More On Kansas City Meatpacking

 FILE: Cattle from Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas were processed through the then-massive stockyards, 1938.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/beef/#storylink=cpy

Kansas City Star:

By century’s end, the then-Big Five meatpackers — Armour, Swift, Schwarzchild & Sulzberger, Cudahy and, soon, Wilson — were the biggest employers in the biggest U.S. city between St. Louis and San Francisco.
Travel writer Emma Gage from Maryland marveled at the technology while touring the local Armour plant, then the tallest packinghouse in the world, in 1899.
On the seventh and top floor, the killing commenced. “One man takes the head off quicker than you can wink,” Gage wrote, and carcasses descended on hooks to lower floors — “the disassembly line.” (Henry Ford would incorporate some of these design concepts into mass-producing Model Ts.)
Gage: “We saw hogs cleaned, dressed and going into the refrigerating room 10 minutes after we had seen those same hogs alive. Everything is done with neatness and dispatch.”
From there Gage rode the streetcars to downtown, where she recognized the sloppier aspects of Cowtown: A white dress will be ruined after a day’s wear in Kansas City, she wrote, because “specks of greasy smut float about in the air, and lodge everywhere.”
Many across the spreading metro held dim regard for the packers: Boston-bred interlopers, mostly, investing in smelly and lethal workplaces. (Labor records for just one plant, Swift, cited 13 men killed between 1907 and 1910.)......
Joe Wolf, a second-generation meatpacker, detoured around high school to get an early run at work in the slaughterhouses. His Croatian parents immigrated to Kansas City, Kan., in 1906 after the industry, spurred by labor demands, sent agents to Eastern Europe on orders to recruit workers.
In time more than one-third of the employees at the Kansas City plants would be of Eastern European descent.
They formed tight-knit neighborhoods, churches and charity networks on the steep bluffs overlooking the Kaw. On Strawberry Hill, where the sidewalks remain brick, they built homes practically rubbing against one another. Croatians, Serbs, Slovenians and Poles who filled St. John the Baptist Church witnessed an average 100 baptisms every year from 1910 to 1960.
A 9 p.m. work-shift whistle blasting from the West Bottoms signaled to parents that their children ought to be home.
“If you were still out after that whistle sounded,” Don Wolf said, “there’d be hell to pay with your father. And come the weekend, with your uncles and aunts.”

I don't know how many folks today would work those jobs.  I'm guessing not many that weren't recent immigrants.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/12/08/3950080/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-meatpacking.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/12/08/3950080/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-meatpacking.html#storylink=cpy