Packinghouse Daughter: A Memoir by Cheri Register. New York: Harper Collins/Perennial, 2001 (278 pages). $13.95 paper. Originally published: St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2000.

While the setting of Cheri Register's memoir Packinghouse Daughter is a Wilson meat packing plant in Albert Lea, Minnesota, her description of a childhood time and place rings as true as if she had grown up in my own working class family in South Omaha in the 1950's. I remember much of the same details: the blue work shirts that my father wore to his job at Swift's packinghouse, the kill floor I witnessed on a school field trip, the tense atmosphere around our house when the packinghouse union decided to call a strike. But, more at the heart of Packinghouse Daughter, and of my own memories, is a fierce respect for blue collar workers, like our fathers, who labored at their jobs to put food on the table.

In addition to drawing on her own personal memories, Register "discovers another Albert Lea" in information gathered from family history, personal interviews, and extensive research in state and labor union archives. Packinghouse Daughter is an example of the type of memoir that serves a larger purpose than mere personal reminiscence: it not only underscores the obvious disparity among social classes that has always existed in America but also points to the fundamental integrity of a typically undervalued class. Register gives the background of her farmer grandparents, who were forced into poverty not because of a lack of intelligence or vision but as a result of the farm crisis of the 1920's and the Depression of the 1930's, economic events over which they had no control .

A large part of Register's book is devoted to the events surrounding the 109-day strike at Wilson in 1959, which drew national attention after Minnesota Governor Orville Freeman declared martial law in Albert Lea, closing down the plant and calling in the National Guard to quell the violence between strikers and scabs. The emotional impact of picket signs bearing the word "UNFAIR" on fourteen-year-old Register signals a coming of age: "I was no longer a lovelorn teenager. I was a proud and angry packinghouse kid living, if only momentarily, at the center of the world." Register makes this time in history come alive through the oftentimes poignant and lyrical descriptions of her childhood experiences: a childhood friendship strained by divided loyalties to either labor or management; the kindness of union members in a neighboring town at Christmas; her father sobbing at the kitchen table after not being initially rehired after the strike.

The author expands on these personal experiences with an extensive examination of union records and newspaper accounts and personal interviews, uncovering a more complex reality than her adolescent passion would otherwise indicate. For example, the union had strategically timed the strike during a glut in the hog market. Newspaper reports written during the strike characterizing the strikers as "ruffians" revealed the pro-company bias of the press. And, most revealing, Wilson illegally violated the UPWA's right to strike by hiring permanent replacements, thereafter manipulating the court system to sanction its methods. In uncovering the story of the strike, Register raises fundamental questions about workers' rights: Are workers, as owners would believe, the property of the company, or, rather, do they, by virtue of the investment of their labor, have an intrinsic property right in the company? And doesn't a company also have a responsibility to the community which gives it the resources to make a profit in the first place?

While Register scrutinizes the strike from all angles, her loyalties nonetheless are squarely with the union, which had a solid record of protecting workers' rights in the community, and which, as an institution, keeps "the ideal of fairness alive" to this day. She makes no bones about picking sides. "Ordinarily . . . I prefer to leave complexities unresolved," she notes in her account of the illegal tactics of Judge Cooney, the owner of Wilson during the 1959 strike, "in this case, however, one truth too easily deteriorates into plain meanness."

Although she strongly identifies with her working-class roots, Register, a college professor and writer, has risen to the ranks of the middle class. Her father, as was typical of his generation, sacrificed to make it possible for her to get an education and avoid the grueling work of the packinghouse (where she had no desire to work). Some readers might question the genuineness of Register's allegiance to a life she has voluntarily left behind. But Register admits her alienation from her working class roots, a condition she feels makes her even more responsible for recording her family's legacy, an obligation, she notes, that "can weigh heavily on those who have left our childhood environment." Register, after all, is writing for those who were too tired at the end of the day to write their own stories and asks of her readers the same question that seems to have compelled her to write Packinghouse Daughter: "What are you doing to honor the people who raised you?"

With unions out of favor, a government that systematically rewards the rich, and a global economy that shamelessly exploits third-world labor, Register's story is as relevant today as it was fifty years ago when our fathers left for work early every morning for the packinghouse.