Published by EH.NET (November 2009)

Daniel Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap Production in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2009. v + 300 pp. $30 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-8014-4726-6.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Gerald Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

These days, few take the short drive over the Ben Franklin Bridge from Philadelphia to visit Camden, New Jersey. But this was once one of America’s leading industrial centers, home of Victor Talking Machines, later RCA, New York Shipbuilding, and Campbell Soup. Now known for its urban decay, sky-high crime rate, and gang- and drug-related violence, Camden has not recovered from the loss of its industrial base. The city’s unemployment rate is usually around twice the national average, nearly 20 percent of the city’s housing stock is vacant, and the median household income is under $25,000, barely a third the New Jersey average. With a largely minority population, the once affluent and productive city of Camden has been left behind.

Daniel Sidorick explores Camden’s decline by telling the story of one of the city’s premier businesses, Campbell Soup. The company was founded in 1869 as a partnership between Joseph Campbell, purchasing agent for a produce wholesaler, and a tinsmith, Abraham Anderson. By 1900, neither Campbell nor Anderson were connected with the company which was run by the Dorrance family, including the German-educated chemist John T. Dorrance who earned a Ph.D. in chemistry and developed pioneering techniques to make “concentrated soup” by removing much of the water. Selling ten-and-one-half ounce cans of condensed soup for ten cents, Campbell, under Dorrance’s leadership, become one of America’s largest, and most profitable, businesses by combining southern New Jersey’s tomatoes with German chemistry and Philadelphia metal-working. Every August, a fleet of trucks stretching for miles would carry the red and ripe tomatoes to Campbell’s Camden factories to be turned into the soup that made Campbell, and Camden, famous.

Sidorick tells the story of labor relations at Campbell and the company’s continued campaign to hold down labor costs. Facing a militant and entrenched labor union after 1940, it would be decades before Campbell could follow after other businesses and leave town. It was held in Camden by the tomatoes, the perishable raw ingredient that distinguished Campbell’s experience from that of its Camden neighbor RCA chronicled in Jefferson Cowie’s classic Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (Cornell University Press, 1999). Facing labor militancy, RCA slipped away, shifting production to Bloomington, Indiana, and other locales with weaker unions. Campbell was tied to Camden because Jersey’s sweet and flavorful tomatoes were hard to ship and had to be processed quickly after harvesting. Eventually, Campbell would leave Camden after improvements in tomato breeding and transportation. Until then, a century of class warfare was fought in the trenches of Campbell’s Camden factories.

Campbell had to find ways to undermine and defeat labor militancy in place. It did this by a continuing campaign to systematically undermine labor unity through careful recruitment and by careful design of jobs and pay systems. From the beginning, Campbell sought to divide its workforce by maintaining a rigid segmentation between permanent and seasonal workers, and by recruiting immigrants, women, African-Americans, and Hispanic workers who were carefully segregated to discourage any incipient sense of worker solidarity. To this, the company added a compensation system designed to atomize the workforce by tying pay directly to individual productivity. Sidorick chronicles the almost-fanatical attention Campbell’s management devoted to delineating and grading every process and every job. In 1927, Campbell adopted the Bedaux system of compensation. Every job, even every task and every operation, was broken down into separate activities and each was given a “B” value setting the work effort required. Each worker’s hourly output was then compared with this ideal and output evaluated according to the number of Bs accomplished per hour. Ultimately, the Bedaux procedures book grew into a seven-inch thick tome spread across two volumes assigning a name and numerical value to every process in the Campbell plant. In this way, Campbell’s Industrial Engineering Planning Department, with the help of outside Bedaux consultants, came as close as anyone ever did to realizing Frederick Taylor’s goal of concentrating within management the “mental component” of production.

While the Bedaux book was used in training, its larger role was in setting workplace standards to divide the workforce by making pay a reflection of individual productivity. Campbell workers were told that their pay depended on their own skills and work rather than the result of collective action and the oppression of capital, and the way to increase their pay was to work harder and better, not to engage in collective action. Here the recruitment and compensation strategies came together in a general campaign to divide and conquer.

In profitability, growth, and productivity, Campbell Soup was an American success story. Well into the 1930s, its labor strategy was so successful that the company faced little labor unrest and found no need to pursue any of the techniques of welfare capitalism developed elsewhere, including in many of its neighbors in the Camden and Philadelphia area. This changed precipitously in the 1930s with a major strike and union drive in 1934 that continued until 1940 when Local 80 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA – CIO) (a.k.a. the Food, Tobacco, and Allied Workers or FTA-CIO) won an overwhelming victory in a National Labor Relations Board representation election. The sudden burst of labor militancy and subsequent union success was a critical moment in the history of Campbell Soup. It is unfortunate that Sidorick devotes relatively little space to this period. Perhaps, like most labor historians, his sympathies are so strongly aligned with unions and labor militants that he accepts militancy, like that which led to the organization of Local 80, as a norm about which little need be said; instead, he devotes most of his attention to what he sees as the unusual — the decline of militancy.

Local 80’s victory inaugurated a period of entrenched class conflict at Campbell between a militant union and a determined management. Eventually, Campbell defeated its unions, deploying a range of weapons and tactics that included but went well beyond the get-up-and-move policy that Cowie described for RCA. Combined with the pressures of labor scarcity during World War II, union success led Campbell to intensify its search for alternative sources of workers. Scouring southern cotton fields and sending emissaries to Puerto Rico, Campbell sought workers willing to work for low wages and, the company hoped, resistant to the union message spoken by its Camden-bred English-speaking workers. While the union struggled to unite an ethnically and racially divided workforce, the company intensified its search for labor-saving innovations, replacing workers with machines, and beginning the search for ways to move production out of Camden. Defended as necessary to modernize the company and remain competitive, automation and layoffs were warnings to workers: get with the (company) program.

The union organized the new workers and, united, Campbell’s workers fought speed-ups with wildcat strikes and hard-fought contract negotiations. Against a militant union supported by a united workforce, Campbell turned to weapons to undermine Local 80 from within. The most important emerged in the anti-Communist red scare of the 1950s and the union fragmentation that emerged from it.

Like many CIO, and some AFL, unions, Local 80 was founded and led for many years by leftists, including members of the Communist Party. John Tisa, from Camden, for example, fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade before returning to lead the campaign for a union at Campbell Soup. Sidorick shows how radicals like Tisa were both the moral center of Local 80 and the strongest advocates of effective labor militancy. Ideologically committed to worker solidarity, Local 80’s leftist leaders fought discrimination as a cardinal principle of union practice. Advocates of worker power, they designed a democratic union with rank-and-file power exercised directly through democratically-elected shop stewards and wildcat strikes. Together, solidarity, democracy, and militancy empowered Campbell’s workers, making Local 80 a serious challenge to management autocracy and the power of capital.

In the Cold War years after World War II, Local 80’s Achilles Heel was the involvement of radicals with a Communist background. The union came under direct attack when one of its founders, Anthony Valentino, was sentenced to five years in federal prison for violating Section 9(h) of the Taft-Hartley Act which required that union leaders sign noncommunist affidavits. Although Valentino’s conviction was eventually overturned, anti-Communism sowed dissension in the union’s ranks and weakened its leadership. Even worse, the Cold War led the CIO to expel Local 80’s parent union, the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers of America. While Local 80 found a new home in the United Packinghouse Workers (UPWA), a militant and leftist union, its sister unions in other Campbell facilities, in Chicago and elsewhere, settled in different unions. Soon, Campbell workers were organized in five different unions: UPWA, the Teamsters, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, and even the International Association of Machinists. While these different unions consulted with each other, rivalry undermined effective action allowing the company to play each against the others.

For a brief moment, in the late 1960s, there was a plan to stop the unraveling of Campbell’s unions. Working through the Industrial Union Department of the reconstituted AFL-CIO, the various unions representing Campbell Soup workers agreed to move towards a united front in contract bargaining and a common contract expiration at the beginning of the tomato harvest in the summer of 1968. Both management and the unions agreed that this coordinated campaign posed the greatest challenge to Campbell’s authority in decades. Determined to resist, Campbell management refused even to bargain with the union’s joint committee. A strike was called.

Timed for the beginning of the tomato harvest in the summer of 1968, a prolonged strike would have been extraordinarily expensive for Campbell Soup. Had the unions held firm, they might have forced the company to negotiate with them collectively and to make significant and lasting concessions. Instead, the strike was an anti-climax when the union leadership collapsed. Always suspicious of the other unions and uncomfortable with worker solidarity and with strikes, the largest of the unions, the Amalgamated Meat Cutters (AMC) abandoned the united front and settled for a simple pay increase. After this break in the front, all the remaining unions settled separately, accepting relatively generous pay increases without concessions on other issues. Conservative unionism undermined attempts to build a real labor movement at Campbell Soup.

Paradoxically, by betraying workplace solidarity, the 1968 strike marked the triumph of the AMC and its undemocratic and conservative trade unionism. The AMC’s leadership quickly entrenched itself to guarantee its position against any radical challenge or any campaign for another strike. The AMC ended Local 80’s practice of electing leaders and shop stewards, it stopped wildcat strikes, and limited any challenges to management. More comfortable with their corporate counterparts than with their rank-and-file, AMC leaders were not the best choice to lead a life-or-death struggle, but that is what emerged after 1968. Threatened, but triumphant, Campbell took seriously the warning of 1968 and seized the opportunity presented by weak union leadership to accelerate its campaign to automate operations and to scatter production. Technological changes helped Campbell. By 1979, the company had stopped using fresh tomatoes and very soon after, in 1980, it discontinued food processing at some of its Camden facilities. Then, on a crisp November morning in November 1991, it blew up the shell of its last Camden production plant.

Sidorick shows how Campbell workers from 1934 to 1968 “fought for more than just a slightly better economic deal. They had struggled for a say in how they did their jobs. They had battled discrimination against blacks and women. Perhaps most of all, they had fought for respect for the people who were looked down upon because they were soup makers.” The type of social-justice unionism represented by Local 80 and the FTA has been eclipsed by corporate power and union autocrats. Some of us regret this. All of us should read Sidorick’s book to learn what happened, and what might have been.

Gerald Friedman is the author of State-Making and Labor Movements. The United States and France, 1876-1914 (1998) and Reigniting the Labor Movement: Restoring Means to Ends in a Democratic Labor Movement (2008).