This Day in Labor History: November 11, 1952

On November 11, 1952, management at an Armour meatpacking in Fort Worth, Texas took down the signs for segregated bathrooms on the job after signing a new contract with the United Packinghouse Workers of America, who demanded it. Although the white rank and file workers were furious over this, the UPWA strongly supported the act. This is a critical moment in the history of the industrial union that probably did more than any other to fight for racial democracy in the American workplace during this era.

The United Packinghouse Workers of America were a CIO-affiliated union formed in 1937, originally as the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee. Its base was Chicago–the center of American meatpacking since the late 19th century. By the 1930s, working in meatpacking was the fate for a lot of workers who didn’t have a lot of other options. It was hard and nasty work. Back in the days when Upton Sinclair wrote about these places in The Jungle, it was mostly Polish and other eastern Europeans who worked in the butcheries and packinghouses. By World War I, Black workers started coming to Chicago in large numbers and the packers were happy to hire them, in no small part to have people of different races in the plants that would lead to tension between workers and thus no union organizing. The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 showed how effectively this could work for employers. Around the same time, Mexicans started migrating to Chicago. Mexican migration to the U.S. really only began in the 1910s, as people fled the violence of the Mexican Revolution. Most of these migrants stayed in the Southwest, but Chicago became the great exception. So some of them ended up in meatpacking too. What this meant was a multiracial workforce. You had to organize on a multiracial effort in order to unionize these workplaces.

PWOC became the UPWA in 1943 and proved more adept at real multiracial organizing than almost any other major American union. It had to. It constantly worked to massage tensions between Black workers, the older eastern Europeans and their children, and the rural white workers also migrating north to places like Chicago. By 1949, the union started fighting harder to end any vestiges of segregation on shop floors or discrimination in hiring. Moreover, the meatpacking industry was shifting out of places like Chicago. Later in the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration would engage in open unionbusting by incentivizing the movement of meatpacking out of Chicago and into rural Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas in order to lower meat prices for consumers. That would be hard for the UPWA to overcome. But they were organizing in places such as the factory in Fort Worth where its anti-discrimination principles would have to meet the reality of white supremacy in Jim Crow America.

Now, what happened in Fort Worth showed the deep tensions of the UPWA pushing these ideas in the South. In 1952, the union and Armour signed a contract that, among other things, eliminated official segregation. On November 11, the company took down its signs for segregated bathrooms. Later that day, 200 workers stormed the UPWA union hall, nearly rioting against its leadership. The next day, international leadership flew to Fort Worth to defuse the situation. It didn’t go well. Some of the workers came to meeting armed and threatened union leadership. One of them was the former president of the local, who was also an evangelical minister. He shouted that Chicago was full of communists and among them was UPWA leadership.

Now, Armour was not ready for this kind of thing. Its management didn’t care one way or another about racial integration or segregation. It just wanted meat produced. So it would have been happy to acquiesce to the rank and file workers. But UPWA leadership urged Armour to stay the course. It went further. It told Armour that if it didn’t stand by the agreement, its northern plants would strike in solidarity with Black workers in Fort Worth. Armour backed off at that point. The UPWA then flooded the plant with Chicago-based staff. In doing so, it threatened the local leadership, as well as leadership through the South with removal if they did not go along with the international’s civil rights unionism. Finally, it worked hard to develop both Black and Mexican worker leadership on the shop floor to help demonstrate that these workers were the future of the union and that whites needed to promote class solidarity, not white solidarity.

It didn’t work entirely of course. Some southern locals left the UPWA. It was good riddance from the leadership’s perspective. Saying racism was OK was counter to everything this union believed and how it operated in its core northern sites. It lost locals in New Orleans sugar factories and all-white stockyards. But it was simply a necessary evil. This sort of unionism was central to a lot of northern-based internationals in this era. The United Steelworkers of America and the International Woodworkers of America were among the other CIO-affiliated unions who had social and racial democracy at the top of their agenda and had to deal with recalcitrant and angry southern locals fighting them every step of the way.

In the aftermath of the 1952 move, the UPWA became a top labor supporter of the civil rights movement. Civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, looked to the UPWA to provide critical support. This was the kind of multiracial unionism they sought for their economic justice demands. Unfortunately, this was at the time that the widespread closure of union plants started to decimate that union, which had to merge with another union in 1968 to become the Amalgamated Meat Cutters. Today, what’s left of the UPWA is in the United Food and Commercial Workers.

I also want to use this moment to argue against the fetishizing of “union democracy” that we see too often today on the labor left. I don’t oppose union democracy of course, but the idea that a democratic union is going to be a social justice union is complete ideological fantasy. I have had a major union leader tell me to my face that a democratic union will obviously be a social justice union. I was absolutely stunned. Historically, the first goal of workers in a democratic union has frequently been to keep that union white. It’s not always like that, but it quite often is. Those who constantly talk about union democracy are either blissfully ignoring this reality and convincing themselves that in fact the workers think just like a leftist organizer or they don’t really believe in the principles of union democracy. After all, the rise of Sean O’Brien in the Teamsters is very much a union democracy movement and that hasn’t been good for anyone in the labor movement. So take what union democracy means seriously and quit idealizing the working class into something that fits your ideology and simplifies complex people.

I borrowed from Michael Goldfield, The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s to write this post.

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