Welcome to The Jungle meatpacking then and now.

The Jungle

By Upton Sinclair

Bedford/St, Martin's, 2005

This year is the centennial of Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, the story of a Lithuanian immigrant newly arrived to the United States who seeks work in Chicago's gruesome meat-packing industry. Remarkably, the book still seems applicable as social criticism 100 years later. Once again, migration is reshaping the North American working class, labour's crisis has left workers defenseless against management, and meat packing is today a low-wage, dangerous job. First published in 1905 in a Kansas-based socialist newspaper, The Appeal to Reason, a year after a national strike of tens of thousands of meat-packing workers was crushed, Sinclair's vivid story reached a broader audience when issued in book form in 1906. A runaway bestseller, The Jungle has remained in print almost ever since and has been translated into dozens of languages. It has influenced generations of readers, including historian Howard Zinn, who has acknowledged its powerful hold on him when he read it as a youth. Many readers of The Jungle have been moved by the novel to a lifetime of socialist commitment. When we first meet the central character, Jurgis Rudkus, he is marrying his sweetheart. He is young, muscular and optimistic, greeting every problem with the pledge, "I will work harder." Character and physique, however, do not bring Jurgis success. Dealt blow upon blow in the giant plants, he steadily loses his dignity, his confidence, his strength, his job, his family and his hope.

GUTS

Middle-class readers were so upset by The Jungle that they wrote scores of letters to President Theodore Roosevelt. But their indignation was not for Jurgis, the personification of "the workingmen of America" to whom Sinclair dedicated his book. Upset readers, rather, were nauseated by The Jungle's revelations about the meat-packing industry's unsanitary practices. "I aimed at the public's heart," wrote Sinclair, "and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

The Jungle exposed the processing of diseased, condemned livestock, the disguising of malodorous meat with dyes and bleach and the grinding-up of sawdust and rat feces into sausages. Public outrage resulted in Congressional passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, both signed into law by Roosevelt in 1906.

Today The Jungle is remembered for its guts, especially by readers who encounter the novel in adolescence. It boldly championed labour's cause, encouraged tolerance toward immigrants, challenged a system that puts money before human rights, espoused socialism and prompted political reform in a way few successful American novels can match.

But The Jungle was not flawless. While Sinclair was sympathetic to the plight of Eastern European immigrants, he portrayed African Americans, who appear in the novel mainly as strike breakers, in the flagrantly racist manner typical of his time. This racism was both a moral failing and a strategic mistake; successful labour organizing, especially in meat packing and poultry, has always demanded interracial solidarity.

Another defect of the novel is its preaching and sentimentality, which have left it open to criticism from literary critics, who fault the book for being a political tract masquerading as fiction. That charge, however, is even more applicable to some of Sinclair's later works. Sinclair lived to be ninety, and he published a book for practically every year of his life. None of them quite recaptured the immense literary and political success of The Jungle, published when the author was merely 28 years old.

By mid-century, it seemed that the conditions depicted in The Jungle lay in the past. A militant, interracial industrial union was born with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and meat packing was thoroughly unionized by the 1940s. "There is now adequate inspection of meat products," Sinclair assured readers in 1956, "and the workers in all the stockyards now have strong unions and are able to protect their rights."

THE JUNGLE RETURNS

In the 1960s and 1970s, however, plant relocation to rural and southern facilities and competition from low-wage, union-hostile meat producers destroyed Chicago's once-vast Packingtown and the working-class Polish and Lithuanian community known as "Back of the Yards." With the exception of some fighting locals like P-9 in Austin, Minnesota, unions failed to face this challenge head-on. Labour's presence in meat packing is ever more tenuous. Most recently, Tyson--the world's largest meat packer--managed to bust Teamsters Local 556 in Pasco, Washington, one of the strongest and most militant locals in the industry.

In the 1980s and 1990s Latin American, Asian and African newcomers replaced the descendants of eastern and southern Europeans as the source of cheap labour at Tyson and other lean-production companies. Critics charge that companies deliberately recruit undocumented workers whose precarious status renders them vulnerable to exploitation. (If The Jungle were published today, Jurgis and Ona Rudkus would be Jose and Rosa Ramirez.) This year, a Human Rights Watch report entitled Blood, Sweat, and Fear (www.hrw.org/reports/2005/usao105) detailed wide-spread illegal union-busting tactics by meat-packing employers, hazardous and unsanitary working conditions, and heavy intimidation of immigrant workers.

Cheap meat is one result, but consumers are paying a high price for it. As deregulation diminished governmental standards and inspection, managers have ratcheted up line speeds, increasing the splattering of fecal and stomach matter and spreading food-borne illnesses like E. coli. This deadly threat, described by journalist Eric Schlosser in his popular book Fast Food Nation, is microbial and invisible, but every bit as much a consequence of profit maximization as the unwholesome practices exposed by Sinclair a century ago. If there is a silver lining, it is that this time around the interests of labour and consumers cannot be easily divided. Speed-up and unsanitary working conditions--two critical issues for meat-packing workers--are directly linked to consumers' health concerns. To secure public health, labour's need for safe, adequately paid, dignified work must be met. If the United States wants to soothe its upset stomach, this time around it will have to show more heart.

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Author:	Phelps, Christopher
Publication:	Canadian Dimension
Date:	Nov 1, 2005
Words:	982
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