History of Meatpacking in the Midwest
In the late 19th century, the meatpacking industry was largely concentrated in Chicago, Omaha and Kansas City. Live animals were shipped via railroads to large factories in cities, where they were prepared as dressed meat. By the early 1900s, the meatpacking industry had become highly concentrated, with five firms (Armour, Cudahy, Morris, Swift, and Wilson) controlling most of the slaughter and transportation of meat. Although plant owners made concerted efforts to discourage unionization, by the 1940s workers and labor unions had won industry-wide labor standards and contracts.
The development of refrigerated railroad cars and an expanded railroad network allowed some meat processing plants to emerge in small Midwestern towns during the late 19th and early 20th century. In the 1960s, however, the geography of the meatpacking industry was dramatically transformed as large operations set up shop in the rural Midwest to cut down on transportation costs and avoid urban labor unions. In particular, Iowa Beef Processors revolutionized the meatpacking industry by locating its operations in rural Iowa close to the cattle supply and by shipping de-boned and trimmed “boxed beef” directly to supermarkets. IBP further lowered production costs by replacing butchers with low-skilled workers performing repetitive tasks along a “disassembly line,” and by employing non-union labor. Eventually, most urban meatpacking plants either relocated to the rural Midwest in order to remain competitive, or closed down. The transformation of the meatpacking industry since the 1960s resulted in a highly concentrated industry in both beef and pork in the Midwest (and increasingly poultry in the U.S. South), albeit with new dominant companies, a decline in unionization rates, deteriorating working conditions and falling wages, and an increasing reliance on immigrant labor.
References:
Fink, Deborah. 1998. Cutting into the Meatpacking Line: Workers and Change in the Rural Midwest. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press.
Striffler, Steve. 2005. Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America’s Favorite Food. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Whittaker, William G. 2006. Labor Practice in the Meat Packing and Poultry Processing Industry: An Overview. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service.
