Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality - Softcover

Halpern, Rick; Horowitz, Roger

Softcover

ISBN 10: 158367005X ISBN 13: 9781583670057

Publisher: monthly review press, 2009

Synopsis

The hope of securing gainful employment in America's meatpacking industry fired the dreams and imaginations of southern blacks seeking to escape the limits imposed by rural poverty, sharecropping, and Jim Crow segregation. Despite terrible working conditions, the packinghouse provided jobs in urban centers where other doors remained closed. Using oral history interviews drawn from the massive United Packinghouse Workers of America Oral History Project (underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities), Halpern and Horowitz trace the impact of the packinghouse on race relations, the civil rights movement, and African American communities from Chicago to Fort Worth. The interviewees speak for themselves with power, intelligence, and emotion. They reveal the importance of the packinghouse employment to midwestern black communities, and offer insights into the work experience and family relationships of African Americans. They relate the remarkable representation of interracial cooperation within a labor union - the United Packinghouse Workers of America - and the positive role this organization played in the promotion of social change, racial equality, and tolerance.

About this title

Product Description:

Meatpackers provides an important window into race and racism in the American workplace. In their own words, male and female packinghouse workers in the Midwest-mostly African-American-talk of their experiences on the shop floor and picket lines. They tell of their fight between the 1930s and 1960s for economic advancement and racial equality. In cities like Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, Fort Worth, and Waterloo, Iowa, meatpackers built a union that would defend their interests as workers-and their civil rights.

About the Author:

Rick Halpern teaches at University College London and is the author of Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-54 (1997).

About this edition

• Publisher: monthly review press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 158367005X
• ISBN 13: 9781583670057
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 180