The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), later the United Packinghouse, Food and Allied Workers, was a labor union that represented workers in the meatpacking industry.
The UPWA was chartered originally chartered as the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC) by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1937. The PWOC organized locals throughout the nation with the greatest concentrations in the Midwestern and Great Plains states. Like many unions in the CIO, the PWOC tried to organize all workers in a given plant regardless of skill or trade (see industrial unionism). The PWOC had to compete with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, an older AFL craft union. In 1943 the PWOC was officially chartered as the UPWA.
In the 1940s, the UPWA won nationwide contracts with companies including the "Big Four" of meatpacking: Armour, Swift, Wilson, and Cudahy. In the 1950s and 1960s, the UPWA was at the forefront of union support for the civil rights movement and was a strong ally of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Historians regard the UPWA's civil rights activity as a prime example of social unionism.
As the meatpacking industry restructured in the postwar years and the Big Four lost their dominance, plants represented by the UPWA closed in large numbers. As a result, its membership in dropped quickly in the 1960s. In 1968, the UPWA dissolved into the Amalgamated Meat Cutters.
Famous quotes containing the words united, workers and/or america:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of ... every industrial area in the whole country.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“I will keep America moving forward, always forward—for a better America, for an endless enduring dream and a thousand points of light.”
—George Bush (b. 1924)