A More Perfect Plate #14 - Labor Day

Labor Day is here, and I want to start by saying how immensely proud I am of the team at Lake Geneva Country Meats. The butchers who break down beef carcasses starting early in the morning. The Meat Ambassadors who cut steaks to order, run the deli slicers, and help somebody figure out dinner at 5:40 on a Tuesday. The people in our office are the glue that holds everything together. It's a privilege to be able to lead this team.

I've been thinking about them because the country is in the middle of two big arguments right now. Well, more than two, but for this Dispatch we're going to focus on two.

The first is about the price of meat. If you read the Beef Dispatch a few weeks ago, you know how much of my brain that one occupies. The second is about the trades. Everywhere you look, somebody is (rightly) telling kids that college isn't the only path, that there's a good living waiting in the skilled trades, that we need more electricians and plumbers.

Here's what I can't figure out: butchery never comes up in the trades conversation.

It's a skilled trade. It's physical. It involves blood, a sharp knife, and a room kept just above freezing. And somehow it fell out of the discussion entirely.

So this Labor Day, let's talk about it. Where the holiday came from, what meat had to do with the American labor movement, and how the trade I love ended up where it is.

Where did Labor Day even come from?

From a parade. On Tuesday, September 5, 1882, workers took an unpaid day and marched through New York City, an event put together by the city's Central Labor Union. Oregon made it a state holiday first, in 1887. And in 1894, President Grover Cleveland signed the law making the first Monday in September a national holiday.

The timing of that is interesting, because President Cleveland signed the law on June 28, 1894, in the middle of the Pullman railroad strike. Days later, he sent federal troops into Chicago to help break the strike. I always assumed the holiday came afterward, as a kind of apology, or something to win back voters. It's the reverse, and I didn't know that until researching this Dispatch. Labor Day was a peace offering signed while the fight was still on.

We know that President Cleveland signed the bill, but nobody agrees on who invented the Labor Day holiday. The official story credits Peter J. McGuire, a carpenter and co-founder of the American Federation of Labor. The evidence increasingly points to Matthew Maguire, a machinist from Paterson, New Jersey, who may have been written out of the story because his politics ran too radical for the labor establishment's comfort. 144 years later, it's still disputed.

Most of the world honors workers on May 1, but May Day carried the radical associations that didn't sit well with the establishment, so America went with September instead. We wanted a labor holiday without the baggage.

What does meat have to do with the labor movement?

Just about everything. When American industry and American workers collided, one of the loudest collisions happened at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago. The Yards opened on Christmas Day, 1865, and at their peak in 1924 they handled more than 18 million animals in a single year and employed some 40,000 people. For decades, if you wanted to see what industrial America looked like, you toured a packinghouse.

In the summer of 1904, tens of thousands of stockyard workers walked out. What they wanted sounds almost quaint now: a guaranteed minimum of about 20 cents an hour for unskilled workers. They lost by September.

Into this world walked a young writer named Upton Sinclair, sent by a socialist newspaper in the wake of the strike to see conditions for himself. He spent about seven weeks inside Packingtown. The book he came back with is remembered for what was in the meat. It was written about what was happening to the people.

Why did The Jungle help the eater and not the worker?

The Jungle came out in February 1906, and it detonated. Readers met workers losing fingers to the line, families losing everything, and, in the passages everyone remembers, meat going into cans that should have gone nowhere near a can.

President Theodore Roosevelt did not care for Sinclair. In a private letter, he called him "hysterical, unbalanced, and untruthful." Then he sent his own investigators anyway, a labor commissioner named Charles Neill and a social worker named James Reynolds, and their report confirmed enough of the book that Roosevelt used it to force Congress's hand. On June 30, 1906, he signed the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act on the same day.

Those laws are the great-grandparents of the inspection system Lake Geneva Country Meats operates under today, and I'm glad they exist. A USDA inspector is part of daily life at our shop, and your food is safer for it.

But these laws are about sanitation, adulteration, and labels. Every word protects the person eating the meat. There is nothing in either law for the person cutting it. Sinclair watched it happen in real time and said it better than any historian since: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

What happened to the skilled butcher?

A few weeks ago, in the Beef Dispatch, I told you that boxed beef made American beef cheaper than it had ever been, and that the cost was the butcher shop in every town. That was the logistics half of the story. Here's the half I saved for Labor Day.

First, the part people forget: for about forty years, cutting meat was a genuinely good living. After the packinghouses organized in the 1930s and 40s, meatpacking became a middle-class job, and it stayed one. Into the late 1970s, packinghouse workers earned roughly 15 to 17 percent more than the average American manufacturing wage. A butcher was a guy who bought a house.

Then came the two men in Denison, Iowa. In the Beef Dispatch, I told you Iowa Beef Packers asked why every town in America needed a skilled meatpacker. The version they asked out loud was blunter: why stay wage-locked in heavily unionized cities when workers in the countryside cost far less? Boxed beef answered both questions at once. Take one craftsman's job, breaking down a whole carcass, and split it into a hundred single cuts, each one learned in days instead of years. Put the plant in a small town near the cattle. Ship the boxes.

It worked better than anyone imagined, and the wage followed the skill out the door. Through the 1980s, real wages in meatpacking fell about 30 percent. In roughly a decade, the industry went from paying 15 percent above the national average wage to 20 percent below it. The middle-class packinghouse job of 1975 became, in the words of the historian Roger Horowitz, "employment of last resort."

Retail went next. Once beef arrived in a box, the supermarket didn't need a craftsman behind the counter, and case-ready meat (cut and wrapped at the plant, nothing left to do but stock it) finished the job. Case-ready did to the meat counter what self-checkout did to the front of the store.

Now hold that history up against the trades everybody is excited about.

In Wisconsin, before the law lets you work alone as a journeyman electrician, you need 8,000 hours on the job, 576 hours of classroom time, and a passing grade on a state exam. That structure is why the wage holds.

There is no equivalent for butchery. No state licenses butchers as an occupation the way it licenses electricians or plumbers. There are meat-cutting classes and programs, and Wisconsin also offers a Master Meat Crafter certification through UW-Madison.

I'm grateful for those programs, but they're education, not a defined career ladder. Nothing you must climb, nothing the law defends, no rung that guarantees the next dollar. The federal government projects 1 percent growth for butchers over the next decade and says in writing: prepackaged meat "may limit employment demand for butchers and meat cutters."

That's how a trade falls out of the trades. Not with a vote or a law. The skill just gets moved somewhere you can't see it, and the wage goes with it.

Would you pay more for a butcher-cut steak?

Here's an honest question. You might pay extra for an American-made shirt. You may even be on board with paying more for a building project because it supports union jobs.

Would you pay more for a steak cut by a trained butcher at your local store?

Luckily for us at Lake Geneva Country Meats, if you're reading this, you've probably decided our skill matters, and I thank you for that. But America, as a whole, has been answering for a hundred years, and the answer is no.

In 1960, Americans spent 17 percent of their disposable income on food. Last year it was 9.7 percent. That falling number is one of the quiet achievements of American history, and the industry I've spent this whole Dispatch describing is a big reason it fell.

But the achievement has a price, and the price lives on the paycheck side. Of every dollar you spend on food in this country, about 12 cents reaches a farm. Around 54 cents pays the wages and benefits of everyone who grows, processes, ships, sells, and serves it.

And here's the part that surprised me when I pulled the history: that worker share hasn't shrunk. For as long as the government has measured it, labor's take has stayed at roughly half of every food dollar. It was about 55 cents in 2001, drifted down to 51 by 2008, hit its record of nearly 58 cents in 2020, and sits at about 54 today. America never cut the total wage bill for its food. It rearranged it. The biggest single slice of the food dollar now belongs to restaurants and foodservice, because we eat out like no generation before us, while the farm's share has drifted down for thirty years. And you already know from the last section what happened to wages in the cutting room. The money didn't leave food work. It left food skill.

Here's where the numbers sit today. The median American butcher makes $19.30 an hour. The median electrician makes $30.38. The median plumber, $30.67. At Lake Geneva Country Meats, our butchers typically make in the $20s per hour, and our Meat Ambassadors in the high teens, and here's the uncomfortable part: the $20s is above the national median for this trade. We pay above the going rate, and a median electrician still makes roughly a third more. In Wisconsin, the gap is wider still.

In this whole discussion, an uncomfortable part is that I'm the person who sets the wages, and I could raise them tomorrow.

I also set the prices, and every dollar an hour I add has to go into the price of a steak, in a year when I'm already writing Dispatches explaining why the steak costs what it costs.

In the Beef Dispatch I told you that you can have cheap beef or a country of small processors, but not both. This is the same trade-off with a more human element. You can have cheap meat or well-paid butchers. America has picked cheap food in the aggregate, and I don't think most people have even considered the trickle-down effect it has on real, skilled tradespeople.

What's happening in Washington right now?

You may have seen the headlines this week. On Friday, the President signed an executive order on meat processing, promising to give farmers and ranchers "the right to process their own food."

Here's what the order actually does, as of this writing. It tells the USDA to review and modernize inspection, to expand the programs that let state-inspected meat cross state lines, and to report back in 60 days. It does not repeal federal inspection, and no uninspected meat can be sold into commerce today.

The Secretary of Agriculture says any changes will come while "maintaining our world class food safety standards," and the congressman who has spent years pushing to loosen these rules complained there was "nothing new" in it.

There are real facts on both sides of this one. Small farmers genuinely cannot get animals processed; we slaughter about twenty head a week for local ranchers, and there's a wait. And the food safety groups, along with the big packers' own trade association, warn that uninspected meat in commerce puts consumers at risk. You can judge the proposals however you want.

Personally, as someone who runs a USDA-inspected shop and is proud of that distinction, I believe history says when you start loosening regulations, bad things happen to consumers and workers.

If we start loosening food safety rules for temporary price relief, we will see more recalls, more unsafe food, and more unsafe working conditions, as pressure continues to reduce pricing.

I am against all of those things.

Happy Labor Day

I'm not here to glorify unions. They've had some outstanding achievements in helping just outcomes occur for workers, and they also have real drawbacks. That's not the debate today.

What I am here to do is praise the American worker, who built everything this series keeps marveling at, and to praise the crew at Lake Geneva Country Meats in particular.

The butchers, who do work most people couldn't last a morning at, in a cold room, with a sharp knife, at speed. The Meat Ambassadors, who cut steaks to order, run the slicers, box up brats, and talk a stranger through dinner like it's the family recipe. Our kitchen team, office crew, delivery driver, maintenance lead, all of them. They work hard for their money, and their effort and their economic future deserve a seat at the table in this whole national argument about the price of beef. They're not an abstraction to me. I see them every morning.

So here's my ask this Labor Day, and it's small. When the grill is going and the holiday is doing what the holiday does, take one second between bites. Somebody skilled cut that. Somebody with years of practice, no license, and no ladder.

Keep them in mind when the country argues about what meat should cost, because whatever we decide, they're the ones who'll live inside the answer.

Happy Labor Day to the LGCM crew. I'm proud of you.

Cheers,
Nick