Mythologized by Upton Sinclair as hopeless, Chicago's packinghouse workers were in fact active agents in the early twentieth century transformation that swept urban industrial America. James R. Barrett's award-winning study explores how the lives and neighborhoods of packinghouse workers convey the experience of mass production work, the quality of working class life, the process of class formation and fragmentation, the effects of unionization, and the changing character of class relations. Merging history and analysis with contemporary social surveys and a computer-assisted analysis of census data, Barrett delves into a wide range of social, economic, and cultural factors that resulted in class cohesion and fragmentation.