Butcher Boycott

Last August Secretary of Agriculture Wallace, surveying a map of 1,100 counties in 22 states burned crisp by Drought, remarked that a food shortage was not nearly so serious as a feed shortage. Last week the feed shortage had produced what looked very much like a food shortage. To be sure, there was enough wheat for bread, potatoes were plentiful and the fruit and vegetable crops were good. But for the first time in years consumption of beef and pork had practically overtaken supply.

According to Government figures, cattle & calves on the hoof totaled 60,667,000 last Jan. 1, as against 68,290,000 one year before, a decrease of 11%. Within the same twelvemonth Drought and AAA's corn-hog program reduced the number of hogs 35%, from 57,177,000 to 37,007,000, smallest in 50 years. Sheep and lambs, least affected by Drought, were down some 5% to 49,766,000 last January. Out of proportion to these decreases in supply were the increases in price paid by the packer. Hogs that cost him $3.65 per cwt. a year ago cost him $10.15 last week. For cattle he paid 50% more last week than for the same week last year.

Slowly through the winter, while the meat supply was dwindling, the price to the consumer was creeping up. By February housewives everywhere began to complain (TIME, Feb. 25). Resentment boiled into a one-day consumers' strike in Los Angeles where 10,000 housewives boycotted their butchers, forced them to cut meat prices 5-c- a lb. For a time all was quiet. Last week a housewives' boycott broke out again, this time in New York City.

A horde of plain Eastside housewives, chanting "down with high meat prices!" invaded the distributing plants of Wilson & Co. and United Dressed Beef Co. In The Bronx 2,000 women volunteering as pickets succeeded in closing down more than 1,000 meat shops. In Brooklyn a poultry dealer named William Sheeger carried a chicken home for supper. Pickets, mistaking him for a customer who would not join the boycott, hurled a rock through his window, pummeled him. Confined at first to kosher shops, the strike spread to some nonkosher operators. Strike leaders claimed that more than 4,000 shops had been closed. Meatmen put the figure at about 12% of that number.

Prime organizer of the strike was a Bronx housewife named Mrs. Sarah Licht, secretary of City Action Committee Against the High Cost of Living. Money was raised through open air meetings at which members contributed dimes, nickels, pennies. A Labor society called the United Council of Working Class Women helped out. Demanding a flat reduction of 10-c- per lb. in all meat prices, Housewife Licht & associates pointed to the following comparison of last week's meat prices in New York City with the same week last year :

             ; Pork         1935        1934
Hams           & nbsp;       $0.28   & nbsp;   $0.20
Loins           & nbsp;            .33          .23
Centre chops           .39          .28

             ; Veal
Leg and rump          .29          .24
Breast                     .19          .14
Shoulder              ;    .24          .16
Cutlets          &nbs p;         .45          .39
             ; Beef
Rib roast                 .34          .24
Sirloin roast             .42          .32
Chuck with bone     .31          .21
Porterhouse steak    .50         .44
Sirloin steak            .41          .36
Round steak           .42          .33
Chuck steak           .29           .21

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