CENTER, Texas ( KETK ) – East Texas poultry workers once helped bring national awareness to the gruesome state of 1950’s chicken plants after strikes in Center.

Those strikes and the other labor disputes in KETK’s series East Texas’ Biggest Labor Disputes , represent a long history of working people from across East Texas fighting against racism, discrimination and unfair working conditions.

They tell the story of how workers from all different industries fought to keep their jobs, unionize their workplaces, secure their wage increases, healthcare benefits and more.

On every Monday and Thursday until Labor Day on Sept. 2, KETK will present one of the eight most consequential chapters in East Texas labor history. Be sure to stay up to date with KETK so you won’t miss the next edition of East Texas’ Biggest Labor Disputes on Monday, Aug. 19.

1953-1957: Center

Shelby County, down in Deep East Texas, was the site of events which helped change the course of the chicken industry forever, the The Texas Sick Chicken Strike.

In 1953, Center had two chicken processing plants where the workers were paid the minimum wage of 75 cents an hour, according to an article in the East Texas Historical Journal (ETHJ.)

Conditions at the Denison Poultry and Egg Company and the Eastex Company were reported to be poor to say the least. The workers would spend 10 to 11 hours a day in highly unsanitary conditions doing work that took a serious physical toll.

The ETHJ article reported that a local jeweler said he couldn’t size poultry workers for rings because their work left their hands bruised and swollen with fingernails “turned inside out.”

No worker could switch jobs to rest their hands and there were no grievance machineries, seniority plan or paid holidays. These conditions led poultry worker Clara Holder to send a letter to Patrick Gorman, then secretary-treasurer of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workman of America.

“I was told to contact your office to secure help in organizing a much needed plant,” Holder said . “The majority of the workers are eager to organize, if only they had some advice from a bona fide labor union. Would you kindly inform me if your organization can help us?”

With the help of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union the poultry workers secured enough names to bring union elections to Denison and Eastex in late 1953.

The National Labor Relations Board reportedly scheduled Denison’s election for Sept. 15 and Eastex’s for Nov. 5. According to reports, some in the local business community were stunned by the elections and a drive to discourage pro-union votes was started.

While business owners were taking out ads in the Center Champion, the management at Denison sent out a two-letter to their employees, which argued that they were paying all they could and that they had already financed an insurance program and given out Christmas bonuses.

Vice President of the Amalgamated Meat Cutter’s district Sam Twedell sent out a handbill in response which read: “Would these men and their wives work in the plant for a lousy 75¢ per hour? They are afraid that if you get higher wages they will have to pay higher wages to the people who slave for them.”

At the all-white Denison plant, the union election won with 81 votes for and 51 votes against. At the Eastex plant, their mostly Black workers also won with 118 votes for and 9 against.

Seven months of negotiations between the union and the companies got no where. Rather than strike and risk the very real possibility of having the low skill jobs at the plants being replaced with scabs, reports said that the Amalgamated Meat Cutters had a trick up their sleeves.

Meat Cutter local unions across the country had contracts with retail employers. A part of those contracts required that those retailers could not carry the products of companies that the union listed as being “unfair” to the union.

So to bring Denison to the table AMC President Earl Jimerson proclaimed that they were “unfair,” letters were sent to all of their retailers and a nationwide boycott was well underway.

Owner of Denison Poultry, Ray Clymer reportedly anticipated having problems selling his chickens and production was sped up in order to try and get ahead of the boycott. According to the East Texas Historical Journal, the normal rate that chickens were processed at Denison was between 37 and 42 chickens per minute. By April 1954, the production line at Denison was up to 66 chickens per minute.

Soon after, wildcat strikes, strikes a union doesn’t authorize, would erupt at both Denison and Eastex. Both plants quickly hired scab labor to replace the striking workers, as the AMC feared they would.

The strikes came around the same time as the Supreme Court decided to de-segregate schools in Brown vs. Board of Education . While the white strikers were reportedly treated like a curiosity, Black strikers were resented.

According to the ETHJ article, Twedell claimed he was summoned to the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office and told to “get those goddamn n*****s off the picket line or some of them are gonna get killed.”

On May 9, one organizer named Allen Williams remarked that they were “sitting on a keg of dynamite” before his Ford was destroyed by a time bomb on July 23. The bomb reportedly destroyed two nearby cabins.

Later, on Aug. 12, a second bombing happened in a Black neighborhood in Center.

Amidst the rampant violence, strikers were being supported by benefits paid to them by the union. The AMC regularly paid the Shelby County strikers and even hosted a clothing drive that was reportedly so successful that national members had to be asked to stop sending clothes.

The unions support was crucially since the town’s two banks supposedly stopped extending credit to any of the strikers. Even though certain businesses were ostensibly against the strikers the ETHJ reported that many people in Center did actually support them.

According to the ETHJ article, both Twedell and Williams credited much of their successful outreach to a weekly Saturday radio program where a union representative would help explain the union’s side of the dispute.

After one incident where the union radio program exposed the low taxes the plants were paying, union organizer Twedell said “I don’t believe there has been as much excitement in Shelby County since the Civil War.”

That was all before these strikes made history. When the national Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act were passed in 1906, poultry was not included as a product that had to be inspected. This lack of inspection lead to gross conditions that the workers and birds had to endure.

A poultry worker from Center said the following:

“My job was to pull feathers… When the chickens reached me, most of the feathers were off the bodies and I could see the skin of the birds very clearly. It is quite often that thousands of chickens would pass on the line with sores on their bodies. Thousands of them would
have large swellings as large as a chicken egg on their bodies. These swellings were filled with a yellowish pus, and the odor was very strong. Others would have red spots allover their bodies that looked like smallpox.”

Similar testimonies from Center poultry workers were presented to committees in Congress by the AMC. According to the ETHJ, five committee hearings were held about poultry conditions. Experts like veterinarians, doctors sanitarians and scientists discussed the presence of diseases like salmonella and psittacosis in poultry.

The new national publicity from the hearings and ongoing boycott reportedly lead Eastex to adopt a contract with the AMC and their mostly Black workers. Their March 1955 agreement included a five cent wage in increase for women, a 7.5 cent wage increase for men, time and a half for overtime, three paid holidays a year, a vacation system, a grievance mechanism, submission to voluntary USDA inspection and the reinstatement of all the strikers, with full seniority.

At the mostly White Denison plant a Center-employed chicken inspector was appointed. Florence Smith was a supervisor at Denison who was chosen to start inspecting the birds but she reportedly had no test or guidance on how to inspect them. She allegedly discovered that the chickens she had taken off the line at Denison would later be put back on the line.

Smith purportedly testified that the Texas Department of Agriculture approval tags would be regularly be found on chickens that she had never even inspected.

Meanwhile, Clymer never recognized the union at Denison and in 1958 the AMC called off their strike there. Since the company still didn’t have a contract with the union, the boycott still effected them greatly and Denison reportedly ceased operations in the 1960s .

The Eastex plant was eventually sold to the Holly Farms chain, according to the ETHJ article. Holly Farms was later bought by Tyson Foods Inc. , who still operates a poultry plant in Center today.

With the help of the Center workers’ testimonies, the Poultry Products Inspection Act was signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on Aug. 28, 1957. East Texas poultry workers helped win the federal government’s regulation of the poultry industry, preventing an untold amount of sickness and death.

To read the rest of this series, visit the following articles:

As this article shows, East Texas has a deep history of labor activity and because of that deep history this article is not comprehensive. Many labor disputes, even modern ones, are under-reported on, so they’re often only known about by the people who lived through them.

Anyone who would like to tell us about any labor disputes not covered in this series is invited to email newsroom@ketk.com.

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