Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality (review)

Abstract

Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz, intellectual collaborators for 15 years, have provided us with a valuable and rich historical resource in this highly readable oral history of black packinghouse workers and their attempts to gain equality and justice both on the job and in society generally. This book, now in paperback from its 1996 hardcover, is actually more a collection of oral histories than a single work, but the authors have done a good job of connecting common threads throughout. Meatpackers covers the experiences of black packinghouse workers in cities as diverse as Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, Fort Worth, and Waterloo, Iowa.