The United Packinghouse Workers of America Oral History Project, funded by an $84,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, supplements the State Historical Society of Wisconsin's holdings on labor organizations in the meat packing industry. Through interviews with former active union members, local officials, and international union staff, the project fills gaps of information in the UPWA records held by the Society. Moreover, because a major concern of the project was the union's involvement in civil rights and other social reform movements, it provides a link between the Society's labor holdings and its Social Action Collection.
The UPWA records, an unusually detailed collection running to over six hundred archive boxes, provide rich information on the institutional activities of the union. However, this archival base, primarily consisting of the files of the UPWA's international office, reveals little about local unions and their activities in various packing communities. The addition of extensive oral histories to this collection will help researchers to evaluate the impact of the UPWA on the lives of packinghouse workers and to assess the actual implementation of union policies and programs on the local level.
In the course of the eighteen-month project, interviewers Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz conducted interviews with 117 former members of the UPWA and 11 other individuals who had contact with the union. 85 of these interviewees were white, 42 were black, and one was a female Mexican-American. There were 67 men and 18 women among the whites, and 28 men and 14 women among the blacks.
The great majority of interviews are with single individuals, but there are a few multiple subject sessions. Many interviewees were located with the assistance of officials of local packinghouse unions now affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers, the successor union to the UPWA. The project also received essential help from former UPWA members, many still active in retiree organizations, who actively sought to locate their former union associates. In a few cases, project staff located potential interviewees in local telephone directories and contacted them directly.
In most cases, the interviews were conducted jointly by Halpern and Horowitz in a union office, a private home, or a hotel room. The interviewers prepared for the sessions by conducting background research on the individual's career, the activities of his/her union local, and the history of the particular locality. In the course of the project, the interviewers conducted research in the records of the UPWA, local newspapers, and other sources at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. In addition, project staff made research trips to examine the CIO records in Detroit and the NAACP and National Urban League papers in Washington, D.C.
Historical Background and Significance
After several years of restive rank-and-file organizing initiatives, the CIO founded the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee in 1937, which gained institutional autonomy as the United Packinghouse Workers of America in 1943. It succeeded in organizing the historically anti-union meat packing industry, and in overcoming the ethnic and racial divisions that had plagued the packinghouse workers and frustrated earlier attempts at unionization. The UPWA reached the peak of its strength in the 1950's, before being undermined by plant closings at the end of the decade. In 1968, the union, in decline, merged with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen, which in turn joined the Retail Clerks to form the United Food and Commercial Workers Union in 1979. The State Historical Society of Wisconsin is now the repository for the non-current records of the UFCW and its predecessor unions.
Study of the UPWA is particularly valuable because of the insights it offers into the CIO, the post-War labor movement, and the complex relationship between organized labor and the communities of which it is a part. Research on the CIO has focused largely on the auto and steel workers, and has tended to extend to industrial unionism as a whole conclusions and generalizations based on the experiences of these two unions.[1]
The UPWA constituted an alternative to the larger CIO unions. The Packinghouse Workers retained their commitment to social equality and industrial democracy, and resisted falling into the more narrow “business unionism” which characterized other unions in the post-World War II period. Most significantly, the union actively advanced the interests of its black members, supporting--and at times playing a direct role in--the movement for black civil rights in the 1950's. It also took an active interest in the problems of women and hispanic workers in the industry.
Moreover, unlike most other unions, the UPWA did not bureaucratize its governing and decision-making procedures. Despite countervailing pressure, the union retained its tradition of democratic unionism, placing a premium on rank-and-file participation. An impressive array of internal institutions sustained the democratic processes within the union: wage and policy conferences discussed and determined union policy in contract negotiations; biennial conventions served as true forums of discussion and exchange around issues confronting the union; district organizations (with subordinate city organizations in major packing centers) provided an apparatus through which the membership could influence union policy; anti-discrimination conferences evaluated and pursued activities against racial prejudice. At a time when other unions developed more formal and rigid lines of authority, the UPWA's internal institutions neither atrophied nor lost their democratic content but actually increased in strength and resilience. Such responsiveness to its membership's concerns solidified the identification of the rank-and-file with the union, preserving its vitality. Although a relatively small union whose membership averaged slightly under 120,000 at its peak, the experience of the Packinghouse Workers stands out because it represents an alternative to the path taken by most of the rest of the American labor movement.
Thematic Objectives
The history of the UPWA may be divided into four sequential periods: the organizing era, 1933-1941; the consolidation of the union, 1941-1948; organizing against discrimination, 1949-1958; and plant closings and decline, 1959-1968. There are several key themes which run through all four periods: active involvement of the rank-and-file in the union, conscious maintenance of internal union diversity in political and trade union matters, and an unwavering commitment to the interests and needs of black, Hispanic, and female workers. There are also significant geographical variations within each temporal period; depending upon locale, different themes and issues come to the fore. Indeed, even within a particular community, different local unions reacted quite differently to the international union leadership and its programs.
a. The Organizing Era, 1933-1941
A vehemently anti-union industry, meat packing firms were open shop citadels in the early years of the twentieth century. Union organizing efforts in 1904, 1907, and 1917-22 were crushed by the determined anti-union efforts of the packing companies and undermined by ethnic and racial divisions in the workforce. The major division was along racial lines, with most black workers remaining aloof from the unions. As a result, unionism made few gains prior to the labor unrest of the 1930's. Beginning in 1933, workers in several midwestern packing centers began to form independent unions. At about the same time, activists from a number of the large Chicago houses came together to launch the Packinghouse Workers Industrial Union. These fledgling groups struggled independently of one another to win limited concessions from the packers. In late 1937, the CIO moved to centralize the fragmented union movement in packing by forming the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee.
PWOC enjoyed an unprecedented degree of success. Its base in the plants, and subsequent cultivation of ties with institutions in the packing communities, helped the young union gain a foothold within the industry. PWOC's successful forging of an alliance with the black community proved critical in the large urban centers such as Chicago and Kansas City. There, the union's commitment to racial equality and its willingness to involve blacks at all levels of the union apparatus gained the lasting support of the previously ambivalent black workforce.
The written record is quite thin for this crucial period. Only a few boxes in the UPWA records at the State Historical Society cover the PWOC, and the material contained therein is spotty. A lengthy manuscript by Arthur Kampfert, a PWOC organizer, remains the only comprehensive work, but one that is marred by its partisan bias and lack of documentation.
The oral history interviews will help researchers piece together the pattern and spread of the organizing drive in meatpacking, which includes PWOC and its predecessors. The interviewers solicited insights into problems of organizing, PWOC's successes and failures, and how such factors as race, religion, culture, geography, political climate, and personnel influenced organizing efforts. In this manner, the interviews fill substantial gaps in the Historical Society's UPWA archival collection. The interviewers also collected information on the nature of PWOC-community relations, the origins of the Packinghouse Workers' unique brand of union democracy and rank-and-file participation, and the attitudes towards PWOC's aggressive racial stance in predominantly white communities.
b. Union Consolidation and Survival, 1941-1948
The union consolidated its base in the meat packing industry during World War II, signing national agreements with the four major packing companies. This was a difficult process because of the autonomous development of the union in different localities, tensions between local leaders who rose to the top of the union, and the determined opposition of the packers. Factional strife ran rampant between 1940 and 1943, and subsided only after the CIO gave PWOC an international charter and with it the right to elect its own leaders. The union's strength was tested by the wartime labor turnover, by a demographic transformation of the workforce, which included an increase in the number of women both in the plants in general and in previously male job categories, and by the wave of nonsanctioned job actions which swept meat packing and other industries in the last three years of the war. Restrained by the CIO's no-strike pledge and government regulation of labor relations, UPWA leaders struggled to hold the union together.
With the removal of government controls after the war, the UPWA won a major strike in 1946, conducted jointly with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters of the AFL. The election of a new leadership at the 1946 convention, most notably President Ralph Helstein, marked the consolidation of the disparate elements inside the UPWA into a coalition capable of maintaining an international union. The UPWA's new unity, however, was immediately tested by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the restrictions it imposed on union activity. A strike in 1948, this time without the support of the AFL, ended in disastrous defeat and helped precipitate the revival of severe internal factionalism. The UPWA, however, was able to recover much of its strength within one year after the end of the strike. It won two dozen consecutive NLRB representation elections, demonstrating its popularity among packinghouse workers, and was able to contain factional tensions fanned by the defeat without suppressing alternative and opposition viewpoints.
Interviews focusing on this period elicited membership reaction to two major events--the transformation of PWOC into the UPWA and the 1948 strike. They also addressed a common theme running throughout the period--the impact of growing government regulation of industrial relations upon. the UPWA's ability to organize and function. The involvement of the federal government in collective bargaining during the war and. the constraints placed upon union activity by the Taft-Hartley Act fundamentally altered the character of labor relations. The packers signed national agreements with the UPWA only under direct order from the War Labor Board, and federal labor agencies played an instrumental role in the resolution of subsequent contract disputes. By restricting certain forms of union activity such as the secondary boycott, the Taft-Hartley Act permanently extended the scope of government regulation. Indeed, Taft-Hartley played an important role in the collapse of the UPWA's 1948 strike. The interviews will help researchers determine the precise ways in which government regulation shaped union activity at the local level.
The involvement of the federal government also helped to transform relations between the union's leadership and the rank-and-file in this period. Restrictions upon the ability to strike created sharp tensions between the needs of workers to respond to shop floor disputes and the needs of union leaders to maintain a working relationship with government agencies. The interviewers sought to establish the causes and significance of workplace discontent, and to describe the different pressures affecting workers, their elected officials, and appointed union representatives. Of particular concern was the relationship between wartime tensions internal to the union and the ability of the UPWA to retain an active brand of union democracy based upon internal diversity.
The post-war years also brought a socio-cultural transformation marked by a growth in intolerance towards alternative points of view. This was reflected within packing communities and inside the UPWA, adding to the problems of the union. The UPWA responded by taking a unique middle ground within the labor movement, refusing to suppress dissident viewpoints but conforming to the requirements of post-war legislation such as the Taft-Hartley Act. The oral history interviews sought to identify the impact of this post-war atmosphere on relations inside the union.
c. Organizing Against Discrimination, 1949-1958
In the wake of the 1948 strike, the UPWA expanded its civil rights activities. In contrast to the CIO, which limited such activities to support for the initiatives of other organizations, the UPWA launched its own dynamic anti--discrimination program immediately after the strike's collapse. Starting with a national self-survey of racial attitudes and practices which was followed by a series of local self-surveys, the union successfully used renewed civil rights activity to retain the active interest of packinghouse workers.
The union's program consisted of: 1) ending racial barriers within the plants, including desegregation of plant facilities and elimination of all-white departments; 2) elimination of community racial barriers, especially desegregation of public facilities near the packing plants, as well as schools and housing in particular communities; and 3) eliminating de facto racial barriers within the union, with the UPWA mandating integration of all union-sponsored meetings and local union committees. The union met with a moderate degree of success in breaking down in-plant racial barriers; its activities in the communities were noticeably less successful, with the exception of the Chicago area.
At the core of the union's commitment to racial equality lay the organizational need for unity among black and white workers. However, vigorous activity against prejudice conflicted with racist attitudes among many white members. This tension culminated in an open revolt in 1953-1954 which again revived old factional divisions and resulted in the loss of hundreds of members until it was contained by the international. To a large degree, internal resistance subsided after 1954 as some whites were won over and others chose to leave. The oral histories examined white union members' attitudes towards the UPWA's activism in this sphere and sought to uncover the extent to which deeply embedded racist attitudes and practices yielded to the union's efforts.
The interviews also will permit researchers to evaluate the impact of the UPWA's efforts on the lives of black workers. They reveal the degree to which the union successfully functioned as an agent of progressive social change in both the plants and the packing communities. In a number of cities, especially Fort Worth and Kansas City, the UPWA developed strong ties with black civil rights organizations. Particularly striking in this regard is the role that many packinghouse workers went on to play in local civil rights struggles. The existing archival material is almost silent on this important connection. However, the interviews gathered information which closely elucidates the link between the UPWA's anti-discrimination activity and the emerging civil rights movement.
The interviewers also attempted to fill important gaps in the institutional record for this period. These holes include records of international executive board meetings after 1952, the breakdown of merger talks in 1956 with the AMC, and internal factional tensions among the international's leaders.
d. Plant Closings and Decline, 1959-1968
In 1959 the UPWA had two long and bitter, but, in contrast to 1948, ultimately successful strikes against Swift and Wilson. Yet, despite this collective bargaining success, factors over which the union had little control were conspiring to undermine the union's position in the industry and within the American labor movement.
During the 1950's, the structure of the meat packing industry was transformed. Due in large part to the rise of an integrated highway transportation system and the development of the refrigerated truck, slaughtering and packing operations shifted away from the urban rail centers and relocated closer to the point of livestock production. Simultaneously, the industry became more competitive. The growth of independent packers in the Midwest and South undermined the dominant position of the Big Four Packers--Armour, Wilson, Swift, and Cudahy. These giants embarked upon a comprehensive program of modernization and technological improvement, closing down their older, low-profit facilities and replacing them with a decentralized network of new, highly mechanized plants. Obsolete packing houses in Chicago, Omaha, Sioux City, Kansas City, Fort Worth, and Oklahoma City were closed and operations in the East phased out.
The closings decimated the UPWA. Between 1956 and 1964, over 38,000 packinghouse workers lost their jobs as employment in the industry dropped 22.3 percent while productivity skyrocketed. The UPWA was forced to grapple with the problems of deindustrialization twenty years before it became a widespread phenomenon, and it did so in an innovative manner. The archival material in the State Historical Society provides rich documentation of the UPWA's response to the crisis at the leadership level, particularly the activities of the Armour Automation Committee. A tripartite body composed of labor, corporate, and public representatives, the Committee was established in 1959 to provide a forum in which labor and capital could work together to anticipate problems caused by technological innovation and work cooperatively toward solutions.
What the written record does not provide is information on the UPWA's response to closings at the local level, especially the interaction between municipal authorities, the union, and the corporations. The interviews partially fill this gap, as well as illuminate the union's overall relationship with various packing communities, particularly the experience following the closings. Many interviews cover problems of union organizing in the new plants and in non-meat food industries, the ways in which changes in the labor process altered the character of work relations, and the degree to which Automation Committee-sponsored vocational retraining programs succeeded. Key respondents include leaders and members of UPWA locals in the affected communities as well as workers who elected to transfer to other plants as part of a pioneering program worked out by the Automation Committee. Further, the interviews explore the attitudes of UPWA members towards the 1968 merger with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and the continued decline of unionism in the industry since that date.
