Title: Automation Fund Committee Records
Inclusive Dates: 1959-1970

Creator:

• Automation Fund Committee

Call Number: Mss 83; Tape 946A; AC 345

Quantity: 4.0 c.f. (10 archives boxes), 2 tape recordings, and 1 film

Repository:

Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections

Archival Locations:

COLLECTION MAY BE STORED OFF-SITE: see catalog entry to request materials and for additional information.

Wisconsin Historical Society (Map)

Abstract:

Records of a committee composed of company, union, and neutral representatives which sought remedies to the displacement of workers when Armour and Company modernized its meatpacking operations and closed plants in the 1950's and 1960's. Financed by Armour, the committee commissioned studies and surveys; made recommendations to minimize displacement, some of which were incorporated into labor contracts between Armour and the Meat Cutters and Packinghouse Workers union; and provided direct assistance to workers in several cities where Armour plants closed. The collection consists chiefly of correspondence, memoranda, minutes, clippings, reports, questionnaires, and statistics. Administrative records, reports from committee studies and projects, and a subject file on labor issues comprise about half the collection. The remaining papers are files on plant closings where the committee actively assisted workers being laid off. Of these, committee projects at Kansas City and Omaha are particularly well documented.

Language: English

URL to cite for this finding aid: http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/wiarchives.uw-whs-mss00083

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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.

The collection consists of committee memoranda, minutes, correspondence. clippings, reports, questionnaires, and statistics. The administrative records are not complete but do provide an overview of the committee's work, based primarily on files from Robben Fleming for the first two years and from co-chairman George Shultz for the period 1962-1968. Files donated by committee participant James L. Stern contain some administrative papers from the late 1960's, but are primarily his files from projects at Kansas City and Omaha.

ADMINISTRATION records, 1959-1970, consist of clippings, correspondence, memoranda, incomplete minutes, scattered financial records, and a few handwritten notes by George P. Shultz. The public members' efforts to find areas of agreement between the unions and Armour and their strategies for making the committee productive can best be seen in the correspondence. Shultz's memoranda to committee members between meetings often provide summaries of on-going committee work in various cities.

The REPORT series, organized alphabetically by author, consists for the most part of the published and unpublished studies commissioned by the committee. Early reports provide information on economic trends in the meatpacking industry and the status of workers already laid off by Armour, while later reports summarize the committee's response to a particular plant closing. The final report of a committee project can usually be found in the REPORT series, while interim reports are filed in PLANT CLOSINGS under the appropriate city heading. The committee's progress report, 1961, and James L. Stern's, “Improved Manpower Planning in Armour Plant Closings from Oklahoma City in 1960 to Omaha in 1968,” are good sources for comparing the committee's approach to labor displacement problems at the outset of its work and after several years' experience with plant shutdowns.

The SUBJECT FILE, 1941-1967, is based on Shultz's general reference file, and includes annual reports and other documents generated by Armour and Company, as well as memoranda, tables, and articles on other topics of interest to the committee, such as educational programs and retirement plans for workers. The Wilcock-Franke Worker Survey Project file, 1960-1961, contains correspondence and questionnaires that were the basis for their profile of Armour workers laid off at plants closed in 1959 and 1960, before committee assistance was available. Of special note is the file on a new Armour plant at Worthington, Minnesota where a fairly successful program was undertaken to absorb sixty black workers and their families into a small white community, following the shutdown of the Kansas City plant where they had been employed.

The largest series in the collection, PLANT CLOSINGS, 1960-1969, consists of clippings, correspondence, reports, statistics, and other materials documenting the committee's projects in several cities, beginning with the shutdown of the Oklahoma City plant, July, 1960. Correspondence and reports by Edwin Young, then chairman of the University of Wisconsin economics department, comprise much of the Oklahoma City file, as he was hired by the committee to spend a month assisting displaced Armour employes there. Included in the Fort Worth file is a transcript of a press conference given by George P. Shultz, November 7, 1963, where he responds to questions about the committee's aid to Armour workers in that city. A tape recording of the conference is also part of the collection.

The Kansas City and Omaha project files reflect the comprehensive approach the committee was able to take in the later closings. Through the notices to workers in the Kansas City file and especially the newsletter of the UPWA local at Omaha (The Bugle), one can trace the chronology of a shutdown and the options presented to the workers. The committee's efforts to establish educational programs for Armour employes and its work with local, state, and federal employment programs is well documented in each file. There are some statistics for both cities on the age, race, sex, educational background, and seniority of workers facing lay-off as well as statistics on the number of employes receiving assistance from the committee. The Omaha papers also contain minutes of the Armour Coordinating Team, a group of local, business, labor, and governmental representatives who constituted the city's official vehicle for providing assistance to workers.

Acquisition Information

Presented by Robben W. Fleming, Ann Arbor, Michigan; George P. Shultz, Chicago, Illinois; and James L. Stern, Madison, Wisconsin, 1967-1975. Accession Number: M67-261, M67-262, M68-226, M71-261, M75-198

Processing Information

Processed by Sarah Cooper and Joanne Hohler, January 1982.

Mss 83	Series: Administration
Box   1 Folder   1	Clippings, 1962-1969
Box   1 Folder   2-10	Correspondence, 1960-1970
Box   1 Folder   11	Financial Statements, 1962-1966
	Memoranda,
Box   1 Folder   12-15	1959-1964
Box   2 Folder   1	1965-1968, n.d.
Box   2 Folder   2-3	Minutes, 1959-1964, n.d.
Box   2 Folder   4	Notes: George P. Shultz, 1963-1967, n.d.
	Series: Reports	⇧
Box   2 Folder   5-7	Armour Automation Committee, “Progress Report,” (Drafts), 1961
Box   2 Folder   8	Bradburn, Norman M., “Inter-Plant Transfer: The Sioux City Experience,” 1964
Box   2 Folder   9	Conant, Eaton, “Report and Appraisal: The Armour Fund's Sioux City Project,” 1965
Box   2 Folder   10	Derber, Milton, “Economic Trends in the Meat Packing Industry,” 1960
Box   2 Folder   11	Eisner, Michael, “Effects of the Cleveland Closing,” 1965
Box   2 Folder   12	Fleming, R.W., “Collective Bargaining Approaches to Job Security,” 1961
Box   2 Folder   13	Gorman, Patrick E., “Statement Before the Subcommittee on Unemployment and Automation,” 1961
Box   2 Folder   14	Livingston, Frederick R., “An Approach to Automation,” n.d.
Box   2 Folder   15	Livingston, Frederick R., “Automation and Collective Bargaining,” 1963
Box   2 Folder   16	Root, Kenneth A. and Zipay, John P., “Unemployment in Omaha in Relation to the Armour Closing,” 1968
Box   2 Folder   17	Shultz, George P., “Statement Before Select Subcommittee on Labor,” 1964
Box   2 Folder   18	Shultz, George P., “Statement Before Subcommittee on Employment and Manpower,” 1964
Box   3 Folder   1	Stern, James L., “Adjustment to Plant Closing: Retraining, Relocation, and Re-employment Experience of Workers Displaced in the Shutdown of the Armour Plant in Kansas City,” 1966
Box   3 Folder   2	Stern, James L., “Evolution of Private Manpower Planning in Armour's Plant Closings,” 1969
Box   3 Folder   3	Stern, James L., “Improved Manpower Planning in Armour Plant Closings from Oklahoma City in 1960 to Omaha in 1968,” 1969
Box   3 Folder   4	Stern, James L., “Post-Shutdown Earning Patterns of Workers Involved in a Plant Closure,” 1968
Box   3 Folder   5	Ullman, Joseph C., “Aiding Workers Displaced by Plant Closings,” 1968
Box   3 Folder   6	Weber, Arnold R., “Advance Notice of Plant Shutdown,” 1961
Box   3 Folder   7	Weber, Arnold R., “The Inter-plant Transfer of Displaced Employees,” 1961
Box   3 Folder   8	Weber, Arnold R. and Shultz, George P., “Placement and Retraining Experience with Workers Displaced by Shutdown of the main Armour Plant in Fort Worth, Texas,” 1963
Box   3 Folder   9	Wilcock, Richard C. and Franke, Walter H., “Oklahoma City Survey of Former Armour Workers,” 1961
Box   3 Folder   10	Wilcock, Richard C. and Franke, Walter H., “Resurvey of Former Armour and ABC Workers,” 1962
Box   3 Folder   11	Wilcock, Richard C. and Franke, Walter H., “Surveys of Former Armour Workers in Four Cities, 1960-1961,” 1961
Box   3 Folder   12	Young, Edwin, “The Armour Experience: A Case Study in Plant Shutdown,” 1961
	Series: Subject File	⇧
	Armour and Company
Box   3 Folder   13	Agreements, 1955, 1964, 1967
Box   3 Folder   14	Arlington Distribution Center, 1962
Box   3 Folder   15	“Armour Foods Views the Future,” 1960
Box   3 Folder   16	Benefit Program, 1964
Box   3 Folder   17-18	Employe Characteristics, 1964-1965
Box   3 Folder   19	Reports, 1959, 1960, 1965, 1967
Box   3 Folder   20	Wage Chronology, 1941-1960
Box   4 Folder   1	Attrition, 1961
Box   4 Folder   2	Education for Employed Workers, 1965
Box   4 Folder   3	Education Improvement Plan, 1964-1965
Box   4 Folder   4	Manpower Policy, 1964
Box   4 Folder   5	Miscellaneous Reports (including photographs), 1960-1965
Box   4 Folder   6	Private Adjustment to Technological Change Conference, 1964
Box   4 Folder   7	Retraining, 1964
Box   4 Folder   8	Retirement, 1964
Box   4 Folder   9	Statistics: Plants Closed, 1956-1967
Box   4 Folder   10-11	Transfer Procedures, 1954-1965
Box   4 Folder   12	Tuition Plan, 1965
Box   4 Folder   13	United Packinghouse Workers of America, 1959-1963
Box   4 Folder   14-15	Wilcock-Franke Worker Survey Project, 1960-1961
	Worthington, Minnesota Plant
Box   4 Folder   16	Clippings, 1963-1967
Box   4 Folder   17	Correspondence, 1964-1966, n.d.
Box   5 Folder   1-2	Housing Questionnaires, 1964
Box   5 Folder   3	Transfer and Hiring Statistics, 1964-1966, n.d.
	Series: Plant Closings	⇧
	Cleveland
Box   5 Folder   4	Correspondence, 1965
Box   5 Folder   5-6	Employe Questionnaires, 1965
Box   5 Folder   7	Eau Claire, 1964
	Fort Worth
Box   5 Folder   8	Clippings, 1962-1963
Box   5 Folder   9	Correspondence, 1961-1966
Box   5 Folder   10	Memoranda, 1962
Box   5 Folder   11	Press Conference, 1963 November 7
Tape 946A	Recording of Press Conference
Mss 83 Box   5 Folder   12	Reports, 1962-1963
	Kansas City
Box   6 Folder   1-5	Correspondence, 1964-1967, n.d.
	Educational Programs
	GED (General Equivalency Diploma)
Box   6 Folder   6	Correspondence, 1965 July-1966 August
Box   6 Folder   7-8	Reports, 1965-1966, n.d.
Box   6 Folder   9	MDTA (Manpower Development Training Act) Records, 1964-1966
Box   6 Folder   10	Power Machine Training, 1965
Box   6 Folder   11	Employment Announcements, 1964-1965
Box   6 Folder   12	Notice to Workers, 1964-1965, n.d.
Box   7 Folder   1-2	Reports, 1964-1966
	Statistics
Box   7 Folder   3	Committee Assistance to Former Workers, 1965 July-1966 March
Box   7 Folder   4-5	Kansas City Employment Office Assistance, 1964 August-1966 August
Box   7 Folder   6	Selected Characteristics of Laid-Off Employes, 1964-1965
Box   7 Folder   7-10	Miscellaneous
Box   7 Folder   11	North Platte, 1967
	Oklahoma City
Box   7 Folder   12-13	Correspondence, 1960-1962
Box   7 Folder   14	Employe Statistics, 1960
Box   7 Folder   15	Reports, 1960, 1962
	Omaha
Box   8 Folder   1	Armour Coordinating Team Minutes, 1967-1969
Box   8 Folder   2	The Bugle, newsletter of Local #8, UPWA, 1967-1969
Box   8 Folder   3	Clippings, 1962, 1967-1970
Box   8 Folder   4	Cooperative Area Manpower Planning System (CAMPS) Reports, 1968-1969
	Correspondence
Box   8 Folder   5-12	1967 September-1969 March
Box   9 Folder   1-2	1969 April-September
	Educational Programs
Box   9 Folder   3	Council of Omaha Private Schools, 1968
Box   9 Folder   4	Job Center Day, 1968
AC 345	Job Center Interview, 1968
Mss 83 Box   9 Folder   5	Omaha Public Schools, 1965-1969
Box   9 Folder   6	Questionnaires, 1969
Box   9 Folder   7	Reports, 1967-1969
Box   9 Folder   8	Training Requests, 1968
Box   9 Folder   9	Labor Area News, 1968-1969
Box   9 Folder   10	Nebraska Employment Service Reports, 1968
Box   9 Folder   11	Questionnaires, 1968
Box   9 Folder   12	Reports, 1962-1969
	Statistics: Displaced Workers
Box   9 Folder   13	Demographic Characteristics, 1968-1969
Box   10 Folder   1	Employment Status, 1968
	Peoria
Box   10 Folder   2	Correspondence, 1966-1968
Box   10 Folder   3	Reports, 1967
Box   10 Folder   4	Pittsburgh, 1964-1968
	Sioux City
Box   10 Folder   5	Arbitration, 1967-1968
Box   10 Folder   6	Clippings, 1963-1965
Box   10 Folder   7-8	Correspondence, 1963-1968
Box   10 Folder   9	Notices to Employes, 1963-1964, 1969
Box   10 Folder   10	Questionnaires, n.d.
Box   10 Folder   11	Relocation, 1964-1965
Box   10 Folder   12-14	Reports, 1962-1965, n.d.
Box   10 Folder   15	Transfers, 1963-1964