United Packinghouse Workers of America

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The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), later the United Packinghouse, Food and Allied Workers, was a labor union that represented workers in the meatpacking industry.

The UPWA was chartered originally chartered as the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC) by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1937. The PWOC organized locals throughout the nation with the greatest concentrations in the Midwestern and Great Plains states. Like many unions in the CIO, the PWOC tried to organize all workers in a given plant regardless of skill or trade (see industrial unionism). The PWOC had to compete with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, an older AFL craft union. In 1943 the PWOC was officially chartered as the UPWA.

In the 1940s, the UPWA won nationwide contracts with companies including the "Big Four" of meatpacking: Armour, Swift, Wilson, and Cudahy. In the 1950s and 1960s, the UPWA was at the forefront of union support for the civil rights movement and was a strong ally of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Historians regard the UPWA's civil rights activity as a prime example of social unionism.

As the meatpacking industry restructured in the postwar years and the Big Four lost their dominance, plants represented by the UPWA closed in large numbers. As a result, its membership in dropped quickly in the 1960s. In 1968, the UPWA dissolved into the Amalgamated Meat Cutters.

[edit] External links

• History of packinghouse unions in Chicago

[edit] Further reading

• Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-54 (University of Illinois Press, 1997)
• Roger Horowitz, "Negro and White, Unite and Fight": A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-90 (University of Illinois Press, 1997)