The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, published in 1906, remains one of the most widely known pieces of realist literature from the early 20th century.
An expose of the brutal exploitation of immigrant workers in Chicago’s meatpacking industry, told through the struggles of Lithuanian immigrant Jurgis Rudkus and his family, The Jungle—both as a novel and as a work of investigative journalism—takes on renewed importance today with rising levels of workplace death and injury, and amidst workers’ fightback for independent control of workplace safety through the independent investigation into the death of Stellantis worker Ronald Adams Sr. initiated by the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).
One of the universal themes described in The Jungle is that when it comes to the lives of workers there is no red line for the ruling class, which will stop at nothing to eliminate workplace safety for the sake of profit. The same system of capitalist exploitation that Sinclair described when the US was a rising industrial power over a century ago continues to prey on workers today.
Completely preventable health and safety incidents continue to plague the workforce. Over 5,200 workers die every year from on-the-job accidents, while upwards of 135,000 more die from work-related diseases. To cite only one recent example, on June 4 two construction employees were crushed to death in central Florida by a large crane after their employers ignored special emergency instructions issued by the National Weather Service to seek shelter due to strong winds.
These dire conditions will only be worsened by the Trump administration’s trade war policies, which pit American workers against their class brothers and sisters the world over in a competition that threatens life and limb through understaffing, speedup, the dismantling of safety protocols, and ultimately world war. Trump, who rules in the interest of America’s billionaire oligarchs, is now completely deregulating the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).
Another theme central to Sinclair’s book that resonates today is its depiction of the threat of disease and the complete absence of public health in Chicago’s Back of the Yards, the neighborhood that provide the novel’s setting, and whose immigrant workforce staffed the great meatpacking plants.
Basic questions of public health once again confront the international working class. Humanity is still passing through one of the worst crimes of the 21st century, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The capitalists first responded to the disease by forcing workers to remain on the job—with the backing of the trade union bureaucracies—contributing to excess deaths of over 1.5 million in the US alone so that their profit streams would not be interrupted. Now the American ruling class has entrusted public health to Robert Kennedy Jr, who merges anti-scientific conspiracy theories with federal policies that undo the basic understanding of the spread of infectious disease, which scientists were first learning about and started combating in Sinclair’s time.
Since the beginning of the Ronald Adams campaign, many workers have come forward to share their personal workplace safety experiences, as well as exposures of safety abuses by the companies, the failures to enforce safety rules by federal and state regulators, and the complicity of the union bureaucracy in all of it. More than two months after Adams’ death, his family has still received nothing but silent hostility from the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.
Published in 1906, The Jungle has much to teach workers today.
Sinclair exposed the experiences of predominately immigrant families who labored in the gruesome meat packing industry of Chicago. It is told through the fictional story of a Lithuanian family but is entirely based on firsthand accounts and interviews from people who lived through the unchecked cruelty themselves.
Also known as Packingtown, the meatpacking district of Chicago was an industrial landscape adjacent to a 375-acre holding area for tens of thousands of livestock, called the Union Stock Yards. Here industrial meatpacking was born in the late 19th century. The industry controlled every aspect of the meat production process, from the raising of livestock to butchering, packing, and the processing of byproducts. In the plants, overhead trolley systems carried animals from station to station, where workers carried out repetitive and dangerous tasks for long hours, until there was nothing left of the cow or pig.
This “disassembly” line, which appeared years before moving assembly in the auto industry, allowed the giant meatpacking firms—Armour & Co., Swift & Co., Morris & Co., and National Packing Company—to produce meat at an astonishing rate, and to displace skilled butchers with unskilled immigrant labor. Between 1865-1900 alone, nearly 400 million animals were butchered and processed in Packingtown, making it the center of industrial meat in the US.
The Jungle follows the story of the Rudkus family, who represent the 40,000 people employed in Packingtown at its peak. The Lithuanian family stands in as well for a massive wave of immigrant workers that dominated not only meatpacking, but steel, textiles, garments, and many other industries in the period. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, immigrants made up a significant section of the workforce and nearly three quarters of the population in Northeastern and Midwest cities such as Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Cleveland. The nearly 17 million immigrants that moved to the United States by 1920 fueled the industries that depended upon cheap labor, as well as the fabulous wealth of the era’s “Robber Baron” capitalists.
Sinclair captures the reality of this mass immigration as it played out in Packingtown:
The families had all been of different nationalities—there had been a representative of all the races that had displaced each other in the stockyards. Grandmother Majauszkiene had come to America with her son at a time when, so far as she knew there was only one other Lithuanian in the district; the workers had all been Germans then—butchers that the packers had brought from abroad—skilled men, as it needed skilled men to start the business. Afterward, as cheaper labor had come, these Germans had moved away. The next were the Irish—there had been six or eight years when Packingtown had been a regular Irish city. There were a few colonies of them still here, enough to run all the unions and the police force and get all the graft; but the most of those who were working in the packing-houses had gone away at the rush of new wages—after the big strike. The Bohemians had come at the next drop in them the Poles. People said that old man Durham himself was responsible for these immigrations; he had sworn that he would fix the people of Packingtown so that they would never again call a strike on him, and so he had sent his agents into every city and village in Europe to spread the tale of the chances of work and high wages in the stockyards. The people had come in hordes; and old Durham had squeezed them tighter and tighter, speeding them up and grinding them to pieces, and sending for new ones. The Poles, who had come by tens of thousands, had been driven to the wall by the Lithuanians, and now the Lithuanians were giving way to the Slovaks. Who there was poorer and more miserable than the Slovaks, Grandmother Majauszkiene had no idea, but the packers would find them, never fear. It was easy to bring them, for wages were really much higher; and it was only when it was too late that the poor people found out that everything else was higher too. They were like rats in a trap, that was the truth; and more of them were piling in every day.
Within a handful of years of Sinclair writing those lines, masses of black migrants from the American South and Mexicans would follow the Germans, Irish, Czechs, Poles, Lithuanians, and Slovaks to Chicago’s meatpacking industry. The story of Packingtown thus expresses a fundamental reality that continues down to the present: the movement of workers from all over the world is the history of the American working class.
The Jungle begins with one such arrival, the protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, and his family to Packingtown. Jurgis is described as being a steadfast believer in the “American Dream.” He isn’t hesitant in expressing his criticism towards the hundreds of unemployed men and women that line up outside the factories every day waiting for a job, the majority of whom are immigrants themselves. He is convinced that there will be plenty of opportunities for him to forge a better life for himself and his family as long as he works hard enough.
Sinclair is skillful in engaging the senses when describing the hell on Earth that was Packingtown, which he experienced firsthand while conducting investigative work for the book in 1904. The closer one was to the district the more intense the sights, smells and sounds became. The Rudkus family quickly experiences “perplexing changes in the atmosphere” upon their arrival to their new home, as well as “a strange, pungent odor” that was so strong, it could literally be tasted.
Due to his strength and youthfulness, Jurgis quickly acquires a job in the high-paced and brutal meatpacking factory. However, the Rudkus family’s “success” is short-lived, and it is not long before they begin to experience the effects of much larger political and social issues.
The family begins to realize that they are not able to attain basic necessities. Ona, Jurgis’ wife, must bribe a manager for employment. Children in the Rudkus family lie about their age and find employment in the factories so that the family doesn’t fall into starvation.
These are only a handful of the difficulties confronting the Rudkus family. Readers are not spared from many truthful details of working class life in Packingtown and Back of the Yards: horrific working conditions, homelessness, disease, environmental contamination, child labor, prostitution, alcoholism, and political corruption.
Old Antanas, Jurgis’ father, finds employment in the pickling plant where the exposure to chemicals is so severe that acid eats through his boots and infects his skin. Other workers in similar conditions lose their limbs entirely.
After losing his job for getting injured at work, Jurgis finds employment at the notoriously inhumane fertilizer plant. People who passed men who worked in fertilizers plants on the streets would keep a fair distance, due to the stench that would perpetually stick to their skin. In such facilities it was known to happen that workers would slip and fall into large vats containing meat byproducts, which would then be packaged and sold.
The Rudkus family is shattered by Chicago and its meatpacking industry. After a descent into hopelessness and indulgence in alcoholism and crime, Jurgis attends a political rally and discovers socialism. Through it, he develops an awareness of the supremacy of profit that has its hands in every layer of society, from the business owners, to local government, two-party system, police force, and the labor unions. He comes to the conclusion that workers like himself are left to fend for themselves in a system that only benefits the exploiting class. The novel ends with Jurgis dedicating his life to organizing workers to “seize upon the machine” that is Packingtown.
In an article written by Sinclair after the book was published entitled “Is The Jungle True?” the author stated,
“I mean it (The Jungle) to be true, not merely in substance, but in detail, and in the smallest detail. It is as true as it should be if it were not the work of fiction at all, but a study of a sociologist.”
The book was originally serialized in The Appeal to Reason, a magazine published in Kansas and associated with the Socialist Party of America, led and founded by Eugene Debs. Sinclair, like other significant artists and intellectuals of his time, was drawn to socialism and was a member of the Socialist Party. His novel unapologetically championed its cause, and that of the working class. After its appearance in The Appeal, Sinclair’s novel was widely distributed by the Socialist Party and was translated into many different languages, reaching even into the immigrant communities it describes.
The Jungle won widespread acclaim, but the deadly working conditions it revealed were largely overlooked by the bourgeois press. For many well-to-do and middle class readers, the book’s main achievement was to expose the unsanitary conditions under which the American consumer’s food was produced. A story from the time described President Theodore Roosevelt reading The Jungle at breakfast, suddenly declaring “I’m poisoned,” and throwing sausages out the window—one reportedly striking Senator Alfred Beveridge on the head. That story is apocryphal, but Roosevelt did read the book and, because of it, ordered an investigation of the meatpacking industry that led to the enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act (1906).
“I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach,” commented Sinclair.
But for many readers, then and now, The Jungle resonates because of its harrowing depiction of the barbarism of capitalist production. Dozens of editions have been published, along with hundreds of printings, not counting innumerable international translations and digital versions, speaking to its continued relevance today.
The Jungle takes its place as a work of literature and also a landmark in the long struggle of the working class for its own liberation, a central component of which has been the fight for workplace safety and health. None of the gains workers realized in the last century were gifts handed down from the ruling class or its political parties. From the eight-hour day to child labor, American capitalism and its politicians have fought tooth and nail against workers every step of the way. Every victory, including the basic right not to be killed and maimed at work, was the outcome of struggle.
Chief among these struggles was the great movement of militant and socialist-minded industrial workers, who, inspired by socialism, first built the great industrial unions in auto, rubber, the garment trade, and in meatpacking—along with many other industries. Today, the treachery of the existing unions has paved the way for the capitalists to drive workplace conditions back to where they were 120 years ago, when Upton Sinclair, then 26 years old, went to Chicago to learn about the meatpacking industry and to write, as he said he would do, “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the labor movement.”
The IWA-RFC’s rank-and-file investigation into the death of Ronald Adams Sr. aims to revive the traditions of the class struggle from Sinclair’s time. The workplace conditions that led to the death of Ronald Adams and thousands of others can only be changed through workers waging a bitter struggle against the entire system that enables them. Workers must take matters into their own hands and fight for their own interests by joining the IWA-RFC and taking up the fight for socialism.
To provide information to the rank-and-file investigation, fill out the form below. All submissions will be kept anonymous.