Immigrant Family Life and Newark Meat Packing Labor in Irvington, New Jersey, 1927 to 1939

Immigrant Meat Packing Industrial Labor

Photograph

Immigrant family life photo album showing scenes of meatpacking work, domestic life, dress, recreation, and generational change around Irvington, New Jersey, from the 1920s into 1940. This period in Irvington and Farmington, New Jersey was marked by rapid development as an immigrant suburb of industrial Newark. Irvington's population more than doubled from 25,480 in 1920 to 56,733 in 1930, while German Americans remained the township's dominant ethnic population from the 1880s into the 1950s. Photographs include a substantial occupational sequence showing family members or associates employed in Newark's meat packing industry at A. Fink & Sons, connecting the private life of a likely German immigrant household to work inside A. Fink & Sons a decade after the company abandoned its union shop, prompting a strike by most of its workforce, the hiring of replacement labor, an organized boycott of Fink products, and a New Jersey Court of Chancery decision restricting the unions’ campaign.

Photo album of 115 silver gelatin photographs of varying sizes ranging from 4.5 x 3.5 inches to 2.75 x 2 inches, primarily Irvington, Farmington, and Newark, New Jersey, circa 1927-1939. Approximately 8 photographs depict men employed in meat production, wearing aprons, work shirts, and protective clothing as they pose at their workplace, handle carcasses and cuts of meat, and appear posing with a hog, and a group shot of men holding butcher tools and knives. The caption identification with A. Fink & Sons places these scenes within the Newark provision company that manufactured meats and sausages for market. Other photographs show women and children in dresses, coats, hats, and formal clothing; men in suits and work clothes; family groups beside automobiles and houses; children at play; outdoor gatherings; women in nursing or religious nursing dress; and visits to parks and other destinations. Handwritten captions and dates include photographs from 1925, 1927, and 1929, references to Irvington, Washington, and West Side Park, and the German word “Sommer." The presence German language, domestic snapshots, formal dress, and industrial work records a household negotiating immigrant inheritance and everyday American life.

New Jersey expanded its civilian and economic infrastructure rapidly during this period of increasing immigration and expansion. Electric trolley connections with neighboring Newark accelerated development beginning in the 1890s, and the building boom that followed continued until 1930, consuming the township's remaining farms and fields; German Americans settled particularly heavily in the East Ward and remained Irvington's dominant ethnic group from the 1880s into the 1950s. The occupational photographs place members of this immigrant household inside the industrial economy that made such suburban settlement possible. In January 1915 the Fink company abandoned its union shop arrangement and announced that union and nonunion employees would thereafter work on equal terms; nearly all of its workers struck, leaving approximately twenty five employees before replacements were hired. Butchers' Union Local No. 422 and allied labor organizations subsequently organized a boycott of Fink products and retailers carrying them, leading to A. Fink & Son v. Butchers' Union, decided by the New Jersey Court of Chancery in July 1915, which enjoined aspects of the unions' boycott campaign. The album's mid 1920s photographs therefore record immigrant meat workers inside a company whose workplace had already become a contested site in New Jersey's struggle over union organization, open shop employment, strikes, and secondary boycotts, while the remainder of the album follows the same social world outward into houses, streets, parks, automobiles, childhood, dress, and family recreation during Irvington's transformation into a densely settled immigrant suburb. Moderate album wear, pages remain bound with tape. Photographs remain largely in cood condition, some adhered and some removable within the album. Few photographs show tear and small chips. Some creasing, silvering, and fading across the album. Overall in fair to good condition.

Item #23873

Price: $550.00