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394 / YICI0U at the factory. The retailer simply buys his ground beef trimmings in another box. Even the hides have been started on the tanning process at Dakota City. Says Lou Havrilla, an assistant vice-president at Iowa Beef, "What you saw down there was a factory. None of us are really in the meat business. We're in the tonnage business. Beef just happens to be our raw material.". Someone else is doing Mrs. Schuller's job now, exactly as she did it. After : an Iowa Beef executive and a reporter picked her out at random as a typical employee, she proved how typical she was by quitting before the story ap. peared in print. The Amalgamated Meat Cutters union says Iowa Beef ran through twenty thousand workers for its two thousand Dakota City butcher jobs before the plant had been open ten years. Then came the 1977 strike, which brought almost total turnover. Even before the strike, fewer than 25 percent of the workforce had been at the plant three years. Such workers obviously earn less than old-line meat companies like Swift and Armour pay their skilled butchers. And they obviously carn nuch less than do the local retail and wholesale butchers around the country whom they are replacing. Membership in the Amalgamated has dropped to about 525,000 from about 5s0,o00 a few years ago, despite ever-increasing meat consumption. If the automation introduced by Iowa Beef and its immitators had taken full effect, the membership would be down much more. In many midwestern cities, the union still explicitly bans the importation of boxed beef. In some cities, the union has threatened to strike to stop boxed beef, and in Kansas City such a strike actually occurred. Iowa Beef says 16 percent of the American people art still covered by such bans. Even in New York, Philadelphia, and other large cities where boxed beef has been admitted, contracts have been chaunged to provide that no currently employed full-time butchers can lose their jobs because of it. When the butchers retire, however, they tend to be replaced by part-time workers, or not to be replaced at all. In Philadelphia, butchers' membership dropped from 5,000 to abour. 4,750 in the tirst six years boxed beef was allowed in, though much niore meat was being sold. In New York, a training program designed to bring minority,group members inio the trade was ended. All through the northeast, apprenticeship programs are being eliminated. Some union officials still rail against boxed beef. "It's no differeni from the Japanese sending cheap TVs'in, undercutting the price," complains David W. Gelios, secretary-treasurer of Local 626 in Toiedo. "It doesn't haye the bloom, it doesn't have the tenderness" of freshly butchered meat, says Leon Schachter, the butchers' leader in the Washington, D.C., area. But consumer reaction hasn't borne him out.. And Iowa Beef remains by far the biggest benificiary of the boom it started. Tino De Angelis was paroled in 1972 after serving seven ycars of his twenty-year sentence for the salad oil swindle. A year later I visited him in his neai, almost ascetically modest one-and-a-half-room apariment on the first foor of a small Jersey City hotel, and then at a hog burchering operation he