Winter at the Packing-House Picket Line
As Seattle's labor landscape shifts in 1887, meat-packers face a grueling struggle against both their employers and the encroaching winter chill.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The trouble at the packing-houses is likely to be a more serious matter than was at first anticipated. The packers do not seem to employ any conciliatory measures, and it is evident that there will be a struggle of some duration for the labor organizations concerned. The attitude assumed by the packers is doubtless caused by irritation at the renewal of a strike which had but recently been settled. The packers are evidently determined that if they are to remain in business at all, it must be independent of the labor organizations. They are determined that the fight should be fought at once, and that the strike which has been inaugurated should end only in the triumph of the labor organizations or in their complete annihilation, as far, at least, as the packing industry is concerned. The outlook is most unfavorable for the men. They are on the eve of winter, and, doubtlessly, face a long period of unemployment. Hunger and cold combined will prove to be a more powerful foe than hunger alone. The strikers are largely men who have homes and families near the stockyards, and they cannot drift away and enter other occupations as they could if they were not men of families. The packing industry is the primary industry of this district and it is that which affords almost all the employment to be had in the vicinity of 'Packingtown.' The packers have expressed their determination to protect their property at all hazards, and it may be said to the credit of the strikers that, as a body, they have thus far showed no disposition to be violent or lawless.
“Hunger and cold combined will prove to be a more powerful foe than hunger alone.”
This 1887 report captures a classic tension in Seattle history: the precarity of laborers tied to a single industry and the weaponization of the cold by capital. Today's Seattle labor struggles, while modernized, still hinge on the same fundamental imbalance where workers risk their homes and livelihoods against massive, entrenched corporate interests during harsh, unpredictable seasons.
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