The Labor Movement Makes You Brave

Back in the 90s, it was a favorite unionbusting tactic of meatpacking companies to hire all the undocumented immigrants they could, then when they went out on strike, they’d call INS and have all their workers arrested. Great labor policy. The terrible PR this caused forced them off of it. But with fascism and ethnic cleansing the name of the game, why not try again? But workers with unions can be very brave. Solidarity is real. Doing something by yourself is very scary. Doing something with hundreds or thousands of other people is a lot less scary. Thus, kudos to these undocumented workers who have voted for a strike authorization in a meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, despite the fact that they know very well what it could mean to them staying in this country.

This week, hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants faced an uncertain future as the Trump administration fought in federal court to revoke their legal status and deport them. But despite these threats, the largely immigrant union workers at a JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado, many of them recent arrivals from Haiti, still voted on Wednesday by an overwhelming margin to strike over poor working conditions in what could become the first sanctioned walkout at a major meatpacking plant in decades.

Outside the plant on the day before the strike vote, semis idled on either side of Highway 85—the cattle trailers full and waiting to unload, the cows’ warm breath rising in clouds through the slatted sides. Across the highway, Tchelly Moise and other representatives of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 union walked through the employee parking lot, passing out handbills to workers coming and going from their shifts. The fliers (in Moise’s native Haitian Creole but also in Somali, Spanish, Burmese, and other languages spoken inside the plant) informed union members of a vote to be held the following day in the ballroom of the DoubleTree Hotel, a little over a mile away.

The daylong secret balloting was no surprise to members who had been demanding a strike vote for weeks, as tense and often contentious contract negotiations over pay and work conditions at JBS, the Brazilian multinational and world’s largest producer of beef, have dragged on for eight months. Haitian workers, who comprise a plurality of the plant’s night shift, have been especially upset. In 2023 and 2024, they were recruited to work at the Greeley plant under what the union characterizes as false pretenses amounting to human trafficking. (A JBS spokesperson told me that the company takes the safety and welfare of its employees seriously and that it follows all laws and regulations. The spokesperson also said that no substantiated evidence was provided that tied the recruiter or company leadership to the claims outlined by the union.) 

In December, a group of those workers filed a class action lawsuit alleging that they were promised free housing but, upon arrival, were charged “to live in overcrowded, uninhabitable housing” nearby at the Rainbow Motel. Worse still, the suit alleges, after being recruited to the B Shift, that they were made to work some of the hardest jobs on the line and at “dangerously fast speeds.” The suit claims that the line on the daytime A shift usually averages 300 head of cattle processed per hour, while the B shift runs at 370—and has reached as high as 440 head per hour.

Despite the lawsuit, the conditions, employees say, have remained largely unchanged—or even gotten worse. Some workers have told the union they struggle to keep up with the speed of the line at times. (JBS did not respond to a request for comment.) In recent weeks, some began coordinating short work stoppages, letting beef slide by on the conveyor belt uncut and untrimmed while banging their meat hooks on the sides of the metal work stations to alert supervisors that the chain conveyor system needed to be stopped.

That story is from a couple of weeks ago and the whole thing does a good job at getting into the awful working conditions of the people who produce your meat. But it is ongoing, though the strike has not yet started and hopefully, this gets worked out well for the workers without a strike.