Content area
Full Text
The history of the meatpacking industry and the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) raises questions about class, industrial relations, race, gender, and ethnicity in the United States. This industry's history, which entwines traditional institutional questions with those of workers' agency, suggests how changing work processes influenced workers' political development and encouraged unified action among previously divided groups. Its story also embraces the surrounding neighbourhoods where community figures played an increasingly important role in determining the success of union drives. Halpern's study and Stromquist and Bergman's collection are two of the best examples from a growing number of monographs, dissertations, and articles on the meatpacking industry that capture the human experience of industrial relations in 20th-century America. By integrating rich oral histories with archival research, and by offering a variety of thought-provoking perspectives on the meatpacking industry and the nature of its union, Halpern and the scholars who contributed to Stromquist and Bergman's edited collection revisit familiar questions with fresh material gleaned from local struggles.
Rick Halpern extends his organizational history into the community where political movements sparked early union activism, arguing that the history of Chicago's UPWA was shaped by shop-floor militancy and rank-and-file struggle rather than top-down bureaucratic methods. Organizing his study chronologically, he begins before the union's 1943 birth and uses each chapter to show that shop-floor struggles determined the tenor of the stockyards' labour relations. In the context of World War I's labour shortages and spontaneous labour stoppages in the yards, a small group of labour activists began a unionization drive with the support of the Chicago Federation of Labor. The Stockyards Labor Council (SLC), which led this drive, gave activists an opportunity to challenge the racial and ethnic divisions that divided the yards workers by interlocking various craft unions into one organization and reaching out to African Americans who were new to the industry. Although the SLC achieved small concessions through wartime arbitration, it failed to carry these successes into the postwar period. Beset with racial tensions that climaxed with the widespread race riots of 1919, the SLC was unable to weather the 1921 recession and a strike loss at the beginning of the next year. Caught between company pressures and the battles between the SLC and the AFL union...