On June 10th, dozens of masked ICE agents filed into the Glenn Valley Fords meatpacking plant in South Omaha. Omaha has a long history of meatpacking. At one point it was the largest meat packing city in the world. The prairie’s high-quality grass was an ideal location for large ranches to raise cattle once destined for the Union Stockyards in Chicago. Presenting a warrant to company officials, the agents proceeded to arrest at least 74 of the plant’s roughly 140 workers, some of whom had worked at the plant for years. According to company officials, production at the plant dropped 80 percent in the aftermath as many of the workers who survived the raid were too fearful to show up at the plant. Reuters reported, citing the Homeland Security Department, that the raid was the “largest worksite enforcement operation” in the state during the Trump presidency.
An August 2019 ICE raid that at the time was billed the largest single-state immigration enforcement in American history also targeted the meat industry. That time more than 600 agents, clad in black body armor, stormed seven poultry plants in rural Mississippi, taking 680 workers into custody. The list goes on: December 2006 saw ICE hit six Swift & Company plants in the Midwest and Southwest, as part of what was dubbed ‘Operation Wagon Train.’ About 1300 workers were detained in that one, most were apparently deported. In May 2008 it was the Agriprocessors plant in Portsville, Iowa. That raid featured 900 ICE agents and about 400 arrests. Subsequently, the office of the Iowa attorney general charged the plant with employing 32 children under age 18, including seven who were younger than 16. That detail doesn’t seem unusual given that a 2023 New York Times expose found meat-processing plants nationwide hiring migrants as young as 13.
It would figure that ICE makes so much hay at meatpacking plants. Numbers can be a bit hazy but according to the Center for Economic Policy and Research over half of all frontline meatpacking workers in the U.S. are immigrants. It is difficult to determine what percentage of workers are undocumented. Estimates range from 30 percent all the way up to 50 percent. The number figures to increase with the Trump Administration’s plan to terminate the legal status of over a half million migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua- countries that provide 10 to 20 percent of the meat industry’s workforce. A 2017 study conducted by the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins University concluded ‘the industrial produce and animal production and processing systems would collapse without the immigrant and migratory workforce.’
In the face of all this, it is easy to recall Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. As far as its practical social effect, it is probably indisputable that The Jungle was the most influential novel of the 20th century. Published in book form in 1906 (it was published a year earlier in serial form for the radical newspaper Appeal To Reason), Sinclair’s scenes of rat carcasses being ground into the sausage casings helped grease the skids of Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act- the latter led to the founding of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), just four months after the novel’s publication. Still, Sinclair thought that the main point about brutally exploited immigrant labor had been missed, lamenting ‘I aimed for the public’s heart and by accident hit it in the stomach.’
It was actually in the meat industry where the assembly line has its roots. Henry Ford himself was inspired by the Armour and Swift plants in Chicago and Cincinnati. Production organized by disassembly lines brought about proletarianization of the industry and thus unrest. Meatpacking was the most strike-prone of all U.S. industries from 1881 to 1905. In 1904, two years before The Jungle’s publication, a major strike erupted at the Union Stockyards. The Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America had been chartered in Cincinnati in January 1897. It wasn’t long before the union was a major presence in Chicago. In 1904 Amalgamated sought a minimum wage for all common workers in the yards. The union managed to unite striking workers across ethnic and class lines for nearly two months yet time was on the packers’ side. While black strikebreakers tend to get the greatest spotlight, all sorts of scabs were readily available, including a large group of immigrants sent straight from Ellis Island where the companies posted recruiting agents. Though turnover among strikebreakers was high, some walked off when they realized a strike was going on, the packers had enough to outlast the union.
The First World War provided workers a chance to make gains. Production rose dramatically during the war. In the three years prior to the war’s outbreak average monthly beef exports ran to just over a million pounds. In June 1918 exports exceeded 92 million pounds. Profits rose along with exports. Aggregate profit for the four largest firms from 1912 to 1914 was $19 million. With labor momentary in shorter supply due to the draft and immigration being severely limited (the shortage was filled in part by married women and the Great Migration of African Americans from the South), the U.S. government, anxious to keep productivity rising and avoid crippling strikes, set up an arbitration system for labor disputes.
However, exports crashing after the war and leftover inventory that couldn’t be sold, the country entered into recession in 1920. The unemployment rate reached double digits a year later. The number of meatpacking workers in Chicago dropped by 40 percent to 27,000. For those still working, however, the common hourly wage was at a high of 53 cents. With prices falling hard and the industry reporting a decline in profits, the packers went on the offensive (the capital offensive was mirrored nationally, it is the reason 1919 was the largest strike year in U.S. history). In February 1921 they scrapped the arbitration system and imposed a wage cut. Only a government-orchestrated compromise prevented a strike but only delayed the inevitable. When another expected wage cut was introduced in November, Amalgamated called a national strike. It was doomed from the start. In the midst of an economic crisis, high unemployment brought back local labor surpluses. This was the strike where black strikebreakers had a large effect. In the aftermath of the gruesome 1919 Race Riot local black institutions such as churches and newspapers were generally anti-union. Given their recent experience as tenant farmers in the deep South, many African-Americans saw even the stockyards as an improvement not to be jeopardized. On top of this, the state came down heavily on the side of the packers. Two thousand policemen flooded into Packingtown to enforce the order. The union called off the strike in defeat on February 1st, 1922.
It may be tempting to simply conclude that meatpacking has always been a grueling, low-paying industry dependent on the exploitation of immigrants. Except this is incorrect. With the emergence of the United Packinghouse Workers of America, or UPWA, originally chartered by the CIO in October 1937 as the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, workers in the industry made lasting gains. In the aftermath of an organizing wave, master agreements for the industry were signed in the 1940s. For a generation meatpacking provided a solid living. By 1960, wages in meatpacking were 15 percent higher than U.S. manufacturing in general, an advantage that persisted through the 1970s.
At the same time the seeds of this period’s demise were eagerly being planted. Production began to be moved from its traditional strongholds of meatpacking districts in cities such as Chicago, New York, and Kansas City, to rural areas. These meatpacking districts had been centered along railroad lines where livestock was shipped. The industry shift to the country moved packing closer to the livestock saving transport costs while moving away from urban unions. The shift was widespread, including reaching places like Kansas and Nebraska where production was shifted from Omaha, Wichita, and Lincoln to rural communities like Norfolk and Lexington. IBP (originally named Iowa Beef Producers, now a brand under Tyson Fresh Meats) emerged, with a $300,000 grant from the U.S. Small Business Administration, as an industry equivalent of Wal-Mart, pioneering boxed beef (thereby leading to the decline of skilled butchers) and dragging the rest of the industry to extreme cost cutting. The rise of IBP inspired emulators such as ConAgra and Excell and expanded to chicken and pork production. Older companies were forced to adopt. It sparked an era of union concessions and decline, highlighted by the defeat of the high-profile strike of workers at a pork packing plant in Austin, Minnesota.
By the time the anti-union work of the 1980s was done, wages in meatpacking were 20 percent lower than manufacturing. By 2002 they were 24 percent lower; today they are 44 percent lower. Meanwhile, regulations were withdrawn and line speeds increased unilaterally by bosses. Even by official numbers, injuries surged. In the 1960s, meatpacking had one of the lowest turnover rates among industrial jobs. Today, the turnover rate is 100 percent.
Clearly, the jungle returned. In one way it is worse than ever in that it returned to a broken system that has come to both depend on cheap, undocumented labor and to despise the workers who provide it. While immigrants from Europe at least had the chance to organize and strike (there were hardly any restrictions of immigration from Europe until the Johnson Act of 1924), the system now makes it basically impossible for workers to organize for higher pay.
Neither political party has a serious immigration policy. Yet even absent comprehensive immigration reform, there are steps that can take off some of the edge. In 1929, the government established the Registry Act, which created a process for some long-term migrants to apply for permanent residency. Originally it applied to those who lived in the U.S. since January 1st, 1921. It has been updated several times since- the last update with the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. That applied to immigrants that arrived prior to January 1972. It has been frozen since then. An update is long overdue and can legalize work for at least hundreds of thousands.
Back in April, the food section of the New York Times featured the headline ‘Meat is Back, on Plates and in Politics.’ Sales of meat hit a record of $104 billion in the U.S. last year. According to one report by Cargill, on average Americans are eating 7 percent more meat than before the pandemic (between 2020-2022 the average amount had dropped by 10 pounds).
In another piece of good news for the industry, JBS, the largest meatpacking company in the world, recently received approval for a public listing on the New York Stock Exchange after years of attempts. In 2017, JBS admitted to paying bribes to more than 1800 officials in Brazil. Just this year, the company agreed to a $4 million fine as part of settlement with the U.S. Labor Department- investigators found that migrant children as young as 13 were working overnight shifts at JSB slaughterhouses in the U.S. Another settlement came in February over a class action suit accusing JBS of conspiring with other companies to reduce the U.S. beef supply to artificially inflate prices. That settlement came in for $83.5 million. Other firms who paid a settlement include Tyson Foods, Cargill, and National Beef. These ‘Big Four’ companies control 85 percent of the U.S. beef industry- another detail that Sinclair would have found familiar.
At this point it is difficult to find rays of light with the industry. Of course, one would have said the same thing a century ago.
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