By the turn of the 20th century, meatpacking was Americas biggest industry by far. Their work also exposed horrible abuses at animal laboratories, fur and leather producing facilities, government labs, and animal-based entertainment operations such as circuses. According to historian Eric Schlosser, the meatpacking industry has a well-documented history of discouraging injury reports, falsifying injury data, and putting injured workers back on the job quickly to minimize the reporting of lost workdays. Required fields are marked *. Making profits initially relied upon two major things cheap labor, and the absence of any type of regulation. Workers did not use gloves until after WWI. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR. Today, the USDA recognizes eight grades of meat, with the three most common and highest quality being U.S. Prime, U.S. Another common skin infection was the tubular wart, but the yard workers called the disgusting infection cut worm. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 applied the same standards to foods and drugs, notably banning the unsafe preservatives used to keep meat looking fresh. They also replaced striking Europeans with African Americans. Ivy Roberts has taught undergraduate-level film studies for over 9 years. This selection from The Jungle provides a stomach-turning description of what exactly goes into sausage. By the 1870s, meatpacking plants were using technology like steam power, monorail trolleys, and mechanical mixers, choppers, and stuffers in factory settings where stationary workers doing individual jobs broke down and processed animal carcasses that continuously passed by them. Both these changes hurt the UPWA, which had its power base within the big companies in big cities. Workers, who were unfortunate enough to be assigned to the pickle rooms (pickling meats and sausage was fashionable before freezers became widespread), many times developed a very nasty infection from constantly handling cold meat with their hands. What were the meatpacking factories like in the early 1900's? . Quarantine stations were set up across several cities to screen and separate diseased imported animals to prevent their meat from going to market. The 1960s were a decade of reformand also a decade when Americas food-supply chain became vastly more sprawling and complex. One such industry that industrialization revolutionized was the meatpacking industry, wherein farm animals are shipped, slaughtered, processed, packaged, and distributed. It was responsible for game-changing innovations such as mechanized refrigeration and the assembly line. Updates? And that is exactly what happened. Packingtown is a section in Chicago where the packing houses are located. Meat Inspection Act of 1906, U.S. legislation, signed by Pres. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/conditions-meatpacking-plants-1906-upton-sinclair, "Conditions in Meatpacking Plants (1906, by Upton Sinclair) Linen The UFCW adopted a less militant stance. Detail 4 Cheap Equipment To save money, the companies would often buy old and rusty machinery that would often break down. The meatpacking industry skyrocketed alongside the Industrial Revolution. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shovelled into carts, and the man who did the shovelling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw onethere were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit. Today, unsafe conditions continue in the meatpacking industry. Laura Allan. your CMS. New York: Doubleday, 1906. Not only did the people in the factories suffered, the people outside of the factory also suffered. Where craft unions like Amalgamated gained power partly by limiting who could get a joboften along racial linesthe UPWA tried to reduce the companys ability to divide workers by race. Between the Homestead Act, the arrival of the railroads, and an endless crisscrossing of impenetrable barbed wire, the open range was doomed and the meatpacking industry entered into the modern era. While immigrants came to the United States based on the American Dream, the idea that anyone could be successful if they worked hard in the United States, working conditions were horrible. However, in the decades since, the power of unions has whittled away in the United States. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. The Meat Packing Industry of the 1900's Unsanitary!!! To uncover these issues, Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, a novel about the meatpacking industry of Chicago in the early 1900s. years, and even decades. And, in the 1990s and 2000s, meatpacking companies began aggressively recruiting Latin American immigrants, using the unequal legal status of these workers as a point of leverage. As anyone familiar with Upton Sinclairs muckraking novelThe Jungle knows, meatpacking was also terrible work in the early twentieth century. The idea of a persons hands actually becoming pickled is beyond understanding. On April 10, 2001, the Washington Post printed a front-page story with the headline They Die Piece by Piece. Harkening back to Sinclairs The Jungle, the article chronicled in graphic detail appalling and widespread instances of animals commonly and regularly being chopped apart at the joints, bled to death, skinned, disemboweled, dunked in tanks of boiling water, and strung up by a single leg while alive and fully conscious, after being improperly stunned or not stunned at all. Virtually every animal on Earth either kills other animals to sustain itself or is unfortunate enough to play the opposite role, being devoured by another animal for the same purpose. Troops who consumed the meat fell ill, becoming unfit for combat, and some died. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. (February 22, 2023). The broadest public attention to the Chicago packinghouses came with the work of Upton Sinclair. Since those workers controlled the pace of production, that gave unions an important source of power. To publish, simply grab the HTML code or text to the left and paste into Small- and medium-sized family farms tasked with feeding a few thousand colonists transformed over the centuries into a juggernaut of billion-dollar corporations that wring profits out of factory farms that farmers a few generations ago wouldnt even recognize as being farms at all. Can the conditions that produced the fast-growing economies of the Four TigersHong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwanbe replicated? See also Food and Cuisines ; Jungle, The ; Meatpacking . Packingtown was notorious for their awful living conditions and working conditions. Meatpackers suffered from the following: Meatpackers were not the only ones impacted by the poor conditions in their facility. After the skin turned red, it then hardened and cracked. The fate of the Western open range, the cattle barons whose fortunes were built on it, and the iconic cowboys who did the hard work of driving cattle for endless miles was sealed in 1867 with the arrival of one of historys most low-tech but consequential inventions: barbed wire. Meat Inspection Act of 1906, U.S. legislation, signed by Pres. With industrialization came new systems of labor. The conditions of the meatpacking industry gained the attention of socialist journalist Upton Sinclair. If your organization is interested in becoming a Stacker Meat Inspection Act of 1906, U.S. legislation, signed by Pres. "The Jungle shows the effects of economic hardship on an immigrant family in the early 1900 's. That is all . Meatpacking is a dangerous job, and the wage is low. Children as young as three were often employed and forced to work long hours (sometimes 12-15 hour days) for very little pay. In Chicago 1900 the Chicago meatpacking industry, along with other industries, began to expand and grow. As early as 1880, American ranchers were exporting their beef to England, which had long been considered the home of the finest beef in the world; now, that title was now squarely in the hands of the American rancher. Support JSTOR Daily! His novel, The Jungle (1906), a shocking expos of the unsanitary and dangerous conditions in the plants, was an immediate best-seller and incited President Roosevelt to enact a series of food safety laws. Its $1 billion in annual sales was more than the annual budget of the U.S. government. The Jungle. Omissions? In 1865, the Union Stock Yards opened in Chicago. In doing so, youre agreeing to the below guidelines. The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was a piece of U.S. legislation, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt on June 30, 1906, that prohibited the sale of adulterated or misbranded livestock and derived products as food and ensured sanitary slaughtering and processing of livestock. In the 1970s, the pork and beef industries finally followed the lead of the poultry industry in adopting factory farming as the preferred business model for meat production. Choice, and U.S. Large warts grew rapidly on the workers hands and split open and developed into ulcers. This fact means employers have leverage over their workers, who fear being reported to the police. It would take at least two months or more to heal; and, that was if they were allowed to work in another department so the infection could heal. In the beginning he had been fresh and strong, and he had gotten a job Add into the equation long hours, low wages, and child workers, what emerges is a social nightmare. However, with the Industrial Revolution came new systems of labor. Elisha Mills in 1818 started the first large-scale pork-packing plant in Cincinnati, where pigs were slaughtered and their meat was preserved in brine-filled barrels to meet the growing demand for salted pork. By the turn of the last century there were only five or six mammoth meatpacking companies, and they controlled the majority of meatpacking in America. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. The 1939 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act finally gave teeth to those reforms by giving the FDA the authority to regulate, monitor, and enforce safety and quality standards for food and drugs produced, sold, and consumed in the U.S. You may also like: Where America sends its planes and 25 other manufacturing exports. In 1940, Jones perfected his design, Werner began building his trucks, and meat could now be reliably transported over the road for long distances any time of year. As the scale and size of their facilities increased, so did the dangers. The Industrial Revolution fundamentally changed meat processing. The animals died in agony and that affected the quality of the meat. JSTOR is part of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. Largest of all was the meat-packing industry in Chicago. The rise of fast-food culture would forever change the way animals were raised, killed, and processed, giving rise to the modern factory farm. In addition to being handled by unclean workers in an unsanitary environment, large volumes of meat were not always refrigerated. Chicago 1900 became the central home of the American industry and small companies began merging with one another. The Big Four lost market share to smaller companies. In 1957, the Poultry Products Inspection Act required the USDAs inspection arm to inspect birds before, during, and after slaughter and to prevent mislabeled poultry products from going to market. It dramatically shortened the time it took to bring meat to market; old-school cattle drives took months to complete and often resulted in huge losses of herds. At the centre of public outrage was the Beef Trusta collaborative group made up of the five largest meatpacking companiesand its base of packinghouses in Chicagos Packingtown area. The garbage stench, and the smellfrom the vile waste of the meatpacking plants, that floated down the Chicago river, had to be overbearing. Recent science would suggest that there was a lot more going on than just cholera and pneumonia. 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