This study will analyze Upton Sinclair's expose of the horrors of the meatpacking industry in Chicago in the first years of the twentieth century. Specifically, the study will focus on the impact of the labor unions and Progressive reform on the immigrant workers in Chicago's packinghouses, considering the political climate, social relations and labor conditions from the perspective of immigrants and their employers. The argument of the study will be that, in the context of the novel, labor unions and Progressive reform had little or no impact on improving the working conditions or general lot in life of any immigrant. Of course, it is vital that we keep in mind that Sinclair was arguing that capitalism---with or without unions or reform---would always be a hell for workers, and particularly for immigrant workers who were even lower on the socioeconomic ladder than native-born workers. Sinclair's novel is meant to entirely reject the capitalist system and to bring in its place a socialist system. In this critical portrait of capitalism and its exploitation of the immigrants and other workers, unions are in fact shown to be tools of the capitalist bosses, used as another means to control and mislead them.
In Sinclair's novel about the broken dreams of Jurgis Rudkis and his fellow Lithuanian immigrants, unions are meant to be institutions which give false hope to the workers. They live in utterly dreadful circumstances and are exploited like animals by their capitalist overlords. The women are forced to work at an inhuman pace, lose money if they cannot, and then are fired if they complain (106). The men work in the packinghouses like slaves in hell. When Jurgis is "lucky" enough to be picked for work, he finds working conditions to hardly be fitting of the American Dream for which he left his native Lithuania. Sinclair is relentless in providing page after page of detailed horrors the immigrants faced every day at work:
There w...