So here are some excerpts from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle which was first published in 1906. It follows Jurgis a strong young Lithuanian immigrant as he goes from confident innocent to experienced bitterness. You can read the whole book online here. It takes place is the stockyards of Chicago.
This may help people understand why people risked their lives to create and join unions. And why the Kochs (what do we say now that only one of the brothers is still living?) and Waltons other wealthy business owners have fought them - so they could do as they wished despite the misery it caused their employees, who are simply expendable. And this story also shows us why factories today still employ millions of undocumented workers - because the workers are desperate and compliant so they won't be deported. It's also a story of why we can't trust for-profit companies to police themselves - for worker safety, fairness, or food safety either.
The owners of the factory Sinclair depicts are no different from how our president behaves - ruthless and entitled.
What made all this the more painful was that it was so hard on the few
that had really done their best. There was poor old ponas Jokubas, for
instance--he had already given five dollars, and did not every one know
that Jokubas Szedvilas had just mortgaged his delicatessen store for two
hundred dollars to meet several months' overdue rent? And then there was
withered old poni Aniele--who was a widow, and had three children, and
the rheumatism besides, and did washing for the tradespeople on Halsted
Street at prices it would break your heart to hear named. Aniele had
given the entire profit of her chickens for several months. Eight of
them she owned, and she kept them in a little place fenced around on her
backstairs. All day long the children of Aniele were raking in the dump
for food for these chickens; and sometimes, when the competition there
was too fierce, you might see them on Halsted Street walking close to
the gutters, and with their mother following to see that no one robbed
them of their finds. Money could not tell the value of these chickens
to old Mrs. Jukniene--she valued them differently, for she had a feeling
that she was getting something for nothing by means of them--that with
them she was getting the better of a world that was getting the better
of her in so many other ways.
Chapter 2
Jurgis talked lightly about work, because he was young. They told him
stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of
Chicago, and of what had happened to them afterward--stories to make
your flesh creep, but Jurgis would only laugh. He had only been there
four months, and he was young, and a giant besides. There was too much
health in him. He could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten.
“That is well enough for men like you,” he would say, “silpnas, puny
fellows--but my back is broad.”
Jurgis was like a boy, a boy from the country. He was the sort of man
the bosses like to get hold of, the sort they make it a grievance they
cannot get hold of. When he was told to go to a certain place, he would
go there on the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would
stand round fidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was
in him. If he were working in a line of men, the line always moved
too slowly for him, and you could pick him out by his impatience and
restlessness. That was why he had been picked out on one important
occasion; for Jurgis had stood outside of Brown and Company's “Central
Time Station” not more than half an hour, the second day of his arrival
in Chicago, before he had been beckoned by one of the bosses. Of this he
was very proud, and it made him more disposed than ever to laugh at the
pessimists. In vain would they all tell him that there were men in that
crowd from which he had been chosen who had stood there a month--yes,
many months--and not been chosen yet. “Yes,” he would say, “but what
sort of men? Broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings, fellows who have
spent all their money drinking, and want to get more for it. Do you want
me to believe that with these arms”--and he would clench his fists and
hold them up in the air, so that you might see the rolling muscles--“that
with these arms people will ever let me starve?”
.....
Yet, when they saw the home of the Widow Jukniene they could not but
recoil, even so, in all their journey they had seen nothing so bad as
this. Poni Aniele had a four-room flat in one of that wilderness of
two-story frame tenements that lie “back of the yards.” There were four
such flats in each building, and each of the four was a “boardinghouse”
for the occupancy of foreigners--Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, or
Bohemians. Some of these places were kept by private persons, some were
cooperative. There would be an average of half a dozen boarders to each
room--sometimes there were thirteen or fourteen to one room, fifty
or sixty to a flat. Each one of the occupants furnished his own
accommodations--that is, a mattress and some bedding. The mattresses
would be spread upon the floor in rows--and there would be nothing else
in the place except a stove. It was by no means unusual for two men
to own the same mattress in common, one working by day and using it by
night, and the other working at night and using it in the daytime. Very
frequently a lodging house keeper would rent the same beds to double
shifts of men.
One of the first problems that Jurgis ran upon was that of the unions.
He had had no experience with unions, and he had to have it explained
to him that the men were banded together for the purpose of fighting
for their rights. Jurgis asked them what they meant by their rights, a
question in which he was quite sincere, for he had not any idea of any
rights that he had, except the right to hunt for a job, and do as he was
told when he got it. Generally, however, this harmless question would
only make his fellow workingmen lose their tempers and call him a fool.
There was a delegate of the butcher-helpers' union who came to see
Jurgis to enroll him; and when Jurgis found that this meant that he
would have to part with some of his money, he froze up directly, and the
delegate, who was an Irishman and only knew a few words of Lithuanian,
lost his temper and began to threaten him. In the end Jurgis got into a
fine rage, and made it sufficiently plain that it would take more than
one Irishman to scare him into a union. Little by little he gathered
that the main thing the men wanted was to put a stop to the habit of
“speeding-up”; they were trying their best to force a lessening of the
pace, for there were some, they said, who could not keep up with it,
whom it was killing. But Jurgis had no sympathy with such ideas as
this--he could do the work himself, and so could the rest of them, he
declared, if they were good for anything. If they couldn't do it, let
them go somewhere else. Jurgis had not studied the books, and he would
not have known how to pronounce “laissez faire”; but he had been round
the world enough to know that a man has to shift for himself in it,
and that if he gets the worst of it, there is nobody to listen to him
holler.
Yet there have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore
by Malthus in the books, and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief
fund in time of a famine. It was the same with Jurgis, who consigned the
unfit to destruction, while going about all day sick at heart because
of his poor old father, who was wandering somewhere in the yards begging
for a chance to earn his bread. Old Antanas had been a worker ever since
he was a child; he had run away from home when he was twelve, because
his father beat him for trying to learn to read. And he was a faithful
man, too; he was a man you might leave alone for a month, if only you
had made him understand what you wanted him to do in the meantime. And
now here he was, worn out in soul and body, and with no more place in
the world than a sick dog. He had his home, as it happened, and some one
who would care for him if he never got a job; but his son could not help
thinking, suppose this had not been the case. Antanas Rudkus had been
into every building in Packingtown by this time, and into nearly every
room; he had stood mornings among the crowd of applicants till the very
policemen had come to know his face and to tell him to go home and give
it up. He had been likewise to all the stores and saloons for a mile
about, begging for some little thing to do; and everywhere they had
ordered him out, sometimes with curses, and not once even stopping to
ask him a question.
Jurgis would find out these things for himself, if he stayed there long
enough; it was the men who had to do all the dirty jobs, and so there
was no deceiving them; and they caught the spirit of the place, and did
like all the rest. Jurgis had come there, and thought he was going to
make himself useful, and rise and become a skilled man; but he would
soon find out his error--for nobody rose in Packingtown by doing good
work. You could lay that down for a rule--if you met a man who was
rising in Packingtown, you met a knave. That man who had been sent to
Jurgis' father by the boss, he would rise; the man who told tales
and spied upon his fellows would rise; but the man who minded his own
business and did his work--why, they would “speed him up” till they had
worn him out, and then they would throw him into the gutter.
One day a man slipped and hurt his leg; and that afternoon, when the
last of the cattle had been disposed of, and the men were leaving,
Jurgis was ordered to remain and do some special work which this injured
man had usually done. It was late, almost dark, and the government
inspectors had all gone, and there were only a dozen or two of men on
the floor. That day they had killed about four thousand cattle, and
these cattle had come in freight trains from far states, and some of
them had got hurt. There were some with broken legs, and some with gored
sides; there were some that had died, from what cause no one could
say; and they were all to be disposed of, here in darkness and silence.
“Downers,” the men called them; and the packing house had a special
elevator upon which they were raised to the killing beds, where the gang
proceeded to handle them, with an air of businesslike nonchalance which
said plainer than any words that it was a matter of everyday routine. It
took a couple of hours to get them out of the way, and in the end Jurgis
saw them go into the chilling rooms with the rest of the meat, being
carefully scattered here and there so that they could not be identified.
When he came home that night he was in a very somber mood, having begun
to see at last how those might be right who had laughed at him for his
faith in America.
The men upon the killing beds felt also the effects of the slump which
had turned Marija out; but they felt it in a different way, and a way
which made Jurgis understand at last all their bitterness. The big
packers did not turn their hands off and close down, like the canning
factories; but they began to run for shorter and shorter hours. They had
always required the men to be on the killing beds and ready for work at
seven o'clock, although there was almost never any work to be done till
the buyers out in the yards had gotten to work, and some cattle had come
over the chutes. That would often be ten or eleven o'clock, which was
bad enough, in all conscience; but now, in the slack season, they would
perhaps not have a thing for their men to do till late in the afternoon.
And so they would have to loaf around, in a place where the thermometer
might be twenty degrees below zero! At first one would see them running
about, or skylarking with each other, trying to keep warm; but before
the day was over they would become quite chilled through and exhausted,
and, when the cattle finally came, so near frozen that to move was an
agony. And then suddenly the place would spring into activity, and the
merciless “speeding-up” would begin!
There were weeks at a time when Jurgis went home after such a day as
this with not more than two hours' work to his credit--which meant about
thirty-five cents. There were many days when the total was less than
half an hour, and others when there was none at all. The general average
was six hours a day, which meant for Jurgis about six dollars a week;
and this six hours of work would be done after standing on the killing
bed till one o'clock, or perhaps even three or four o'clock, in the
afternoon. Like as not there would come a rush of cattle at the very
end of the day, which the men would have to dispose of before they went
home, often working by electric light till nine or ten, or even twelve
or one o'clock, and without a single instant for a bite of supper. The
men were at the mercy of the cattle. Perhaps the buyers would be holding
off for better prices--if they could scare the shippers into thinking
that they meant to buy nothing that day, they could get their own terms.
For some reason the cost of fodder for cattle in the yards was much
above the market price--and you were not allowed to bring your own
fodder! Then, too, a number of cars were apt to arrive late in the day,
now that the roads were blocked with snow, and the packers would buy
their cattle that night, to get them cheaper, and then would come into
play their ironclad rule, that all cattle must be killed the same day
they were bought. There was no use kicking about this--there had been
one delegation after another to see the packers about it, only to be
told that it was the rule, and that there was not the slightest chance
of its ever being altered. And so on Christmas Eve Jurgis worked till
nearly one o'clock in the morning, and on Christmas Day he was on the
killing bed at seven o'clock.
All this was bad; and yet it was not the worst. For after all the hard
work a man did, he was paid for only part of it. Jurgis had once been
among those who scoffed at the idea of these huge concerns cheating;
and so now he could appreciate the bitter irony of the fact that it was
precisely their size which enabled them to do it with impunity. One of
the rules on the killing beds was that a man who was one minute late
was docked an hour; and this was economical, for he was made to work the
balance of the hour--he was not allowed to stand round and wait. And on
the other hand if he came ahead of time he got no pay for that--though
often the bosses would start up the gang ten or fifteen minutes before
the whistle. And this same custom they carried over to the end of the
day; they did not pay for any fraction of an hour--for “broken time.” A
man might work full fifty minutes, but if there was no work to fill out
the hour, there was no pay for him. Thus the end of every day was a
sort of lottery--a struggle, all but breaking into open war between
the bosses and the men, the former trying to rush a job through and
the latter trying to stretch it out. Jurgis blamed the bosses for this,
though the truth to be told it was not always their fault; for the
packers kept them frightened for their lives--and when one was in danger
of falling behind the standard, what was easier than to catch up
by making the gang work awhile “for the church”? This was a savage
witticism the men had, which Jurgis had to have explained to him. Old
man Jones was great on missions and such things, and so whenever they
were doing some particularly disreputable job, the men would wink at
each other and say, “Now we're working for the church!”
One of the consequences of all these things was that Jurgis was no
longer perplexed when he heard men talk of fighting for their rights.
He felt like fighting now himself; and when the Irish delegate of the
butcher-helpers' union came to him a second time, he received him in a
far different spirit. A wonderful idea it now seemed to Jurgis, this
of the men--that by combining they might be able to make a stand and
conquer the packers! Jurgis wondered who had first thought of it; and
when he was told that it was a common thing for men to do in America, he
got the first inkling of a meaning in the phrase “a free country.” The
delegate explained to him how it depended upon their being able to get
every man to join and stand by the organization, and so Jurgis signified
that he was willing to do his share. Before another month was by, all
the working members of his family had union cards, and wore their union
buttons conspicuously and with pride. For fully a week they were quite
blissfully happy, thinking that belonging to a union meant an end to all
their troubles.
How are things today? Here's from a 2006 PBS look at meat packing in the US from the days of The Jungle until today:
"Today, America's meat industry is the nation's largest agricultural sector and sales of meat and poultry exceed $100 billion a year in the U.S. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the animal slaughtering and processing industry employed a total of 506,000 people at the close of 2005. The average earnings of production workers that year was $11.47 an hour, about 30 percent less than the average wage for all manufacturing jobs in the U.S. According to REAP, a union-affiliated group, union membership among meat packing employees has plunged from 80 percent in 1980 to less than 50 percent today.
The face of the average meatpacking plant worker has also changed. Over the past two decades, the number of immigrant laborers in meat packing plants—and in the Midwestern areas in which they are primarily located—has increased dramatically. According to the USDA, the percentage of Hispanic meat-processing workers rose from less than 10 percent in 1980 to nearly 30 percent in 2000."
[UPDATE 2:30pm: KS offers a link to an Atlantic article on current labor conditions. ]
