![]() The average wage of animal slaughterers and processors remained comparatively strong from the 1960s through the early 1980s. ![]() Worker at Hormel meatpacking plant, Austin, MN, 1941. ![]() The UPWA was also known for its progressive ideals and its support of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Over the next 40 years, unions such as the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) were able to improve both the pay and working conditions of meat packing employees in the U.S. But some critics say America's meat business has been in decline for decades and that the poor conditions found in slaughterhouses and packing facilities today are often little better than those described by Sinclair a century ago.ĭuring the 1930s, trade union-organized drives led by the newly-created Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) began to organize workers across different industries, including meat packing. ![]() The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act were both passed later that year, and labor organizations slowly began to improve the conditions under which the country's meat packers toiled. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress In 1906, Upton Sinclair's novel "The Jungle" uncovered harrowing conditions inside America's meat packing plants and initiated a period of transformation in the nation's meat industry. ![]()
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