Tied to the Great Packing Machine: The Midwest and Meatpacking

CHAPTER 5 Benefits of a More Substantial Nature

IN TWO BRIEF PASSAGES from The Jungle,Upton Sinclair points out packinghouse workers’ deep concerns about workplace rights and the quality of their community life. The first focuses on workers’ efforts to gain a degree of workplace control: “Little by little he gathered that the main thing the men wanted was to put a stop to the habit of ‘speeding up’; they were trying their best to force a lessening of the pace,for there were some, they said, who could not keep up with it, whom it was killing.”1 The second emphasizes workers’ goal of homeownership: “They had bought their home. It was hard for them to realize that the wonderful house was theirs to move into whenever they chose.”2 Yet as Sinclair shows throughout the novel, workers’ efforts to gain these benefits were stymied not only by their employers but also by their own internal divisions and conflicts (see chapter 4). During the twentieth century ,midwestern meatpacking communities evolved from generally bad to fairly good conditions to fairly bad ones again with respect to both workplace rights and quality of community life for the majority of production workers and their families. During the terminal-market and early direct-buying periods,improvements in workplace and community standards can be linked to workers’ success in building powerful labor unions, but unionism has been less proactive during the modern direct-buying era.3 Changes in workplace rights and in the quality of workers’ lives also reflect distinctive developments in the three main patterns of meatpacking communities that evolved over the twentieth century: terminal market,early direct buying,and modern direct buying. We have already seen the unique economic structures and workforce compositions of these patterns, whose contours also shaped the quality of workers’ lives.This chapter highlights historical developments associated with how the quality of workers’ labor and community life changed in each of the three main patterns in terms of workplace rights and protections, housing, health, and sense of power. CHAPTER 5 Benefits of a More Substantial Nature Workplace Rights and Quality of Community Life The Jungle and Other Terminal-Market Communities Particularly for understanding changes over time in packing workers’ lives inside and outside the slaughterhouses in the early twentieth century, Chicago’s Packingtown , which included the stockyards as well as the neighborhoods of Bridgeport and the Back of the Yards, is the benchmark. Between 1900 and 1920, Packingtown, better known to its residents as Lake or New City, was probably the greatest industrial complex in the world. In 1910, as historian Robert Slayton describes, the stockyards ’ district “covered 500 acres, had 13,000 pens, 300 miles of railroad tracks, 25 miles of streets, 50 miles of sewers, 90 miles of pipes, and 10,000 hydrants.” In 1920, the official population of Packingtown was nearly 76,000 in an area just over six square miles, and about 45,000 of its residents were employed in the packing industry, Chicago’s largest source of employment. About 43 percent of the neighborhood ’s inhabitants in that year were foreign-born, more than two-thirds Poles, Slovaks, Bohemians, Russians, or Lithuanians and nearly all Roman Catholic. Most were not paid well. Indeed, the only way most families could survive was if most if not all members, including women and children, found employment. This did not change even when real wages increased in the World War I era, partly due to union-organizing success.Packingtown was highly polluted and disease ridden,with arguably the highest rate of tuberculosis in the country before World War I, as well as a very high infant mortality rate. Workers succumbed to injuries at a frightening rate in the packing plants—in 1917 Armour officials reported that half the company’s workers were either injured or became ill.4 Housing in Chicago’s Packingtown before 1920 was both congested and poor in quality. Historian James Barrett notes that most of the neighborhood’s houses, built before 1902 housing reforms,were firetraps.Only Chicago’s southside steel area had a higher percentage of frame houses. The typical tenement “was a dilapidated twostory wooden structure divided into four or more flats.” Boarding was quite common , with the average household including between six and seven people. About one-third of Packingtown’s residents in 1909 were boarders.5 Yet despite its residents’ poverty and low living standards, Packingtown was a vibrant neighborhood in many respects. Most notable was the high rate of homeownership . The East...