Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922Chicago'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 |
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Common terms and phrases
Amalgamated American boarding Bohemians Brody Butcher Workmen called cattle Census century changes chap Chicago Commission committees common labor corporate Council crowd developed division early economic employee employment ethnic experience families Federation five force groups History immigrants important included increase industry Irish John Journal July labor movement leaders Lithuanian living major Mary mass McDowell Meat meat packing meeting ment migrants movement neighborhood Official organization packers packing packinghouse workers Packingtown percent plants Polish problem production proportion race recent relations remained Report represented riot saloons Side skilled Slaughtering Slavic social Society South Stockyards Street strike structure struggle suggests Swift thousand throughout tion Trade turn twentieth union United University unskilled various wages women working-class World yards York