Meatpacking and Meat Processing Industry. Commercial meatpacking in North America dates from 1660, when entrepreneur William Pynchon began selling preserved pork from an abandoned warehouse in Springfield, Massachusetts. In the
Antebellum Era, meatpacking and processing concentrated in Cincinnati, where the Ohio River provided low‐cost transport of pork to distant markets. By the late 1840s, Cincinnati boasted more than forty pork‐packing plants using an advanced division of labor that integrated packing with slaughtering and dressing. By the end of the
Civil War, however, Cincinnati had been displaced as the meatpacking capital by
Chicago, strategically located along rail lines linking western livestock supplies to eastern urban markets.
Between 1865 and
World War I, meatpacking changed from a mostly local, seasonal, and small‐scale business into a giant, nationally integrated, and year‐round industry dominated by five massive corporations led by Swift's and Armour's. At the heart of this transformation lay Chicago‐based firms' use of refrigerated railroad cars to ship dressed beef from Chicago and other western packing centers to eastern, urban markets. These firms also developed networks of refrigerated branch distribution outlets, deployed armies of salespeople, developed and marketed broad ranges of animal by‐products, and subdivided a mostly unskilled labor force in massive, multispecies packing establishments. Collectively keeping labor costs low and pricing their goods on the basis of average costs rather than supply and demand, they dominated the industry through the 1940s.
After
World War II, the advantage shifted to three upstart firms (Con‐Agra, Excell, and especially Iowa Beef Processors) that challenged the older rail‐ and river‐connected packing centers and slaughtered 70 percent of the nation's cattle by 1989. These companies deployed new technologies to eliminate skilled labor, advance the industry's legendary specialization of tasks, and increase
productivity. They built single‐species plants closer to livestock supplies and revolutionized the meat trade by trimming red meats to retail specifications within their slaughterhouses and selling the resulting “boxed beef” directly to grocery stores and supermarkets. They undertook an effective campaign against established wage standards, reduced plant safety, sped up production, and recruited nonunion workers from rural areas in the United States, Latin America, and Asia. As the twentieth century ended, the meatpacking and meat‐processing industry remained one of the nation's leading employers, important to the economies of Midwestern and Mid‐Atlantic states as well as Texas and
California.
Upton
Sinclair's
The Jungle (1906), an exposé of labor exploitation and unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry, had led to stricter federal regulation. The industry continued, however, to be plagued by charges of labor exploitation, noxious conditions, workplace danger, nutritional risk, and environmental damage.
See also
Agriculture;
Immigrant Labor;
Labor Markets;
Livestock Industry;
Mass Marketing;
Pure Food and Drug Act;
Refrigeration and Air Conditioning;
Swift, Gustavus.
Bibliography
Jimmy Skaggs , Prime Cut: Livestock Raising and Meatpacking in the United States, 1986.
Roger Horowitz , “Negro and White, Unite and Fight”: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–1960, 1997.
Paul Street
