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On May 14, 1937, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the upstart union federation organizing the country’s mass production industries, awarded the Ottumwa, Iowa local of the United Packing House Workers its first charter for meatpacking employees. Workers had fought a pitched battle with their employer, John Morrell and Co., which sixteen years earlier had used the Iowa National Guard to break their strike and bust their union. Last Monday afternoon, in a decidedly more subdued environment — the red metal union hall of the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Ottumwa local — immigrant workers who toil on the late-night shift at the local meatpacking plant assembled at a “satellite caucus” to deliver their verdict in the Democratic presidential primary. It was a speedy affair: in less than twenty minutes, the fifteen attendees had filled out caucus cards and divided up into “preference groups.” All but one, an Elizabeth Warren organizer, went for the Vermont senator. And because Warren fell below the “viability” threshold (15 percent), Sanders grabbed all the site’s delegates — the first awarded in the 2020 Iowa caucus. “Most of the people in here are from Africa, there was a guy here from Bosnia,” one caucusgoer, Tarik, told me after the event (he requested I not use his last name). “We just want someone who’s going to work for us, make America better. We want to have the best future for everybody.” The face of the Iowa working class has morphed since the heyday of the CIO and the Packing House Workers union. In those years, Ottumwa was almost entirely white, with meatpacking workers mostly of English, Swedish, and German descent. These days, nearly a quarter of the city is nonwhite. Ottumwa isn’t an anomaly. While Iowa remains about 90 percent white, many pockets of the state boast relatively high numbers of nonwhite residents. In the months leading up to the caucus, Bernie Sanders, more than any other candidate, made it a point to court these workers — even organizing for the “satellite caucuses” aimed at nontraditional voters that other presidential hopefuls wrote off. It worked. According to exit polls, the democratic socialist won 38 percent of nonwhite caucusgoers — trouncing his next closest competitor, Joe Biden, by 21 percentage points — and 32 percent of participants with a household income under $50,000. (That number jumped to 43 percent for those making under $25,000.) Iowa, by dint of its first-in-the-nation status, became the testing ground for Sanders’s audacious wager: that he could build a multiracial working-class base to power a political revolution. With the results finally in — and New Hampshire set to vote tomorrow — we can safely say he’s in the early stages of delivering on that bet.

The Changing Face of Iowa Workers From the late 1930s until the early 1950s, Local 1 of the United Packing House Workers was synonymous with shop floor militancy. Ottumwa’s meatpacking workers, many of them schooled in the tactics of worker solidarity in Iowa’s south-central coal mines, repeatedly spearheaded job actions to prevent the company from speeding up work and foisting imperious managers on them. In one characteristic action in 1938, Clarence “Bronc” Poncy, a “beef kill” worker, initiated a sit-down strike to challenge the pace of slaughtering. He convinced the rest of his crew to join, leaving the foreman and department supervisor little choice but to concede. A new pace was established. “Morrell workers’ solidarity,” Wilson Warren writes in his history of the local, “would result in the creation of one of the most dynamic CIO union movements in the meatpacking industry.” But by the 1960s, a “structural revolution” had hit the meatpacking industry: “Between the early 1960s and mid-1990s,” Warren writes, “dozens of old-line, medium and large-city midwestern, unionized plants closed. [Companies] replaced them with new, nonunion beef and pork processing facilities.” Iowa Beef Processing, founded in 1961, was a leader in stoking the shift. The company bought animals directly from farmers, deskilled the work with automation, and deployed a “total managerial strategy of low-wage labor at all costs.” The unions that were able to hang on struggled to secure good contracts. Meatpacking became less lucrative and more dangerous. An important part of the new normal was hiring immigrant labor, which companies often actively recruited to ruthlessly exploit. In small and medium-sized towns across Iowa, Latinos became the archetypal packinghouse worker. The 1980 census recorded a Hispanic population of less than 1 percent; the most recent figures place that number at more than 6 percent. Between 2000 and 2018, the size of the Hispanic community shot up by 136 percent. Three counties now have Latino populations of more than 20 percent, and several others are in double digits. The larger numbers didn’t translate into political or economic power. Companies refused to concede basic rights to the new workforce and banked on the country’s immigration system keeping workers afraid and in line. In 2008, the northeast Iowa town of Postville (population 2,000) was ripped apart when immigration agents raided a meatpacking plant and rounded up four hundred workers. Before it was over, about a fourth of the town had disappeared. (The company’s CEO ultimately served prison time, but President Trump commuted his sentence.) Immigrant workers in meatpacking and other industries learned to keep their heads down, contributing much to their local communities without raising a stink. Iowa’s major business owners no doubt thought they’d gotten a great deal. But many of those same immigrant workers (and especially their children) now form a crucial part of Bernie Sanders’s socialist campaign — one of the most ambitious efforts to roll back corporate power in years.