Full Citation
Title: When Chickens Devoured Cows: Union Rebuilding in the Meat and Poultry Industry
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2013
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Abstract: This paper examines the current trends in the collective bargaining in the meat and poultry industry, which are the direct consequence of the collapse of the national bargaining structure in the American meat industry during the 1980s driven by the industry's restructuring that lead to the return to plant level collective bargaining in beef, pork, and poultry slaughter and processing. We argue that the driving force behind the collapse and restructuring was the substitution of chicken for beef in the American diet. The relatively high price of beef was no longer sustainable when it came into competition with poultry products that were less costly, healthier, more convenient, and more malleable to further processing. The substitution of chicken for beef, put wages back into competition as consumers redefined market boundaries. Poultry processors were nonunion, paying low wages, and had developed a high productivity growth production system, known as the broiler complex. They were located in the union hostile rural South and had grown their businesses using African American labor in the Southern Black Belt.
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Authors: Bolton, Mathias; Keefe, Jeffrey
Publisher: Rutgers University
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Other
Countries: United States