacturing facility in Camden, Campbell Soup zealously pursued low cost production through scientific management, automation and labor force segmentation—policies vigorously opposed by workers in union Local 80.

In Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century, Daniel Sidorick explores the evolution of this most iconic of American companies, as well as the men and women who picked the tomatoes, plucked the chickens, peeled the potatoes, and packaged the product in those ubiquitous red and white cans placed on millions of supermarket shelves around the world. Framed in a classic exposé style, Sidorick agues that Campbell's long-running and systematic efforts to control its workers combined with a decision to remain in Camden makes the soup maker "an excellent case for studying the other techniques available to corporations, and . . . the consequences of such strategies" (7). While uneven at times, the book is a powerful synthesis of business and labor history that effectively maintains its focus on the "contending forces [of] management's drive for low-cost production and employees' attempts to achieve some control over their working class lives and livelihoods" (2).

The opening chapters of Condensed Capitalism cover the period from the founding of the company shortly after the Civil War through the unionization of its workforce in the late 1930s. Campbell really assumed its corporate identity under the management of John T. Dorrance, a trained chemist who ran the company during the first three decades of the twentieth century. While also working to control supply chains and marketing, Dorrance focused his efforts most closely on scientifically managing the production process itself. In 1927, the company adopted the Bedaux system, a Taylorist model for organizing workers that Sidorick persuasively argues provided a pseudo-scientific veneer to what was "little more than a speedup scheme" (31).

While RCA responded to unionization and rising labor costs by moving production away from Camden to cheaper areas beginning in the early 1940s, Campbell adopted a policy of bringing low cost workers to the city. Campbell did build new factories to serve western markets, but it maintained the bulk of production at the original plant until postwar changes in technology allowed it to move away from the farms of southern New Jersey and their famous "Red Gold" tomatoes. World War II marked a watershed in the history of the company, as wartime labor shortages pushed Campbell to import workers from the rural South, Puerto Rico, and the British Caribbean. In Sidorick's telling, the fiercely conservative company had an ally in the federal government, which steered scarce tin to the company and helped provide workers from the during times of peak demand, thus further segmenting the workforce and expanding the labor pool "with entirely new groups who would accept what Campbell was willing to pay" (69).

The symbiotic relationship between Campbell and the federal government extended into the postwar period, as McCarthyism helped to first discredit and eventually destroy the left-leaning Food, Tobacco and Agricultural Workers union, with whom Campbell workers had been affiliated. Indeed, Tony Valentino, a founder of Camden's Local 80 became "the first unionist in the nation convicted...