It’s the largest strike in decades. Who wins if meat prices keep rising?
This article was produced in collaboration with Mother Jones. It may not be reproduced without express permission from FERN. If you are interested in republishing or reposting this article, please contact [email protected].
On Monday at 5:30 a.m., more than three thousand employees at the JBS beef packing plant in Greeley, Colorado, officially walked off the line. Members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, the union that represents the plant, had begun the first major meatpacking strike in more than four decades, effectively shutting down one of the largest meat processing sites in the country. About 7 percent of America’s beef comes out of this single plant on a normal day. But now, thousands of workers—mostly foreign-born laborers from Haiti, Somalia, Burma, and Mexico—formed a picket line across the street, singing in Haitian Creole, chanting through a megaphone in Spanish, and wearing placards that read PLEASE DO NOT PATRONIZE JBS.
They were walking out to protest stalled wage negotiations and poor working conditions. A recent class action lawsuit brought by Haitian workers at the plant claims that they have been segregated onto a night shift and forced to work at “dangerously fast speeds.” Last month’s strike vote was nearly unanimous—evidence, the union says, of worker frustration.
By mid-morning outside the plant, just three semis carrying cattle for slaughter sat idling on the side of the highway—a far cry from the usual long line of trucks, known among workers as “Death Row.” The cattle pens north of the plant were virtually empty. Production was at a standstill. But the company seemed to want to downplay the significance of the stoppage. “This morning,” a JBS spokeswoman told me via email, “many JBS Greeley team members chose to report to work rather than participate in the strike called by UFCW Local 7, and we expect that number to continue increasing in the days ahead.”
But the scene outside the plant didn’t seem to support that optimism. JBS had erected fencing around the employee parking lot, and security personnel in company windbreakers stood at entry checkpoints, scanning IDs and waving through any workers who chose to cross the picket. There weren’t many of them. Union members had voted almost unanimously to strike a couple of weeks earlier. Workers on the picket parted to let the cars enter but speculated that these were probably managers at the plant.
“Don’t be late for work,” one picketer jeered.
Another shouted, “Have fun on the kill.”
All morning, the picket line continued to grow as union officials checked in more workers, handed out more picket signs, and called out simple reminders—stay on the sidewalks, keep moving, don’t block anyone trying to cross the picket line. Kim Cordova, president of Local 7, stood by the folding tables where strike placards were being distributed. She wore a winter hat and down jacket with a yellow reflective vest over top. “My toes are frozen,” she joked, “but everything is going well, very organized.”
She was projecting confidence, but the fact is that this strike is a huge gamble. The price of beef has soared over the past year. The work stoppage—choking off slaughtering, butchering, and packaging of some 30,000 head of cattle per week—promised to further constrict supply and likely send prices even higher.
“I think it’s unavoidable,” said Jennifer Martin, an associate professor of Animal Sciences and Meat Extension Specialist at Colorado State University. The only question, she said, is when. “That depends on how much of the kill they can relocate to other plants,” she said. “That’s going to be the thing that really determines the speed at which consumers see price impacts.”
In short, if the strike lasts more than a few days, then what has been a local battle over workplace conditions, healthcare, and wages could turn into a proxy for bigger picture conflicts—inflation and affordability, the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, and corrupt corporate influence.
If the strike continues, it stands to become a national issue, one that might force a reckoning over how our meat is made. “I don’t think the American public has a sense that the food on our table is being produced by immigrant workers under conditions that would make Upton Sinclair turn over in his grave,” said Peter Rachleff, a professor emeritus of history at Macalester College and author of Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement. “I don’t think the public has a clue that that’s what’s going on.”
JBS was well aware of the shockwaves such a strike could send through the system. Last week, in preparation for the work stoppage, the company halted slaughtering, canceled cattle shipments, and began redirecting deliveries from feedlots to its plants in Grand Island, Nebraska, and Cactus, Texas—exactly the strategy described by Martin. “By utilizing available capacity at other JBS facilities,” the company spokeswoman said via email, “we can maintain supply, protect the long term stability of the beef chain, and minimize disruption for consumers and retailers.” Still, the price meatpackers pay feedlots for livestock fell 4 percent in anticipation of the strike. (The price of livestock goes down whenever slaughtering slows, since there is more supply and ranchers feel pressure to sell at a lower cost.) “We are operating the facility to the best of our ability,” the JBS spokeswoman wrote. “We will continue scaling operations this week as more team members return.”
Cordova says the company is trying to force employees back to work through implicit threats of firing. On March 9, she says, JBS called workers into a meeting, and managers passed out a form letter addressed to the union, resigning membership. All employees had to do was sign and then show up for work as usual—with no more union representation. I independently obtained a copy of the letter from a worker. On a recording of the meeting made by another employee, a manager can be heard telling workers who declined to sign that they should take all of their personal possessions with them. (The JBS spokeswoman wrote: “This is a legally compliant document that was shared in response to employees asking for direction on how to withdraw their union membership in order to prevent being fined by the union for making the choice to work.”)
On a new website posted to respond to questions about the strike, JBS again hinted that workers could be fired if they don’t return soon—vowing to continue operations “either with workers who choose not to strike, or with replacement workers.” Such language has fed fear among the workforce and fueled speculation that JBS might bus in workers from the recently shuttered Tyson beef plant in Lexington, Nebraska, or from Amarillo, Texas, where, in January, Tyson reduced operations from two shifts to one.
This strategy of trying to turn the workforce against itself, some labor historians observed, is a familiar tactic—one that helped create the industry landscape of today. Rachleff, whose book Hard-Pressed in the Heartland is an insider account of the last major labor stoppage among meatpacking workers, the 1985 to ’86 union strike at the Hormel pork plant in Austin, Minnesota, sees parallels between that stoppage and the dispute unfolding in Greeley. During the Hormel strike, the company reopened the plant with more than five hundred “permanent replacements,” escorted through the picket lines by National Guard troops called up by the governor of Minnesota. Under such pressure, the union unraveled. Nearly five hundred members crossed their own picket lines. A thousand unyielding workers were fired. And, eventually, union leadership in DC stepped in and declared an end to the strike—with almost none of the union’s demands met.
The failure of that strike had far-reaching implications. The nearly all-white, US-born workforce was steadily replaced with immigrant workers. Wage increases were slowed or halted. Skilled work was broken down and automated. Most importantly, meatpacking giants were able to grow and consolidate, until just a few companies gained near-total control over markets for beef, pork, and poultry. Today, the US meatpacking industry is more centralized and monopolized than it was when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906, leading President Theodore Roosevelt to break up the so-called Meat Trust.
JBS’s size allows the company to achieve powerful economies of scale. It’s so large, in fact, that JBS and just three other companies (Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef), known as the Big Four, control as much as 93 percent of the market. Other members of the beef supply chain—cattle ranchers, grocery chains, and the fast food behemoth McDonald’s, among others—have argued in multiple lawsuits that the Big Four are working in coordination to depress the market price of cattle, suppress worker wages, and drive up the price of processed beef for their clients, who pass the pain along to consumers. Local 7 is gambling that workers can use the industry’s unprecedented consolidation against JBS: If they can hamstring the plant’s production, maybe prices will rise enough that the government will have to take action against JBS.
We’ve certainly been paying more for beef. Prices have climbed steadily since the pandemic—but in the last year, they’ve soared. Since Trump returned to the White House, the average price of steaks has climbed from $10.87 a pound to $12.51 a pound—a leap of 15 percent. The price of ground beef is 20 percent higher—nearly seven times the increase in overall consumer prices. Then, late last year, Tyson announced its plans to reduce production, cutting the national beef processing capacity by 10 percent and further driving price increases. This led some industry observers to allege that the company was intentionally constricting supply in order to increase profitability. (In a statement, Tyson said it was working to “right size its beef business and position it for long-term success.”)
President Trump took to Truth Social. “I have asked the DOJ to immediately begin an investigation into the Meat Packing Companies who are driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation,” he wrote. “Action must be taken immediately to protect Consumers, combat Illegal Monopolies, and ensure these Corporations are not criminally profiting at the expense of the American People.” The Department of Justice immediately announced an investigation into JBS and other members of the Big Four. Last week, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer introduced legislation that mandated a breakup of the large meatpacking corporations and specifically called for an investigation of JBS for “corruption” and business practices that “distorted competitive conditions” across the industry.
The union is betting that if it can take another 7 percent of the nation’s slaughter capacity offline, it may drive up food prices enough that Trump and Congress would be forced to follow through on their promises to investigate JBS—and even break up the company.
But it could also backfire. Cordova worries that JBS will be protected by the Trump administration—in part because the company was the single largest donor to his second inauguration. And also because the plant’s workforce is estimated to be 90 percent non-white immigrants, including more than 1,200 Haitian workers, whose visa statuses are on shaky ground. The administration is currently arguing before the Supreme Court that it should have the power to revoke the Temporary Protected Status of hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants who entered the country legally under the Biden administration. If that happens, Cordova believes there’s a chance that the Trump administration could use the strike as justification for a raid of the plant by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Cordova was a union representative in 2006 when the plant, then owned by Swift & Company, became a central target of the first major ICE action ever undertaken. “Those raids,” she told me in an earlier interview, “were a push by [President George W.] Bush, I believe, to make some sort of political statement—to come in and really go after the industry and these plants for what he believed were undocumented workers.” The situation today is different: All of the plant’s employees, who herald from dozens of countries and speak some fifty different languages, have documentation. At least, for now.
On Monday afternoon, as night shift strikers took to the picket, the threat of an immediate ICE raid dissipated. The Supreme Court had declined to allow the administration to revoke TPS protections for Haitians and begin deportations immediately. But no one could breathe a total sigh of relief: The justices had agreed to hear oral arguments for the case in late April.
Despite their precarious status, the Local 7 membership voted last month nearly 99 percent in favor of the strike—driven, many say, by years of mistreatment. “The chain speed is the main thing,” Robenson Franc told me, speaking in Haitian Creole through an interpreter. Franc is one of more than a thousand Haitian workers who arrived at JBS in 2023 as part of what Local 7 describes as a human trafficking scheme, aimed at undercutting the union and forcing new employees to work on the night shift at unfair speeds. The suit claims that the line on the daytime shift usually averages 300 head of cattle processed per hour. But the night shift, when many of these newly recruited Haitian workers are on the line, runs at 370—and has reached as high as 440 head per hour. “They put up the speed as fast as they need,” Franc told me. And regardless of the speed, he said, workers are expected to keep pace.
Last month, Trump’s Department of Agriculture removed all restrictions on the speeds of poultry and pork production lines—a move that will increase output and help stabilize JBS’s profits through its pork operations and Pilgrim’s Pride, which is majority-owned by JBS and one of the largest poultry producers in the world. Cordova says JBS is now pushing to lift restrictions on beef production lines. The prospect of government oversight being removed has made documentation and negotiations over staffing to safely match line speeds a central issue at the Greeley plant, where workers say that lines currently run so fast that there’s no time to sharpen their knives, leading to debilitating repetitive stress injuries.
On the new website posted by JBS, the company says it is “false” that “UFCW Local 7 is striking over worker conditions.” The website claims that JBS “and the union resolved all non-economic items in bargaining” and says that the company has implemented “a process to provide newly sharpened knives frequently throughout the day”—with new, state-of-the-art knives to be installed soon. JBS says that the only remaining disagreement is over hourly wages and other “economic considerations.”
“They’re just trying to push that this is an economic strike,” Cordova said, which she believes is an effort to paint workers as only concerned about money. “That’s not true,” she said: Unresolved issues include disagreements over who should have to pay for worker personal protective equipment; the amount of sick time and paid leave benefits workers receive; and accurate accounting of line speeds, in order to make sure there’s enough staff to keep up with the pace of sped-up lines. While those issues may be strictly economic considerations for JBS, she said, for workers “it’s a staffing issue, it’s a safety issue, it’s a transparency issue.”
It remains to be seen whether this strike is short-lived or stretches on for weeks or months in the way of historic strikes of the past. Jennifer Martin emphasized that the length of the strike will determine the future for consumers. “If the strike continues, would we expect to see higher prices? Yes. And would we expect that to be compounded by higher input costs, fuel prices, all of those sorts of things? Yes.”
What she couldn’t predict is who would feel the impact of those changes the most. Would it be the workers, who are forced to risk their livelihoods or accept what they consider unsafe conditions; the ranchers, who will have to sell their cattle at a lower price; the company, which says its razor-thin margins are “pressuring profitability”; or the American people, who are struggling to put food on the table?
“Is this the final straw,” she continued, “where all of these pressures have been building, and this is the thing that sends it over the edge, where prices move far enough that consumer behavior changes in a meaningful way?”
“That’s an unknown. It will really depend on how long this strike continues.”
Help us keep digging!
FERN is a nonprofit and relies on the generosity of our readers. Please consider making a donation to support our work.
Cancel monthly donations anytime.