Labor Practices in the Meat Packing and Poultry Processing Industry: An Overview

Publication Date: October 2006

Publisher: Library of Congress. Congressional Research Service

Author(s):

Research Area: Agriculture, forestry and fishing; Labor

Type:

Abstract:

During the early 1960s, segments of the meat packing industry began to move from large urban centers to small communities scattered throughout the Midwest. By century's end, this migration had effected major changes within the industry. The old packing firms that had established their dominance during the late 1800s had largely disappeared or been restructured as part of a new breed of packers. Joining with the poultry processors who had emerged in the wake of World War II, they quickly became a major force in American and, later, global industry.

The urban-to-rural migration, some suggest, had at least two major motivations. One was to locate packing facilities in areas where animals were raised rather than transporting the stock to urban packinghouses as had been the tradition: a more economical arrangement. The other was a quest for lower labor costs: to leave behind the urban unions and their collective bargaining agreements and to operate, as nearly as possible, in a union-free environment. This initiative involved a lowwage strategy, allowing for employment of lower skilled and low-wage workers.

The aftermath of this migration was complex. The urban unionized workforce, by and large, did not follow the migrating plants. Since most local communities could not provide an adequate supply of labor, the relocation process implied recruitment of workers from outside the area of production. In practice, packers and processors came increasingly to rely upon recent immigrants or, allegedly in some instances, upon workers not authorized for employment in the United States.

Gradually, the new breed packers (and their poultry counterparts) began to dominate the market -- through various business arrangements consolidating the industry into a small number of large firms. This corporate churning impacted the trade union movement and its relations with the industry. The unions, too, were restructured. The labor-management relationship, largely set during the 1940s, was gradually replaced with new patterns of bargaining. Further, the demographics of the workforce changed with the introduction of a new racial/ethnic and gender mixture. Distances between the rural plants made union organization difficult, as did the new linguistic and cultural differences among workers. Gradually, the workforce was transformed from high-wage, stable, and union, to lower-wage and often non-union, and came to be characterized by a high turnover rate.

From time to time, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) has received requests for information on labor standards and labor-management relations in the meat packing industry. Often, these queries have been associated with the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act, but there has been concern with other legislation and issues as well. Some of these areas have been (and continue to be) the subject of litigation. This report is intended as an introduction to the meat packing/processing industry, the unions that have been active in that field, and labormanagement practices among the packers and their employees. It will not likely be updated.