Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922

James R. Barrett

University of Illinois Press, 1990 - Business & Economics - 290 pages

Chicago's packinghouse workers were not the hopeless creatures depicted by Upton Sinclair in "The Jungle", but active agents in the early twentieth century transformation that swept urban industrial America. In his case study of Chicago's Union Stockyards, Barrett focuses on the workers - older skilled immigrants, new immigrant common laborers, migrant blacks, and young women workers - and the surrounding neighborhoods. The lives and communities of these workers accurately convey the experience of mass-production work, the quality of working-class life, the process of class formation and fragmentation, and the changing character of class relations. Because Packingtown's struggle for existence was linked directly to the character of work and employment in the industry, unionization played an important role in the lives of these workers. Although unionization was associated with both improving the quality of life and creating a viable community, workers were divided by race, ethnic identity, and skill. "Work and Community in the Jungle" discusses a wide range of social, economic, and cultural factors that resulted in class cohesion and fragmentation. Addressing the broader problem of relations between capital and labor, Barrett demonstrates the effects of government intervention on labor organization, negotiation, and conflict. Shop-floor workers banded together to develop new strategies and forms of organization in their struggle with management for control. Barrett employs contemporary social surveys and a computer-assisted analysis of census data to illustrate the physical and social characteristics of the workers' environment. He analyzes this data in the context of the relationships between community, ethnicity, family, work experience, and industrial characteristics.

Contents

• The Meatpacking Industry Monopoly Capital and Mass Production: 13
• The Packinghouse Workers: 36
• The Families and Communities of Packingtown 18941922: 64
• Unionization and Americanization 19001904: 118
• Work Rationalization and the Struggle for Control 19001904: 154
• Class Race and Ethnicity 191721: 188
• The Packers Offensive 192122: 240
• Conclusion: 269
• Appendix A: 281
• Appendix B: 283
• Index: 285

Popular passages

Page 114 - Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Mary P.‎

Page 36 - Durham had squeezed them tighter and tighter, speeding them up and grinding them to pieces, and sending for new ones. The Poles, who had come by tens of thousands, had been driven to the wall by the Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians were giving way to the Slovaks. Who there was poorer and more miserable than the Slovaks, Grandmother Majauszkiene had no idea, but the packers would find them, never fear.‎

Page 56 - ... as far as the eye can reach there stretches a sea of pens. And they were all filled — so many cattle no one had ever dreamed existed in the world. Red cattle, black, white, and yellow cattle; old cattle and young cattle; great bellowing bulls and little calves not an hour born; meek-eyed milch cows and fierce, long-horned Texas steers. The sound of them here was as of all the barnyards of the universe...‎

Page 60 - William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (New York: Alfred A.‎

Page 23 - It was a long, narrow room, with a gallery along it for visitors. At the head there was a great iron wheel, about twenty feet in circumference, with rings here and there along its edge. Upon both sides of this wheel there was a narrow space, into which came the...‎

Page 13 - This inspector wore an imposing silver badge, and he gave an atmosphere of authority to the scene, and, as it were, put the stamp of official approval upon the things which were done in Durham's. Jurgis went down the line with the rest of the visitors, staring openmouthed, lost in wonder. He had dressed hogs himself in the forest of Lithuania; but he had never expected to live to see one hog dressed by several hundred men.‎

Page 57 - The uproar was appalling, perilous to the eardrums; one feared there was too much sound for the room to hold — that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack. There were high squeals and low squeals, grunts, and wails of agony...‎

Page 24 - ... they also slid through a hole in the floor. There were men to scrape each side and men to scrape the back; there were men to clean the carcass inside, to trim it and wash it. Looking down this room, one saw, creeping slowly, a line of dangling hogs a...‎

Page 263 - Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974); Katherine Stone, "The Origins of Job Structures in the Steel Industry...‎

About the author

James R. Barrett is a member of the history department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A co-author of Steve Nelson, American Radical, he is also the editor of an annotated edition of Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922; Volume 311 of Working class in American history
• Author: James R. Barrett
• Edition: illustrated, reprint, annotated
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1990
• ISBN: 0252061365, 9780252061363
• Length: 290 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Labor