| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 53

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Ian MacLachlan, Kill and Chill: Restructuring Canada's Beef Commodity Chain (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2001).

THE ECONOMIC, political, and environmental importance of Canada's beef industry has become more apparent following the discovery in 2003 of a single case of 'Mad Cow' disease in Alberta, and contamination of Walkerton, Ontario's municipal water supply in 2000, in part because of its proximity to a cow-calf operation. Ian MacLachlan's study, Kill and Chill: Restructuring Canada's Beef Commodity Chain, provides a much- needed historical context for understanding these events, particularly in light of a remarkable "metamorphosis" in key elements of the beef commodity chain since the late 1980s.

MacLachlan, a University of Lethbridge geographer, had good reason to examine changes in the beef commodity chain "from the calf to the hamburger" at this juncture. Lethbridge is located at the centre of "feedlot alley," a region of Alberta where intensive cattle-feeding on factory-like farms with as many as 50,000 head of cattle has created cow pile problems of truly extraordinary proportions. More troubling than the "apocryphal" June wedding marred by the stench of fresh manure, are the municipal boil-water orders that "have become an accustomed part of domestic life" in the region's communities.(86) The emergence of massive meat-packing plants employing thousands of unskilled workers in the region because of its notoriously anti-labour political climate is equally disturbing.

This thorough and well-researched study provides an effective overview of Canada's beef industry from its origins in the late 19th century to the year 2000. MacLachlan's spatial and predominantly economic framework of analysis demonstrates convincingly "the close relationship between consumers, processors, and producers in a long commodity chain that persists despite sweeping structural changes in every link from farm to firm to final demand by consumers."(10) The study provides substantial analysis of the complex structural factors that reshaped the beef-cattle industry during the 20th century. His approach, however, is one in which the perspective and agency of workers is overshadowed by a celebration of shrewd owner-managers and their clever accounting practices. MacLachlan also remains studiously noncommittal about government actions and policies, even though, as the author demonstrates, they have always played a key role in the industry's development. As a labour study there is scope to deepen analysis of the largely post-union era of the 1990s by linking reduced wages and declining working conditions more directly to ethnic, racial, and gender hierarchies. Similarly, although MacLachlan demonstrates dramatic regional shifts and the growing influence of the United States, he does not speculate about the larger significance of these developments.

Kill and Chill is organized in three sections around the production, processing, and marketing of beef. Some chapters are more technical and will appeal to the specialist, but others, particularly his engaging analysis of "postmodern" marketing strategies and fickle consumer attitudes, will be of interest to anyone who shops for meat.

The book's strength lies in the author's careful elaboration of structural factors that dramatically changed links in the commodity chain from the calf farm to the supermarket meat counter, drawing on a wide range of primary and secondary sources. MacLachlan identifies regulatory and technological changes as key factors behind three "revolutions" in the beef commodity chain during the 20th century. Between 1890 and World War II industrialization of the meat-packing process through a division of labour and reliance on the railway fostered development of an agroindustrial complex of fully integrated meatpackers and associated businesses at the heart of major urban centres across the country. The federal Crow Rate, which discouraged the breeding and feeding of livestock in the west, and the difficulty of transporting dressed beef, made central Canada the heartland for beef manufacturing jobs. In the postwar era efficient refrigerated truck cattle liners replaced railways and public stockyards, fostering direct-to-packer sales and the construction of beef plants in smaller centres in the west, to bring the processing stage closer to the raw material.

MacLachlan demonstrates that several factors combined to rapidly transform the feeding and meat-packing elements of the beef commodity chain in the 1990s: gradual elimination of the Crow Rate since 1983, new irrigation technologies that expanded Alberta's capacity for cattle feed crops and feedlots, the development of "boxed hermetically sealed beef," and new American ownership. Centred in Ontario throughout much of the 20th century, feeding and meat-packing shifted west, particularly to Alberta. Between 1976 and 2000 the proportion of Canada's slaughter cattle herd located in Ontario dropped from 40.5 per cent to 18.4 per cent, while the proportion in Alberta rose from 29 per cent to nearly 66 per cent. Industry ownership, which had remained firmly in Canadian hands for nearly a century, shifted to two large US-based concerns, IBP and Cargill Foods, "each operating a single continental-scale beef plant in the heart of Alberta's feedlot country."(329) It is no coincidence that these changes were accompanied by the collapse of a once-strong and remarkably successful union movement in the meatpacking industry.

MacLachlan takes an ambivalent stance toward power dynamics within the cattle-beef industry. Using the term "oligopsony," he describes the beef commodity chain as among the most "imbalanced" of Canada's agroindustries because "15,000 calf producers sell feeder cattle to 400 feeders, who in turn sell finished slaughter cattle to a dozen or so meat-packing plants."(5) Yet, in his discussion of public allegations of profiteering during World War II, MacLachlan defends meat-packers, emphasizing the industry's low margins. On the environmental front MacLachlan describes the actions of an Alberta feedlot operator who dumped 30 million litres of cattle pen run-off in a tributary of the Bow River in 1997 as an "appalling" example of "negligence and irresponsibility." But he offers no comment to place in perspective a government fine of $120,000 that resulted from charges under both the provincial environmental and federal Fisheries Acts.

Similarly, MacLachlan does not lament organized labour's loss of power in the meatpacking industry since the mid-1980s. Using a Commons-style approach, MacLachlan's examination of labour centres on the rise and decline of the remarkably successful United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) and its successors during a forty-year hiatus from the mid-1940s to the mid-1980s, in an otherwise dismal century for meatpacking workers. MacLachlan attributes the union's strength to a labour shortage during World War II, favourable labour legislation, and postwar economic growth, rather than emphasizing the politicization, determination, and industry of workers as a result of their Depression and wartime experiences. In the postwar period workers forged an effective system of pattern bargaining with the major companies, who cooperated in part because this form of bargaining took wages out of competition within the labour market. By the 1980s UPWA's successors had achieved skill-based wage rates that were virtually uniform across the industry and the country, which "made semiskilled meat-packing workers among the highest paid manual workers in Canada in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s."(235)

MacLachlan is critical of industry leader Canada Packers for creating "instability" by allowing wages to rise so high at mid-century. Yet he does not acknowledge that low wages, high turnover, and high injury rates in post-1980s packinghouses have created a new kind of instability. Large-scale beef plants were purposely located in small-town Alberta where "a rural populist political culture ... has never been supportive of the labour movement."(246) The author's celebration of greater ethnic diversity, a more youthful workforce, and a larger proportion of women in the massive meatpacking plants of the 1990s ignores the correlation of this "progress" with a substantial drop in wages and less worker control over conditions of work. Repeated attempts to unionize workers have failed. It also ignores the high social welfare costs and social tensions generated by large-scale immigration to small towns like Brooks, Alberta.

MacLachlan has provided a comprehensive historical survey of the beef-cattle industry in Canada that raises important questions about its social and environmental costs, the political economy of the west, particularly Alberta, and the influence of the United States. It is also an engaging read for anyone who buys and eats meat. For all of these reasons Kill and Chill is a valuable addition to the literature on an industry that continues to hold an important place in the national historical narrative.


Cynthia Loch-Drake York University

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.