In 1947, employment in meatpacking across the Midwest was concentrated in the region’s metros: Chicago, Peoria, St. Louis (including the counties on the Illinois side), Milwaukee, Madison, Dubuque, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Omaha, and Kansas City.  The only non-metropolitan outposts were an Armour plant in Mason City (Cerro Gordo County), Iowa, and a Hormel Plant in Fort Dodge (Woodbury County), Iowa.   Over the following decades, the industry thinned out dramatically.  Employment in the metro settings fell, while production moved to new or expanded plants in places like Ottumwa (John Morrell), Denison (Farmland), and Storm Lake (Iowa Packers), Iowa; Austin (Hormel), Albert Lea (Wilson) and Worthington (Swift), Minnesota; Schulyer (Cargill) and Fremont (Hormel), Nebraska; and Arkansas City (Rodeo/Morell), Emporia (Tyson), and Liberal (National Beef), Kansas.

Missouri’s boot and shoe industry began to abandon the commercial core of St. Louis for the Ozarks early in the twentieth century.  The state’s largest leather goods firm, the Brown Shoe Company built a plant in Moberly in rural Randolph County in 1905.  Others followed Brown’s lead.  Small towns in Missouri and Illinois competed for this investment, offering generous incentives (construction assistance, tax abatements) and a “company town” hostility to union organizing.  Employers made no secret of their motives, or of their conviction that they were escaping both labor and the urban density that made labor organization easier, and easier to sustain.  When the arrival of the Wagner Act and CIO in the 1930s spawned a renewed union drive, employers responded with economic threats (including plant closings), physical threats, and migration.  In 1941, Brown Shoe opened a new plant in Dyer, Tennessee.   

LEATHER GOODS MAP

The map above tells the story.  In 1947, Missouri’s leather goods industry employed about 20,000, over 90 percent of whom worked (and lived) in the City of St. Louis.  A decade later, employment in leather goods had almost doubled statewide (to over 37,000), but fallen by half in the City—which now claimed less a quarter of those jobs.  After that, employment began to drop off—to 29,000 in 1967 (18 percent in St. Louis), 22,000 in 1977 (9 percent in St. Louis), 14,600 in 1987 (4.5 percent in St. Louis); barely 4,000 in 1978 (7 percent in St. Louis); and only 1,645 in 2007 (just over 100 of which were in St. Louis). 

Although the economic fortunes of the two industries were quite dissimilar, the labor relations strategies had much in common.  Both sought escape from organized (and more easily-organizable) urban labor markets.  Both initially targeted rural workers, and then moved on to foreign workers—the packers by recruiting immigrants, the shoemakers by moving production overseas entirely.

And in each case, the spatial dispersion of production brought with it a collapse in union density, and a collapse in real wages.  At the end of the 1970s, just under half of meatpacking workers belonged to a union. This fell to a third by the early 1980s, and less than one in five by the end of the decade [density graph].  In meatpacking, wages fell alongside—but more dramatically—than those of other production workers.  Between 1947 and 1979, the average real hourly wage of all production workers nearly doubled; after 1979 it flatlined (rising 1.5 percent over 33 years).  Between 1947 and 1979, the average real hourly wage of meatpacking workers rose 80 percent; after 1979 it fell nearly 30 percent.  In 1970 packinghouse wages were about 20 percent higher than the average manufacturing wage, by 2002 they were 20 percent lower.  Wage and union losses were closely related to plant size and location. At the end of the 1970s, large urban packing plants (1,000 or more employees) boasted wages 23 percent higher than the industry average, and 30 to 45 percent higher than the wages at small (fewer than 500 employees) plants.  As outmigration of production continued, and larger rural facilities became the industry norm, the wage premium at larger plants gradually dissipated. 

WAGES GRAPH

In the boot and shoe industry, production wages rose steadily (in real dollars), from under $7.00/hr in the late 1930s to almost $13.00/hr in the early 1970s—but then ground to a halt, falling back under $12.00 by the early 1990s.  Sectoral wages have risen since then, but this is largely an artifact of collapsing employment: as most production moved overseas (national employment in the broader leather goods sector fell from 135,000 to under 30,000 between 1990 and 2012), the few jobs that remained were in non-production jobs or in “boutique” artisanal lines.

We can see a glimpse of these patterns across our more recent history.  Since 1983 (when good industry-level data on union membership becomes available), density in both meatpacking and footwear has fallen steadily.  While the overall employment trajectories are quite distinct (meatpacking consistently employs about half-a-million across these 30 years; footwear employment almost disappears), the net effect is similar. The jobs leaving the urban core are mostly union jobs.  The new jobs--whether they are in Ottumwa or Malaysia—are not.

UNION DENSITY

Union leaders—at least outside the building trades—now have a deep appreciation of the impact on sprawl on public and private sector unionism.  Big box suburban commercial development displaces union jobs, especially in grocery retail and warehousing.  In sectors such as hospitality or building services, union density declines almost in direct proportion to the distance from the urban core. And sprawl undermines public sector unions either by reducing demand for their services (as with transit) or putting unrelenting pressure on public budgets—and feeding the backlash against teachers and other public servants. 

I am interesting in taking this insight further back into the history of American cities and American unions. Meatpacking and shoes are outlying examples, but this sketch of the relationship between urban decline and union decline could be replicated for almost any city and its major sector of employment.  We need to devote closer attention to the geography of organizing and sustaining labor power, and to the ways in which urban decline and sprawl erode the natural solidarities of city life.