Meantime the packers had set themselves definitely to the task of making a new labor force. A thousand or two of strikebreakers were brought in every night, and distributed among the various plants. Some of them were experienced workers⁠—butchers, salesmen, and managers from the packers’ branch stores, and a few union men who had deserted from other cities; but the vast majority were “green” negroes from the cotton districts of the far South, and they were herded into the packing-plants like sheep. There was a law forbidding the use of buildings as lodging-houses unless they were licensed for the purpose, and provided with proper windows, stairways, and fire-escapes; but here, in a “paint-room,” reached only by an enclosed “chute,” a room without a single window and only one door, a hundred men were crowded upon mattresses on the floor. Up on the third story of the “hog-house” of Jones’s was a storeroom, without a window, into which they crowded seven hundred men, sleeping upon the bare springs of cots, and with a second shift to use them by day. And when the clamor of the public led to an investigation into these conditions, and the mayor of the city was forced to order the enforcement of the law, the packers got a judge to issue an injunction forbidding him to do it!