Labor Day 2024

Following is a chapter of my privately published memoir, An Iowa Life.

A Union Job

With classes and examinations finished, I headed back to Mother’s home for the summer. Several high school classmates applied for summer jobs at industrial workplaces in the Quad-Cities. The post-World War II economy was still humming at John Deere, International Harvester, J.I. Case, and other manufacturers. I took a job at Oscar Mayer and Company where my maternal grandmother and father had worked at different times.

It had been two years since Father died at the plant while loading an elevator. He had been the chief union steward and knew almost everyone. It was a safe, comfortable place to work where the folks who knew Father looked out for me. During one of my first shifts, a millwright who was good friends with Father, asked me if I wanted to see where he died. I passed on the opportunity and took no rain check. It was too soon.

I experienced being a union hire, Iowa-style. Once Oscar Mayer’s human resources representative finished orientation for our group of new hires, he reminded us that the company was an at-will employer in an at-will employment state. At-will means an employee can be discharged for any reason or for no reason. He then left the room so a union representative could recruit us to join. There was never a question that I would join the union, and I did. I worked for Oscar Mayer that summer and two years later in 1973. When I left, I secured a union retirement card. At $4.04 per hour, with overtime, I earned enough during the summer of 1971 to pay my bills during sophomore year at university.

Three college students worked as “maintenance helpers” that summer. It meant we performed a variety of work, usually helping one of the millwrights or welders on projects too big for one person. I spent time in almost every plant department and at the warehouse on Schmidt Road in the West End of Davenport. I learned to drive a forklift, but mainly, I was there to perform physical work. It was hard work.

I was skeptical about productivity. As summer help, a group of us did routine maintenance jobs, like picking up trash on the roof, and cleaning up large piles of metal that had accumulated over the year. But mostly, I helped millwrights and welders repair things in the plant. The work was important, but we were never very busy.

When the production line went down, it was all hands-on deck to repair whatever went wrong and avoid idleness among line workers. The cost of down time was estimated in the tens of thousands of dollars per hour, which seemed like a lot in the early 1970s. I remember trying to break loose a vat of resin with a jackhammer. The resin was used to remove hair that hadn’t burned off the animal at a previous station. Once it cooled and congealed, the line went nowhere until it was removed. I had plenty of supervisors as I ran the tool in the black brick the resin had become. We got the line back into production.

There were days when we were assigned a job at the warehouse. The old timers interpreted a trip to the warehouse as a full day’s work regardless of what had to be done. The times I went with millwrights to the warehouse, whatever needed fixing took a couple of hours. We always spent the full day doing the work. Instead of eating lunch in the company cafeteria, my co-workers looked forward to items off the roach coach which plied the neighborhood with sandwiches, snacks, and beverages. The plant foremen had full understanding about our use of time, and were part of the problem, if there was a problem. When a company recruiter offered me a job to become a plant foreman before college graduation, I turned it down. After my work experience, I did not want a job where lack of productivity was the norm.

My co-workers at the meat packing plant no longer work there, and I lost communication with them as soon as I returned to college that fall. Maybe I learned something from them. There is more to life than staying constantly busy.

Staying busy has never been my priority. I seek truth and meaning in life and feel no need to occupy every moment with items from a to-do list. In fact, there are several ways constant industry creates problems. We become task masters of an arbitrary list and block out the potential of life around us while we concentrate on what we thought was important in the morning.

While we may be skeptical of what a day will bring, and how busy we are, we should enjoy the anticipation of different work and what the roach coach may bring. If we do that, I suspect we will recognize opportunities that we otherwise wouldn’t have known exist. Productivity and industry are important in business, but in our lives, we must take time to wonder. That is a form of industry too often neglected.

It was easy to get a job at the plant. I belonged to a union, the Amalgamated Meat Packers and Butcher Workmen of North America, Local 431. Wages were good, plant conditions were dangerous, and the work was physically hard. I never felt in danger in the plant, despite Father’s death. In my work as a millwright’s assistant the first summer and on the cleanup crew the second, I got to see most of what went on throughout the plant and warehouses. It was not pretty.

Meatpacking was much different in 1971 from what it is today. The plant took in live hogs from farmers and processed about 500 of them each day. There was very little waste. There was a “hog hotel,” which was a place where hogs were kept in smaller pens and fed so they would be calm for slaughter, usually the next day. One of the dirtiest jobs I had was at the end of the production line where a rendering tank processed the final remains from the cutting floor into lard. What was left was shipped to a processor to make fertilizer. My job was to work with a millwright to remove and replace giant paddles inside the tank. It was among the dirtiest jobs in the plant. I learned about using hearing protection and lockout/tagout. The union had negotiated a payment for extra cleanup to perform that work. My millwright made sure I knew to request the pay on my timecard.

People who worked on the production line did not look happy. The work was repetitive and physically demanding, requiring a person to be on their feet for an eight-hour shift. A lot of the work was mindless. Stamping a USDA inspection marking on carcasses, picking through hog innards to find a certain organ, or making the same cut hundreds of times a day. The pay and benefits were perceived to be good by most workers, so they put up with the mindless quality of the job to bring home a paycheck. After the first summer, it was clear a career in meatpacking was not in my future.