A repost from another blog I run, with a personal update and an idea for a project about the Dubuque Packing Company, a large meat processing plant that once employed 3,500 people, until its decline and eventual closure, in 2001.
This is a repost from the Iowa Radical History blog I maintain. For a little while, it was a main interest of mind to uncover mostly forgotten strikes, organizations and protests in the state and collect the records and recollections of them onto one place.
It’s been quite a long time since this blog has been updated. I started this blog when I was still living in Iowa, and while the interest is still there, the time isn’t. For those who are interested, I moved from Iowa in Spring of 2011 to Madison, WI to briefly work for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in assisting their efforts in trying to get a general strike going in response to the right-wing Governor’s efforts to crush unions. Another IWW organizer and I wrote a report of our activity called The general strike that didn’t happen: a report on the activity of the IWW in Wisconsin.
After that, Minneapolis was my destination, which is where I currently reside. Most recently, I’ve been the co-editor of The Organizer, the official blog of the Twin Cities IWW General Membership Branch, assisted with union campaigns, and helped run Recomposition, a website that centers on stories about and by workers themselves.
For a long while, writer’s block consumed me, and all writing, and nearly all editing, came to a halt. Finally snapping out of that, all sorts of ideas have come back to me. One of them is rooted in one of the places that could be considered home, Dubuque, Iowa.
Moving to the Dubuque area in the early 90s, The Pack always held a special place in the way I thought of the town. As I became older, and familiar with books and stories that centered around oral histories from working people like Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-class Organizers or The American Worker, I became more indepthly interested about the people who used to work there.
Although never having taken on a project this large, I’m interested in trying to sketch a project like this out. What kind of people worked there? Where did they originally come from? What were their lives like? What was there experience working there? What were the conditions? What did they do to make these conditions better?
If you’re from Dubuque and are seeing this, what are your thoughts on this?
Originally posted: September 10, 2013 at Iowa Radical History
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