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Dissertation Information for James R. Barrett

NAME:
- James R. Barrett

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of Pittsburgh (USA) (1981)

ADVISORS:
- None

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- None

MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected

Title: WORK AND COMMUNITY IN "THE JUNGLE": CHICAGO'S PACKING HOUSE WORKERS, 1894-1922

Abstract: This is a case study of the social implications of the "rise of big business" and the introduction of mass production methods for the lives of workers. After describing the market structure of the industry and the giant corporate bureaucracies which dominated it, the dissertation analyzes the effects of the "rationalized" work process and labor market in the plants and the community--low wages, chronic employment insecurity, extremely irregular hours, high accident rates, and alienation.

Contemporary social surveys and a computer-assisted analysis of manuscript census data are employed to sketch out the physical and social ecology of the community and the relationship among family economy, the work situation, and the standard of living. Linking Packingtown's struggle for existence directly to the character of work and employment in the industry, the study explains the importance of unionization for the community.

Reorganization of the labor market threatened skilled butchers with a decline in status, power, and the quality of their work experience, and also created a large pool of causal common laborers, drawn from throughout the U.S. and around the world. The dissertation traces this continual process of ethnic, racial, and sexual recomposition of the labor force and provides a detailed demographic sketch of packing house workers in the early twentieth century.

Despite tensions among workers along sexual, ethnic, racial, and skill lines, the Amalgemated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America had remarkable success in uniting the workers during two periods of union organization (1900-1904 and the First World War). Consequently, packing provids a good case study of the remaking of the American working class in the era of early monopoly capital. Unionization is described as a process of socialization, an "Americanization from the bottom up" through which an earlier generation of "mature" butcher workmen with trade union experience integrated newcomers into the strong labor milieu of Chicago's South Side.

Several factors influenced the relative success of the butcher workmen in organizing young women and recent Slavic immigrants and their ultimate failure to bring Black workers into the movement. These were: the degree of social contact in the plants and the community among the various groups represented in the industry; the attitude of important leaders and institutions in racial and ethnic subcultures to working class organization; and the general economic and political context and balance of class forces within which organization took place.

Working class fragmentation during the early twentieth century remains a matter for investigation rather than assumption. Labor market segmentation, cultural divisions, and even racism were overcome in some situations; class organization could thrive in the midst of striking diversity. Persistent shop-floor organization and control conflicts in meat packing placed limits on the influence of the corporate liberalism which many historians of the Progressive era have seen as the basis for integration of the labor movement into the dominant political economy.

MPACT Scores for James R. Barrett

A = 0
C = 1
A+C = 1
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2009-06-03 20:34:05

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