 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(April 2013) |
The Rath Packing Company was a meatpacking company located in Waterloo, Iowa, between 1891 and 1985.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(April 2013) |
The Rath Packing Company was a meatpacking company located in Waterloo, Iowa, between 1891 and 1985.
George John Rath (variously referred to as George Rath and John George Rath) was born in 1821 in Breitenau, Württemberg province, Germany. He came to the United States in the late 1840s and eventually settled in Dubuque, Iowa. In Dubuque, Rath began a merchant business, making and selling soap and tallow candles. He also began a pork packing operation. By 1873 he had a new partner in both endeavors: His son, E. F. (Edward Frederick) Rath, doing business under the name George Rath and Son.
In February 1891, the Rath's small pork packing plant and retail market in Dubuque was destroyed by fire. The fire came at a time when many growing towns in Iowa were trying to attract meat packers to relocate or open operations in their communities. A packing plant was a major acquisition for a small but ambitious town. Such a business meant locally-available fresh meat, employment, and typically created a livestock market, all adding to local commerce and prosperity.
The Raths were approached by the Waterloo, Iowa, Board of Trade (a Chamber of Commerce forerunner) and were eventually won over. Incentives included $10,000 in capital, land for a plant, and tax concessions. At some point during this process, George J. Rath decided not to leave Dubuque and not to continue in the meat packing business, rather to stay with his mercantile business. His son E. F. Rath, and John W. Rath, a cousin from Ackley, Iowa, began the Waterloo venture.
The Rath Packing Company (Rath) of Waterloo (Iowa) opened for business on November 24, 1891, on the Cedar River. Initially, the company concentrated on hogs, but by 1908 the company was also slaughtering beef and soon lamb as well. Business thrived; lucrative contracts to supply meat to the Armed Forces during both World Wars helped the company grow. Growth and profitability were also spurred between the 1930s and 1950s by innovations such as the fancy dry curing of bacon and the vacuum canning of meats. By the company's fiftieth anniversary in 1941, the small regional packing house in Waterloo had grown into the nation's single largest meatpacking facility with branch facilities in 12 states. By the end of World War II, Rath was the fifth largest meatpacker in the U.S. Through two world wars, stock market panics, depression, and drought, the company had failed to show a profit in only four of its years.
The years following World War II brought labor troubles. A 1948 strike at the Waterloo plant resulted in the death of a striking union member and a riot. Iowa National Guard troops were called in to restore order. Holding firm, Rath management eventually outlasted the union in negotiations, but labor relations remained sour. [1]
The 1960s and 1970s were difficult times for the meat packing industry. Competition was fierce and the industry had become high volume, low margin. Profitability was hurt by a decline in per capita pork consumption beginning in 1960. By the mid 1970s, Rath's 50-year-old four-story plant was obsolete. [2] The new model for packing houses called for single-level plants with continually moving automated disassembly lines. In addition, Rath's workforce was predominantly middle-aged, older than the industry average for packing houses, and thus burdened with higher than average wage and benefit costs.
In 1980, Local 41 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union which represented most of the labor force, negotiated a plan that, in exchange for wage and benefit concessions from the workers, gave them control of Rath's board of directors.
The employee-owned Rath operated at a loss in 1981-1983. After a series of further financial setbacks, Rath ceased operations in December, 1984 and was liquidated in 1985. [3]
Philip Danforth Armour Sr. was an American meatpacking industrialist who founded the Chicago-based firm of Armour & Company. Born on an upstate New York farm, he made $8,000 in the California gold rush, 1852–56. He opened a wholesale soap business in Cincinnati, then moved it to Milwaukee. He made millions selling meat to the United States Army during the Civil War. In 1875, he moved his base to Chicago. Armour's innovations including bringing live hogs to the metropolis for slaughter, inventing an assembly line system for the dis-assembly of hogs, canning the product, economy of scale and efficiency in detail. He systematically utilized waste products, boasting that he made use of "everything but the squeal". The introduction of refrigerated rail cars opened a national market for him and competitors such as Gustavus Swift. Armour expanded into banking and speculation on the futures market for pork and wheat by 1900, his plants employed 15,000 workers; his own wealth was in the range of $50 million. The urgent Army need for meat during the Spanish–American War of 1898 led to highly publicized complaints about "embalmed beef." Armour retired from business in 1899, and devoted himself to philanthropy in the Chicago area, including low-cost housing for industrial workers, and the major institution of higher education, the Armour Institute of Technology.
The meat packing industry handles the slaughtering, processing, packaging, and distribution of meat from animals such as cattle, pigs, sheep and other livestock. Poultry is generally not included. This greater part of the entire meat industry is primarily focused on producing meat for human consumption, but it also yields a variety of by-products including hides, feathers, dried blood, and, through the process of rendering, fat such as tallow and protein meals such as meat & bone meal.
The Dubuque Packing Company was a former meat packing company that operated under a variety of names in Dubuque, Iowa from 1891 until 2001. It was recognized for the quality of its products, and in the 1950s became the second-largest employer in the city. The company was widely known in the community as "The Pack." The company used the fleur-de-lis logo as its trademark.
The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., or The Yards, was the meatpacking district in Chicago for more than a century, starting in 1865. The district was operated by a group of railroad companies that acquired marshland and turned it into a centralized processing area. By the 1890s, the railroad capital behind the Union Stockyards was Vanderbilt money. The Union Stockyards operated in the New City community area for 106 years, helping Chicago become known as the "hog butcher for the world" and the center of the American meatpacking industry for decades.
Arbogast & Bastian was the name of a slaughterhouse and meat packing plant located in Allentown, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, in the United States. Once a national leader in hog slaughtering, the company had the capacity to process most of the 850,000 hogs raised annually in Pennsylvania for slaughtering. In its heyday, Arbogast & Bastian slaughtered an average of 4,000 hogs daily.
JBS USA Holdings, Inc. is an American food processing company and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Brazilian company JBS S.A.. The subsidiary was created when JBS entered the U.S. market in 2007 with its purchase of Swift & Company.
Tyson Fresh Meats, Inc., formerly IBP, Inc. and Iowa Beef Processors, Inc., is an American meat packing company based in Dakota Dunes, South Dakota, United States. IBP was the United States' biggest beef packer and its number two pork processor. To reflect the company's multiple operations, the company changed its name to Iowa Beef Processors, Inc. in 1970. After the company expanded operations to pork and other areas, Iowa Beef Processors, Inc., became IBP, Inc. Occidental Petroleum owned IBP from 1981 to 1987, and was the majority owner from 1987 to 1991.
Smithfield Foods, Inc., is a pork producer and food-processing company based in Smithfield, Virginia, in the United States, and a wholly owned subsidiary of WH Group of China. Founded in 1936 as the Smithfield Packing Company by Joseph W. Luter and his son, the company is the largest pig and pork producer in the world. In addition to owning over 500 farms in the US, Smithfield contracts with another 2,000 independent farms around the country to grow Smithfield's pigs. Outside the US, the company has facilities in Mexico, Poland, Romania, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Globally the company employed 50,200 in 2016 and reported an annual revenue of $14 billion. Its 973,000-square-foot meat-processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, was said in 2000 to be the world's largest, processing 32,000 pigs a day.
Rinderbraten, is a dish of German origin whose name means "beef roast". It is made from a large round of beef, stuffed with pork fat that has been rolled in a combination of salt, red pepper, brown sugar, allspice, and cloves. The round is then submerged in brine for up to six weeks, then boiled, and then simmered, with the blackened outer layer of beef and fat removed and cinnamon sprinkled over it before serving.
The Union Stockyards of Omaha, Nebraska, were founded in 1883 in South Omaha by the Union Stock Yards Company of Omaha. A fierce rival of Chicago's Union Stock Yards, the Omaha Union Stockyards were third in the United States for production by 1890. In 1947 they were second to Chicago in the world. Omaha overtook Chicago as the nation's largest livestock market and meat packing industry center in 1955, a title which it held onto until 1971. The 116-year-old institution closed in 1999. The Livestock Exchange Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.
Cargill Meat Solutions is a subsidiary of the Minneapolis-based multinational agribusiness giant Cargill Inc, that comprises Cargill's North American beef, turkey, food service and food distribution businesses. Cargill Meat Solutions' corporate office is located in Wichita, Kansas, United States. Jody Horner is the division's president.
J. C. Lore Oyster House, also known as J. C. Lore and Sons, Inc., Seafood Packing Plant, is located at 14430 Solomons Island Road South, in Solomons, Calvert County, Maryland. It is a large two story, rectangular frame industrial building constructed in 1934 as a seafood packing plant. It replaced a 1922 building that was destroyed by the 1933 Chesapeake Potomac hurricane. It is significant for its historical association with the commercial fisheries of Maryland's Patuxent River region, and architecturally as a substantially unaltered example of an early-20th century seafood packing plant. It has been adapted by the Calvert Marine Museum to house exhibits and many of its original spaces, artifacts, and records have been incorporated into them.
The Rath Packing Company Administration Building, also known as Adams Store Inc., is a historic Late Gothic Revival building in Waterloo, Iowa.
Labor rights in the American meatpacking industry are largely regulated by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which regulates union organization. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulates the safety and health conditions applicable to workers in the American meat packing industry. According to scholars of the American meat packing industry, despite federal regulation through OSHA and industry oversight, workers in meat production plants have little agency and inadequate protections. Workers in the industry perform difficult jobs in dangerous conditions, and are at significant risk for physical and psychological harm. In addition to high rates of injury, workers are at risk of losing their jobs when they are injured or for attempting to organize and bargain collectively. Several of studies of the industry have found immigrant workers - "an increasing percentage of the workforce in the industry" - especially at risk of not having their labor rights sufficiently protected.
The Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Sioux City, in the state of Iowa in the Midwestern United States, was built in 1918–19 as a speculative venture under the name Midland Packing Plant. After going into receivership, it was acquired by Swift & Co. in 1924, and continued to operate until 1974. It was then purchased by a Sioux City businessman and converted to an enclosed mall, the KD Stockyards Station. The building was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
The Dunleith and Dubuque Bridge, also known as the White Water Creek Bridge and the Bergfeld Recreation Area Bridge, is a historic structure located in Dubuque, Iowa, United States. This span was part of a seven-span approach to one of the first bridges constructed over the Mississippi River. It was part of a railroad bridge that connected Dubuque with Dunleith, Illinois, now known as East Dubuque. The bridge was fabricated by the Keystone Bridge Company of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Andrew Carnegie himself traveled to Dubuque to advocate for his company to build the bridge. The bridge was erected by Reynolds, Saulpaugh and Company of Rock Island, Illinois. The approach, of which this iron truss was a part, was completed in 1872. It was used by the Illinois Central and other railroads.
The COVID-19 pandemic was confirmed to have reached the U.S. state of Iowa in March 2020. The first known cases were three individuals who had traveled on a cruise in Egypt before returning home to Johnson County on March 3. Initially, case clusters were focused at meatpacking plants and congregate care facilities. By late October, community spread had become a concern, and some areas of the state had reported over 20% test positivity. A headline stated that "Iowa hospitals fear overwhelming patient surge if coronavirus cases continue to climb."
The meat industry has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Outbreaks of the virus have taken place in factories operated by the meat packing industry and the poultry processing industry. These outbreaks affected dozens of plants, leading to closures of some factories and disruption of others, and posed a significant threat to the meat supply in the United States. By April 27, there were at least 115 facilities with cases across 23 states, and at least 4,913 workers diagnosed positive with COVID-19, or approximately 3 percent of the workforce, with 20 deaths reported. By May 5, over 10,000 meatpacking plant workers in 29 states and working at 170 plants had tested positive for the coronavirus. At least 45 of those meat industry workers had died. As of May 20, at least 15,300 workers have been infected with COVID-19 at 192 different meatpacking plants in the United States, based on ongoing reporting by the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting and USA Today. At least 63 of those workers have died from the disease.
During the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, outbreaks of the virus took place in factories operated by the meat packing industry and the poultry processing industry. These outbreaks affected multiple plants, leading to closures of some factories and disruption of others, and posing a threat to the food supply in Canada.