Down on the Killing Floor

Rick Halpern is a professor of history and Bissell-Heyd Chair of American Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He is the coauthor of Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality.

"An ideal case study to analyze one of the central problems in American labor history--the relationship between racial identity and working class formation and organization."--James R. Barrett, author of Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago's Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922 "Meticulously researched, grounded firmly in extensive oral history and archival sources, and carefully argued, Down on the Killing Floor will be indispensable reading for everyone interested in race and labor."--Eric Arnesen, author of Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality