Go west

WHEN THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE IN Greeley first opened, its rural location was unusual. Meatpacking plants were much more likely to be found in urban areas. Most large American cities had a meatpacking district with its own stockyards and slaughterhouses. Cattle were shipped there by rail, slaughtered, carved into sides of beef, then sold to local butchers and wholesalers. Omaha and Kansas City were prominent meatpacking towns, and the United Nations building now stands on land once occupied by New York City’s stockyards. For more than a century, however, Chicago reigned as the meatpacking capital of the world. The Beef Trust was born there, the major meatpacking firms were headquartered there, and roughly forty thousand people were employed there in a square‑mile meat district anchored by the Union Stockyards. Refrigerated sides of beef were shipped from Chicago not only throughout the United States, but also throughout Europe. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Upton Sinclair considered Chicago’s Packingtown to be “the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place.” It was in his view the supreme achievement of American capitalism, as well as its greatest disgrace.

The old Chicago slaughterhouses were usually brick buildings, four or five stories high. Cattle were herded up wooden ramps to the top floor, where they were struck on the head with a sledgehammer, slaughtered, then disassembled by skilled workers. The animals eventually left the building on the ground floor, coming out as sides of beef, cans of beef, or boxes of sausage ready to be loaded into railcars.

The working conditions in these meatpacking plants were brutal. In The Jungle (1906) Upton Sinclair described a litany of horrors: severe back and shoulder injuries, lacerations, amputations, exposure to dangerous chemicals, and memorably, a workplace accident in which a man fell into a vat and got turned into lard. The plant kept running, and the lard was sold to unsuspecting consumers. Human beings, Sinclair argued, had been made “cogs in the great packing machine,” easily replaced and entirely disposable. President Theodore Roosevelt ordered an independent investigation of The Jungle ’s sensational details. The accuracy of the book was confirmed by federal investigators, who found that Chicago’s meatpacking workers labored “under conditions that are entirely unnecessary and unpardonable, and which are a constant menace not only to their own health, but to the health of those who use the food products prepared by them.”

The popular outrage inspired by The Jungle led Congress to enact food safety legislation in 1906. Little was done, however, to improve the lives of packinghouse workers, whose misfortune had inspired Upton Sinclair to write the book. “I aimed for the public’s heart,” he later wrote in his autobiography, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” For the next thirty years, unions battled to gain representation among Chicago’s stockyard and slaughterhouse workers, who were mainly eastern European immigrants. The large meatpacking firms used company spies, blacklists, and African‑American strikebreakers to thwart organizing efforts. Nevertheless, most of Chicago’s packinghouse workers had gained union representation by the end of the Depression. After World War II, their wages greatly improved, soon exceeding the national average for workers in manufacturing. Meatpacking was still a backbreaking, dangerous job, but for many it was also a well‑paid and desirable one. It provided a stable, middle‑class income. Swift & Company, the largest firm in the industry until the early 1960s, was also the last of the big five meatpackers to remain privately controlled. Much like Ken Monfort, Harold Swift ran the company founded by his father with a paternalistic concern for workers. Swift & Company paid the industry’s highest wages, guaranteed long‑term job security, worked closely with union officials to address worker grievances, and provided bonuses, pensions, and other benefits.

In 1960 Currier J. Holman and A. D. Anderson, two former Swift executives, decided to start their own meatpacking company, convinced that by slashing costs they could compete with the industry giants. The following year Iowa Beef Packers opened its first slaughterhouse – a meat factory that in its own way proved as influential as the first Speedee Service McDonald’s in San Bernardino. Applying the same labor principles to meatpacking that the McDonald brothers had applied to making hamburgers, Holman and Anderson designed a production system for their slaughterhouse in Denison, Iowa, that eliminated the need for skilled workers. The new IBP plant was a one‑story structure with a disassembly line. Each worker stood in one spot along the line, performing the same simple task over and over again, making the same knife cut thousands of times during an eight‑hour shift. The gains that meatpacking workers had made since the days of The Jungle stood in the way of IBP’s new system, whose success depended upon access to a cheap and powerless workforce. At the dawn of the fast food era, IBP became a meatpacking company with a fast food mentality, obsessed with throughput, efficiency, centralization, and control. “We’ve tried to take the skill out of every step,” A. D. Anderson later boasted.

In addition to creating a mass production system that employed a de‑skilled workforce, IBP put its new slaughterhouses in rural areas close to the feedlots – and far away from the urban strongholds of the nation’s labor unions. The new interstate highway system made it possible to rely upon trucks, instead of railroads, to ship meat. In 1967 IBP opened a large plant in Dakota City, Nebraska, that not only slaughtered cattle but also “fabricated” them into smaller cuts of meat – into primals (chucks, loins, ribs, rounds) and subprimals (such as chuck rolls). Instead of shipping whole sides of beef, IBP shipped these smaller cuts, vacuum‑sealed and plastic‑wrapped, as “boxed beef.” This new way of marketing beef enabled supermarkets to fire most of their skilled, unionized butchers. It also left IBP with a great deal of leftover bones, blood, and scraps of meat that could be rendered into profitable byproducts such as dog food. IBP soon added “grinders” to its plants, machinery that made hamburger meat in enormous quantities, driving small processors and wholesalers out of business. The company’s low wages and new production techniques transformed the entire beef industry, from the feedlot to the butcher counter.

The IBP revolution was guided by a hard, unsentimental view of the world. Amid a packinghouse culture that valued toughness, Currier J. Holman took pride in being tougher than anyone else. He didn’t like unions and didn’t hesitate to do whatever seemed necessary to break them. IBP should always conduct business, Holman argued, as though it were waging war. When workers at the IBP plant in Dakota City went on strike in 1969, Holman hired scabs to replace them. The striking workers responded by firing a bullet through Holman’s office window, killing a suspected company spy, and bombing the home of IBP’s general counsel. Confronted with a real war, Holman sought assistance from an unusually powerful ally.

In the spring of 1970 Holman and three other top IBP executives held secret meetings in New York City with Moe Steinman, a “labor consultant” who had close ties with La Cosa Nostra. Unionized butchers in New York were blocking the sale of IBP’s boxed beef, out of solidarity with the striking workers and fear for their own jobs. IBP was eager to ship its products to the New York metropolitan area, the nation’s largest market for beef. Moe Steinman offered to help end the butchers’ boycott and in return demanded a five‑cent “commission” on every ten pounds of beef that IBP sold in New York. IBP planned to ship hundreds of millions of pounds of beef to New York City every year. Currier J. Holman agreed to pay the mob its five‑cent commission, and the leaders of New York’s butcher union promptly withdrew their objections to IBP’s boxed beef. Shipments of IBP meat were soon being unloaded in Manhattan.

After a lengthy investigation of mob involvement in the New York City meat business, Currier J. Holman and IBP were tried and convicted in 1974 for bribing union leaders and meat wholesalers. Judge Burton Roberts fined IBP $7,000, but did not punish Holman with any prison term or fine, noting that bribes were sometimes part of the cost of doing business in New York City. Holman’s links to organized crime, however, extended far beyond the sort of payments that honest New York businessmen were often forced to make. He appointed one of Moe Steinman’s friends to the board of IBP (a man who a decade earlier had been imprisoned for bribing meat inspectors and for selling tainted meat to the U.S. Army) and made Steinman’s son‑in‑law a group vice president of IBP, head of the company’s processing division (even though the son‑in‑law, in Judge Roberts’s words, “knew virtually nothing about the meat business”). And Holman forced out four top IBP executives who opposed dealing with organized crime figures. Subsequent investigations by Forbes and the Wall Street Journal cited IBP as a prime example of how a mainstream corporation could be infiltrated by the mob.

The relentless low‑cost competition from IBP presented old‑line Chicago meatpackers with a stark choice: go west or go out of business. Instead of symbolizing democracy and freedom, going west meant getting cheap labor. One by one, the packinghouses in Chicago closed down, and slaughterhouses were built in rural states hostile toward labor unions. The new meatpacking plants in Iowa, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, and Nebraska followed IBP’s example, paying wages that were sometimes more than 50 percent lower than what union workers earned in Chicago.

I recently drove through Chicago’s Packingtown with Ruben Ramirez, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), Local 100A, the city’s meatpacking union. Ramirez is in his early sixties, but still looks fit enough to work in a packing plant, with broad shoulders, a thick neck, and strong hands. His smoothly shaved head adds to his formidable appearance. When Ramirez arrived at the Chicago stockyards in 1956, cowboys on horseback still herded cattle from their pens to the slaughterhouses. He was seventeen years old at the time and did not speak any English. He’d just come from Guanajuato, Mexico, and found a job at an old processing plant operated by Swift & Company. He was one of the few Mexicans employed there; the other workers were Polish, Lithuanian, and African‑American. They looked down at Mexicans, and so Ramirez was not allowed to use a knife or perform any skilled tasks. Supervisors gave him the lowest menial jobs in the plant. He carried heavy boxes and barrels of meat, getting soaked in blood that hardened and froze to his clothing during the winter. After a few years he went to work for a nearby processing company, Glenn & Anderson, where he worked in sanitation. Three years later Ramirez was finally promoted and allowed to cut meat. He saw friends get badly injured on the job, lost the middle finger on his right hand while using a saw, got knocked unconscious when a side of beef fell off a hook and struck him in the head. He married a young woman he met in church, and they later had six children. He woke up at four o’clock in the morning, worked eight hours a day at Glenn & Anderson, then took college courses at night. Life was far from easy, but his salary was good enough to let his wife stay home and look after the kids. All òf their children went to college.

Ruben Ramirez became active in the union, first as a shop steward, then as an executive. He became an American citizen, loved this country, felt grateful for the opportunities it had given him, and took great pride in the accomplishments of his children. In 1993 he became the first Latino to head a local UFCW meatpacking union in the United States. But as Ramirez climbed to the top of Packingtown, the whole thing was crumbling right before his eyes. Any enjoyment of his own success had to be tempered by a hard, cold reality. While listening to Ruben Ramirez’s life story, I looked out the car window at one poignant scene after another, at abandoned warehouses and slaughterhouses, at junkyards, slums, and parking lots where Chicago’s stockyards once stood.

The world’s biggest aggregation of labor and capital in one place has largely disappeared, with bits and pieces of its history lurking amid brick housing projects. The local meatpacking industry that once employed 40,000 people now employs about 2,000. Ninety‑five percent of its jobs have moved elsewhere. The last of the Chicago stockyards closed in 1971. Today there’s only one slaughterhouse left in Packingtown, an old hog plant. There’s just a handful of meat processors: firms that make bacon, sausage, hamburger patties, and kosher products. When the large meatpackers departed, the soul of the place fled with them.

We got out of the car at the entrance to the Union Stockyards, built in 1875, a grand archway with two Victorian turrets on either side. Millions of men, horses, and cattle had passed through it over the years. A spot that had for generations been at the center of tumult and loud commotion now was desolate and quiet, except for an occasional car driving past to a nearby industrial park. The sculpted head of a steer gazed down from the center of the arch. Broken glass and an old sneaker lay on the ground beneath it. Weeds grew between the crumbling brick paving stones, and the pale beige surface of the arch was marred with cracks. The place felt like an archeological site, the ruins of a lost American civilization.