The Armour Automation Fund Committee was established as part of a collective bargaining agreement following 1959 contract negotiations between Armour and Company and two unions which had organized its plants: the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America and the United Packinghouse, Food and Allied Workers of America. Its purpose was to study and make recommendations to minimize the displacement of Armour workers whose livelihoods were threatened as the meatpacking industry modernized and increasing numbers of plants closed.
The specific impetus for the tripartite committee (union, management, and neutral representatives) had been the announcement in the summer of 1959 that Armour would shortly close six major plants, resulting in the dislocation of 6000 workers. Though Armour had closed nine smaller plants during the 1950's, the new series of closings augured a much more serious era of displacement, softened only slightly by the construction of eight new Armour plants in 1963 and 1964. Because of technological changes, the new plants required only 900 workers, which meant that by 1965, after a fifteen-year period of plant closings, 14,000 jobs at Armour had been lost.
Financed by a fund set up by Armour, the committee consisted of four representatives from the company, two from each of the unions, and two neutral public members. Though the committee's composition varied some through the 1960's, Russell Dresser and James Wishart usually represented the Meat Cutters, while Ralph Helstein and Jesse Prosten served on the committee from the Packinghouse Workers. Armour representatives included Harold E. Brooks, Walter E. Clark, Clifton B. Cox, and lawyer Frederick R. Livingston. Labor economics or industrial relations experts served as public members of the committee. For the first two years, Robben W. Fleming, then law professor at the University of Illinois, was executive director, while Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, served as chairman. When Fleming left the committee in early 1962, the executive director position was dropped, and George P. Shultz, then a professor at the University of Chicago Business School, joined the committee as co-chairman. From 1964 to 1970, James L. Stern, director of the University of Wisconsin's Industrial Relations Research Institute, participated in the committee, directing most of its projects. The committee held its first official meeting on December 28, 1959, and continued meeting several times a year (often in Chicago, where Armour was headquartered), until 1970.
Initially, the committee undertook a general analysis of the meatpacking industry, contracting with outside experts to carry out surveys and studies. The 1960 shutdown, on one month's notice, of the Armour plant at Oklahoma City was the committee's first attempt to provide direct assistance to workers being laid-off. A crash program to retrain jobless workers met with minimal success, but did provide the committee with information and experience which could be used when later shutdowns occurred.
Recommendations of the committee occasionally influenced the outcome of negotiations between Armour and the unions. In the 1961 contracts, increased severance payments and more flexible early retirement options in case of plant shutdown, were included. In addition, the company agreed to a minimum of ninety days' advance notice of a plant closing, which was extended to six months in the 1967 labor agreement.
After the Oklahoma City experience, and with more advance notice of plant shutdowns, the committee gradually developed a more comprehensive manpower program to help workers facing lay-off. The committee often set up an office in or near the affected plant, coordinating the testing of job skills, assisting with the placement of workers within and outside the company, and occasionally operating educational programs (such as high school graduate equivalency courses) out of the committee's headquarters. AAFC offices provided services for several months at Fort Worth, Sioux City, Kansas City (Missouri), Peoria, and Omaha, staffed usually by an industrial relations professional as well as by local Armour employes who served as links between the committee and the plant's workers.
The positive effect of the committee's work varied from city to city, depending on several factors: the interest of community groups willing to provide services to displaced workers, the job market in the area at the time of the plant closing, and the degree to which good vocational training was available (in Fort Worth, a segregated public school system prevented black workers from getting quality training). Though with each plant closing, the committee became more effective in aiding Armour employes, the disruption to workers' lives and the economic loss many of them faced when having to take jobs outside the meatpacking industry were cited as continual problems by the committee's public members.
Despite conflicts between union and company representatives on the committee, its existence was renewed in every labor contract in the 1960's. The committee's activity diminished, however, when George P. Shultz departed to become Secretary of Labor in the Nixon administration in 1969, and its life virtually ended by 1971, following the purchase of Armour by the Greyhound Company.
For further information on the Armour Automation Fund Committee, see George P. Shultz and Arnold R. Weber, Strategies for the Displaced Worker: Confronting Economic Change, Harper & Row, New York, 1966. Related Society collections are the massive archives of both the Meat Cutters and the Packinghouse Workers.
