Opportunity in Crisis: The IBP Revolution during the 1980s Farm Crisis
This paper analyzes IBP, Inc.’s domination of the beef and pork industries during the early 1980s in the American Midwest and subsequent resistance by union workers in Dakota City, Nebraska during the 1982 and 1986 strikes. Though some scholars have linked the decline of strong labor contracts with the IBP Revolution, little attention has been paid to IBP’s use of regional economic hardship to infiltrate the union strongholds throughout the Midwest. The 1980s Farm Crisis and economic recession combined with IBP’s takeover of many defunct beef and pork facilities in Illinois and Iowa gave many old meatpacking companies the excuse they had been waiting for to adopt IBP’s low-wage labor model. Nevertheless, workers at IBP’s flagship facility in Dakota City, Nebraska continued a long history of protest against the company’s anti-labor policies well into the 1980s.
The 1980s farm crisis hobbled strikers’ ability to weather a long strike. IBP’s willingness to drag the local and international unions into costly legal battles also affected the union’s financial ability to support striking workers, as well as the international leadership’s growing aversion to union militancy during strikes. Historians cover the long decline of meatpacking union militancy during the 1970s and 1980s in their studies of changing attitudes of labor leaders as labor organizations with differing ideologies merged. Using union records, congressional testimony, medical records, and newspapers, I follow the local union’s transition from traditional physical militancy to public-facing demonstrations meant to draw public support to the union’s side. I show that while the international union rejected militancy increasingly throughout the 1980s, the local rank and file of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 222 exposed IBP’s corporate weaknesses regarding safety to turn public opinion against the corporate giant.
