Summary Of Cutting Into The Meatpacking Line

“Cutting into the Meatpacking Line: Workers and Change in the Rural Midwest” book, by Deborah Fink, focuses mainly on showing what was happening in the meatpacking’s industry in the rural Midwest of Iowa. It shows that the key factors in the creation of the history of the rural working class of Iowa depended on the different experiences that gender, ethnic and racial minorities faced during their working years in the meatpacking. It shows the painful process of struggling for recognition of the employees' rights that women, ethnic and racial minorities faced when they were entering into the meatpacking workforce. Fink wrote her book to inform the reader about what was happening in the meatpacking industry of Iowa the old days, and how women,

As many men left for the military, women’s work become more patriotic. By that time, women work was so important and required and even it was considered to be less indecent. After the war, many women were quitting, and the other who did not quit or fired weren’t receive equal pay as men for equal work. Some plants stopped from hiring women after the war thinking that women's jobs worth less than men's jobs, and for those who did, women remained in low-paying jobs. During 1930, more women started to work in the manufacturing with denying the significance of indecency, but the society made them face new problems like gender segregation and unequal pay. Men were working in a high-paying department with the handling of live animals and killing pigs while women were working in low-paying departments such as bacon and sausage department and made less money than the men in the cut and kill part.An example of gender segregation was when Fink applied to work in the IBP, the person who interviewed her was a man, the person who conducted her orientation was a man, and her supervisor was a man, and there was only one woman. Also, Men's work was graded according to the type of the job and the skills required for that job, while women's wages were same for any women's jobs. Most of the union contracts were protecting men from lower wages, so if they were assigned to women's jobs, they

The inequalities associated with ethnicity are essential to understanding the history of the working class in rural Iowa (Fink, p. 117); Fink once said when she tried to explain that the division of ethnicity was much like the division of gender in the workplace of Iowa, both were treated differently with less human rights. By the time of working in the rural Iowa, gender was segregated, and women were receiving unequal pay as men did for the same job. The ethnic and the racial division were much more like a gender division when ethnic diversity or nonwhites were segregated from whites in the workplace and the daily life. Whites were receiving higher wages than non-whites workers. The races and the ethnic division ran throughout the meatpacking workplace, were the supervisors and the management were white men, and the lower-bracket jobs were Latino, Asian American and black men. The segregation was even in the workplace’s cafeteria where tables were segregated for each ethnic group, where whites were sitting together on the seats on the wall, black were sitting in the cafeteria’s corner, and Latino and Asian American had their different sections and different food. It was not only in the workplace, but the segregation also was present in the daily life when the white households were surrounding by whites, and black families were surrounding by only black neighborhood. As well,