Meat, and a Bishop

Americans eat 15 billion pounds of meat a year. It has made fortunes and names for four U. S. families--Armour, Swift, Wilson, Cudahy. It keeps 129,000 men at work the year around.

Two years ago Labormaster John L. Lewis, after long study of the meat industry, slapped his paunch impatiently and sent his No. 1 soapbox fireball, Van A. Bittner, to organize Chicago's 24,000 packinghouse workers for the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Last weekend, two years of patient preparation matured in a mass meeting in the Chicago Coliseum. John Lewis was ready to move against Armour, second packer in the Big Four. In 17 Armour plants from St. Paul to Los Angeles to Birmingham, Ala. to Milwaukee, the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee had either been named sole bargaining agent by the NLRB or claimed a majority.

The haggard, hot-eyed Bittner, who speaks softly off the stump, heard 856 delegates, claiming to represent 78,000 workers, unanimously vote to strike all Armour plants if the big firm declines to negotiate with the C. I. O. Then he told reporters:

"That either means joint wage agreements or the damnedest strike you ever saw. . . ."

When Mr. Lewis called Organizer Bittner off steel and sent him into the almost wholly unorganized meat industry, there were no illusions in his huge, brooding head. He knew that the packing industry's labor policies are far from being as perishable as its products. Packinghouse workers have a non-union tradition. Since a big strike was crushed in 1886 in Chicago, only two major labor disturbances -- one in 1904, one in 1921--have troubled the stockyards. Each was finally throttled. Workers are low-paid. Their wages rank 13th among the 15 major industries. But nearly all larger packers have some sort of employe representation plan.

Laborites Lewis and Bittner moved slowly and thoroughly. They did not risk the splits and premature rough stuff that C. I. O. permitted to occur elsewhere. Chicago packinghouse labor lives "back of the yards" in a wide, dismal area of ramshackle homes and crumby tenements. Nearly all now belong to the C. I. O. Nearly all are devout Roman Catholics.

The religious angle makes the Chicago packers' labor dispute unique, and it will help to shape the outcome, whether the decision is wrought over a council table or fired over a bloody barricade. For while Lewis has been selling them material self-betterment, another man has long been concerned with the packinghouse people's souls.

This man is Most Rev. Bernard James Sheil, Senior Auxiliary Bishop of Chicago, right bower to firm old Cardinal Mundelein. Bishop Sheil is a short, electric character who speaks staccato brogue. Shrewd, kindly, foresighted, he founded the first Catholic Youth Organization in 1930, which has now been accepted as the official organization for all 7,000,000 U. S. Catholic children. Once an able athlete (in 1906 he pitched for St. Viator's College a no-hit, no-run game against Illinois, Big Ten baseball champion that season), he has seen his CYO boys' boxing teams ("The Bishop's K.O. Boys") win the Chicago Golden Gloves tournament every year since 1931.

Bishop Sheil realizes that the backbone of his Church is the same lowly worker who is also C. I. O.'s backbone. Lately he became interested in the Back-of-the-Yards Neighborhood Council, organized by Saul Alinsky, University of Chicago sociology graduate who for social research once lived with the Capone gang. The Council is sympathetic to C. I. O. Bishop Sheil has felt pressure from the packers and from A. F. of L., but last week he was on Van Bittner's platform large as life after the strike vote was taken. In fact, he read the invocation, then sat on the platform, one chair removed from Lewis, who key-noted the threatened strike. The good Bishop realized well that in actively applying a Papal Encyclical to a labor dispute he was making not only Chicago, but U. S. history.

He knew the organizers' story: that the Armour officials. simply would not discuss anything with them; that the plants are fortified; that shipments of livestock to the yards will be stopped by the packers when the strike comes, to starve public opinion as well as the workers into submission. But as a Catholic prelate Bishop Sheil also believed in the sacredness of property rights, the wickedness of violence. He earnestly meant John Lewis and Organizer Bittner as well as Armour & Co. when he prayed God's guidance for "those upon whose shoulders are laid such heavy responsibilities, fraught with such momentous consequences."

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