Until the late 1800s,
meat-packing was a job for skilled butchers who were paid a reasonable salary,
and did every part of the job, turning a dead animal into clean meat. One of
the reasons that meat-packing was a small-scale operation was that there was no
way to store large quantities of meat.
By 1900, refrigerated railway cars allowed companies to turn meat-packing into a large-scale operation. They lowered salaries, hired more workers, and turned their factories into an assembly line, where each employee had only one job. This led to unhappy workers, as they were paid a fraction of what they deserved, were driven hard, often got injured, and worked in constant filth. Jobs in meat-packing facilities were nonetheless in high demand because of the thousands of immigrants streaming into Chicago looking for work. In 1898, 76.4% of the people living in the Chicago Stockyard district were immigrants. |
“All day long this man would toil thus, his whole being centered upon the purpose of making twenty-three instead of twenty-two and a half cents an hour; and then his product would be reckoned up by the census taker, and jubilant captains of industry would boast of it in their banquet halls, telling how our workers are nearly twice as efficient as those of any other country. If we are the greatest nation the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we have been able to goad our wage-earners to this pitch of frenzy.” -- The Jungle "At the crack of dawn, men and women assembled outside the meat plants. Sometimes crowds of hundreds or even thousands would wait for the straw bosses and employment agents to appear and choose new employees. Representatives of the company went out into the crowd and picked those that seemed the strongest or most skilled. There was no bargaining as to wages or hours: the agent simply tapped the man or woman he chose and told the, "Come along!" |