Book Review

Canada and the United States

Rick Halpern. Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904–54. (The Working Class in American History.) Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 1997. Pp. xiii, 309. Cloth $44.95, paper $17.95.

The two volumes under review draw on the rich union archives of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. They demonstrate that African-American workers were the dynamic element in the formation and survival of a strong, self-consciously democratic, decentralized, shop-floor-oriented trade union, the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA). Alliances with whites who were not racists or were willing, for pragmatic reasons, to cooperate with black workers helped to maintain union strength. Roger Horowitz demonstrates that, from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, the UPWA's working shop stewards forged strong linkages ("chains") in different meatpacking plants of the same company, enabling rank-and-file workers to conduct effective, strategic "rolling" strikes. "Right-wing" and "leftist" stewards worked together in these chains, whose members attended national contract negotiations. Unlike Ford and General Motors, but like Chrysler, the nation's largest meatpacking firms maintained an anti-collective bargaining orientation well into the 1950s. Meatpacking workers defended themselves by intensifying shop-floor job actions.	1
Horowitz shows that the specific character of meatpacking technology created a dialectic of management "drive" systems and strategic opportunities for skilled animal slaughterers and meat cutters to use job actions to resist management pressure. The effectiveness of shop-floor action was enhanced by the need to slaughter animals soon after they were delivered and to dress the dead carcasses shortly thereafter. The rate of slaughtering strongly influenced production in all other departments of the meatpacking plants. The brutal cold (rarely above 40 degrees Farenheit)and the blood and animal parts that permeated the killing floors made many white workers reluctant to take slaughtering jobs, creating a vacuum that was filled by African-American workers attracted to jobs that paid sixteen to fifty percent more than the best jobs available to blacks in other industries. In the 1920s, the packers retained blacks hired during World War I. After blacks did not join the 1921 and 1922 strikes, their employers promoted black meatpackers on the assumption that they would continue to be largely anti-union. But this policy created a large core of black workers, who backed Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) union organizing efforts in the 1930s.	2
Horowitz indicates that Communists in the vital Chicago region, where blacks were a large majority of the packinghouse employees, played a crucial role in interracial organizing in 1936 and thereafter, using racially integrated flying squads, integrated open air rallies, and black preachers from storefront churches as organizers. (Many became shop stewards.) In Kansas City, Orthodox Croatians, who had been discriminated against by Protestant and Catholic foremen and managers, empathized with blacks. Black and white Communists pressed for the formation of interracial coalitions among packinghouse workers and for union action to reduce racial discrimination, leading African-American centrists like Bill Weightman to admit that without the Communists' anti-discrimination activities "I might not have been as aggressive as I was" (p. 197). Both Horowitz and Rich Halpern conclude that the Communists in the Chicago meatpacking unions used non-ideological organizing appeals and—unlike their counterparts in the United Auto Workers (UAW)—often ignored directives from national Communist officials. Horowitz and Halpern find that black meatpacking workers were especially resistant to post-World War II redbaiting, since they appreciated the support the Left had given to anti-discrimination efforts. Redbaiting white politicians probably had little credibility among black union members, who had a strong consciousness of race.	. . .