Teresa Cotsirilos: You're listening to REAP/SOW, dispatches from the front lines of food, farming, and the environment. I'm your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Earlier this year, thousands of workers walked off the job at a JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, launching the largest strike at a US meatpacking plant in 40 years. These are some of the most vulnerable workers in our food system. Many of them are refugees, some are at risk of deportation, but they decided to walk out anyway. According to allegations in a recent class action lawsuit, the plant's line speeds were dangerously fast. Worker housing was at times uninhabitable, and something just had to be done.
My colleague Ted Genoways was in the room when Greeley workers voted to strike. A senior editor at FERN, he's an expert on US meatpacking, as well as its long history of labor violations, and the web of corruption that some meat processing companies like JBS are involved in. He recently sat down with journalist Tom Philpott to talk about his work. This episode is from Unconfined, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. I'll let their host, Tom Philpott, take it from here.
Speaker 2: This is an episode of Unconfined, the podcast of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future in Baltimore, Maryland. Unconfined is a podcast about industrial food animal production and its emerging alternatives. You can find us online at clf.jhsph.edu. The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Johns Hopkins University or of the Center for a Livable Future.
Tom Philpott: Welcome to the latest episode of Unconfined Podcast. Our guest today is Ted Genoways. Ted is a senior editor at the Food and Environment Reporting Network and a contributing writer at Mother Jones. He has covered the meatpacking industry for 15 years, writing a book called The Chain, which is phenomenal, about Hormel Foods. In recent years, he's turned his attention to JBS, which is an enormous Brazilian meatpacking company that has huge operations in the United States. It's actually the biggest beef packer in the world and probably the second biggest meat company in the world after Tyson.
I should also mention about Ted that he and I share an interest in tequila, and he has a book that came out last year called Tequila Wars that I still haven't gotten my hands on, but I look forward to it. Today we're going to make ourselves focus on meatpacking, which is another interest that we share, covering meatpacking labor. Ted, you have, for about a year now, been covering the situation in Greeley, Colorado, this enormous JBS beef packing plant and the labor issues that have gone on there. Maybe we can set up our conversation by talking a little bit about the demographics of meatpacking. Who are the people who work in this plant and where do they come from and how do they get here? Why don't we start there?
Ted Genoways: That's a great place to start, Tom, and thanks for having me on. This is really a pleasure to talk with you about this stuff. The plant in Greeley, there are about 3,800 workers there, and it's a full-size beef operation. You've got people working in the slaughter side. You've got people who are making what they call the primal cuts, the large packaging or large cutting of the carcasses, and then everything being cut down to the cuts that we are used to seeing in the store, all of which happens on the cold side of the operation.
It's almost 2,000 people working in the plant at any given time, and they run two shifts, and there's a third shift that is sanitation. Of those thousands of workers, the union estimates that probably less than 10% of them were born in the United States. They are overwhelmingly immigrant workers. Just given what has happened in our immigration system in the last 10 years, most of them are people who are here as asylum seekers of one sort or another. Many of them have temporary protected status and are, therefore, in a vulnerable position. They are here legally, but their status is being challenged by the current administration.
As a picture of the background of the plant, there's somewhere around a quarter of the workers who are Haitians who have arrived here recently, who came under the Biden administration. You've got more established groups of Somalis, Hispanic workers primarily from Mexico and Guatemala. There's a large population of Burmese workers. There are workers who are scattered from various parts of the world. There are West African workers, and many of these populations have to do with who's been doing the recruiting, where people have been resettled by our immigration system. You have these odd pockets where there are a large number of people from Benin.
When you put this all together, what you have is a workforce that is not just overwhelmingly immigrant, but one that is speaking many different languages, representing many different cultures. This united nations of workers is partly by design, that this is something that JBS are operating as Swift at this particular plant. They have hired in this way in order to keep the workforce fragmented and difficult for them to organize and to do some of what they've done recently, overcoming those obstacles, which is to essentially form a unified workforce that stands behind the union in labor negotiations. That strategy of fragmenting the workforce has worked for 20-plus years, but just in the last year, conditions have gotten severe enough in the plant that the workers have unified, despite the cultural and language barriers.
[00:07:29] Tom: You had a piece in Mother Jones, the May/June issue that people can find online, called Immigrants on the Line. It tells a pretty extraordinary story of how that plant attracted Haitian workers. Can you tell that story, please?
[00:07:50] Ted: Yes. One of the things that has historically happened over the last 20 years is that there will be a wave of workers that is recruited into the plant, and they become a dominant part of the plant, and then their numbers will face a slow attrition as those workers are able to other kinds of work. Meatpacking is the last thing that anyone wants to be doing, and so those numbers will come down, and then there will be a period where the company starts looking for a new immigrant group.
In this case, as there were a large number of Haitians that were coming into the country amid the gang violence, especially in Port-au-Prince, there was an influx and an available workforce that the company identified kind of by accident. There was this young guy who was interested in being a TikTok influencer. He was a Haitian immigrant who had arrived in Colorado and was driving an Uber. His notion was that if he could get on TikTok and convince people to move to Colorado, then he would be in a position to drive a lot of those people around because he speaks Haitian Creole.
His idea was to go around and find employers who were hiring Haitians so that he could say, "Hey, here's a place where there are a bunch of jobs." When he stumbled onto JBS and found this mid-level HR manager, that person who was from Benin and is French-speaking himself was like, "Here's everything that you need to tell people, and let's start recruiting them in. Tell them, don't worry, we'll guarantee them jobs. We'll guarantee them a place to stay, and this is going to be great for them." What ended up happening was that that video went unexpectedly viral. There were thousands of people who were interested in coming to Greeley all of a sudden.
There were more than enough jobs. In fact, the union alleges that the company started disciplinary actions against people who were current employees in order to make space for people who were inexperienced and didn't know how fast the line should be moving, what the break protocols were, and all of these union-negotiated parts of the job. The problem was that there was no place to put people. They had said that they would provide a place to stay, and their plan was to put them up in a tiny motel near the packing plant, but when they suddenly had hundreds and then more than 1,000 people who arrived, they just kept packing them into this little motel and then into a rental house.
The descriptions, and I was able to get text messages back and forth between the JBS HR manager and the Uber driver, there were periods where there were 6, 8, sometimes even 10 people in a single tiny motel room as they crammed people into this place in order to have this new workforce arriving. What the union alleges, and there's a class action lawsuit that has now been brought by the Haitian workers themselves, they allege that this constitutes human trafficking, that people were promised good-paying, safe jobs, they were promised a clean, safe place to live.
What they found when they arrived was that the job was actually, they were being asked to work more than 50% faster than the workers on the dayside shift. They were all being put on the night shift, and they were being crammed into this tiny motel. Once they arrived, they didn't have the resources to leave. They were trapped in these conditions. What's unexpected about all of this, and the reason that I continue to cover this as more than just this isolated human trafficking story, is that those workers then became a core. They formed a community and were a big part of the union, then saying, "What we need to do is to press the company. We're not going to just leave. We don't have anywhere we can go."
JBS was also in a bind because the Trump administration has essentially shut off the spigot of new immigrant arrivals, and so they can't be easily replaced. They were in a position where they had to really negotiate with their own workforce for the first time in a very long time. As those tensions elevated over a period of about eight months of negotiations, just recently, it finally resulted in the first major meatpacking strike that we've had in 40 years in this country.
Tom: Leading up to the strike, you report that there were wildcat work stoppages where the people in the line would get together and say, "We're going to stop and bang our instruments." That's also something that's unusual, I think.
Ted: One of the things that I think is amazing to picture is that what everyone described is that the wine typically on the dayside runs somewhere between 250 and, at peak periods, can get over 300 head of cattle in an hour. Then, on the night shift, as a standard starting point, was running at 350. More often, it was being described to me that the line would run up to 410, 415, just unbelievable speeds.
You're approaching running twice as fast at night. The worker said they just couldn't keep up. That you have all of these problems, especially on the tables where you're working with a meat hook and with a knife, where you have to take a piece of meat, you have to hit it with your hook, turn it over, trim it, and send it on down the line. They said that they didn't have time to sharpen their knives, so their knives would get dull and the work would get harder and harder as the speed is continuing to increase.
They just, at a certain point, couldn't keep up. What they would collectively start to do, I think spontaneously, is that when they couldn't keep up, they would just take a step back and, in frustration, start beating the hooks and the knives on the tables to indicate to the supervisors, this product is going by untrimmed. We physically can't do this work.
From there, when one person sees that happening and then a whole table says, "We're not going to trim these cuts," they're forced to stop the line. You stop it, you have to trim everything, and then to restart it, you have to go slower for people to keep up. As you know, Tom, so much of everything in the meatpacking industry boils down in the end to the question of line speed. This, to me, was this amazing illustration of how you can push the system to the point that people, human beings, are simply not able to do the work in the way that the machines elsewhere on the line are.
It becomes this question of really of the humanity of the workers and how the company treats them. In the initial reporting, I was really struck by one Haitian worker who told me that when he was coming to work one day and going through the holding pens where the cattle are held right before they're released into the slaughter area, that he was struck by the fact that they are given individual holding pens to reduce the amount of stress that the animal experiences before it goes in to be slaughtered.
He said that they are moved at a pace that is also, again, intended to reduce that stress. He said that it suddenly hit him that they were treating the cattle better than they were treating the immigrant workers. He told me that in that moment, he felt like he was being treated as a slave. When we talk about what is it that these workers are objecting to, I think it's that at the bottom. They are objecting to having their humanity ignored by their employer.
[00:17:37 Tom: There's another element here. You had a great piece in February of 2026, so this year, about a TikTok in Mother Jones about the day leading up to the strike vote, that I recommend everyone read, and it'll be in our host notes. There's another factor of stress on these people, and that is that the Haitians who are working in this plant are here under temporary protected status granted to them by the Biden administration. The Trump administration, fairly soon after coming to office, revoked or tried to revoke that temporary protected status. Talk a little bit about that, and what happened, and how that overlaid with the strike vote.
Ted: That's a really fascinating and heartbreaking element of all of this. I think it's worth stating that, in order to get temporary protected status, what the Haitians who are on the line at JBS and Greeley all had to do was to demonstrate that their lives were in imminent danger if they were in Haiti. The most common way that you can demonstrate that convincingly is to prove that someone tried to kill you.
Many of the people that I have interviewed have visible scars. They have stories of having been held, having been the subjects of gang violence in Haiti. In order to flee the country and to come to the US, many of them went either to Brazil or to Nicaragua and began their journey to the US on foot. You've got people that their backstory is almost to a one, someone tried to murder them, they fled the country, they traveled more than 1,000 miles on foot.
They applied to our immigration system for protected status, applying for refugee status, and have now been brought into the US, given some of the most dangerous and difficult jobs that we have to offer. Now the Trump administration is saying, "We don't want you here. We are going to round you up and send you back." The thing that I think is especially worrisome that the doctrine of temporary protected status is really an executive power that was asserted by Jimmy Carter, it is something that is simply a philosophy. It's saying, "If there are refugees, we're the United States of America, we shouldn't reject people because they haven't been given a formal recognition of refugee status in a time of crisis. We should be willing to just accept people on a temporary basis and work out their status later."
What the Trump administration is saying is, "We don't think that the danger is potent enough in some of these countries to justify being able to stay in the US without question." I don't agree with the Trump administration on very many things, but I think as a legal doctrine, if the President of the United States has the power to extend temporary protected status, I think it holds to reason that there's the same power to rescind that protected status, and that they have challenged exactly this power when it comes to the Venezuelans.
The Supreme Court has already held that yes, that status can be rescinded and the Venezuelans can be deported. I think there's every reason to think that that's exactly what's going to happen with the Haitians. The cases before the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court has said that they're going to take that case up in late April. Now we can expect that to happen very, very soon. The expectation is that they will be facing the prospect of either being deported or having to apply through a new system that may grant them more permanent status. I think that this is another thing that has driven this desire to stand up.
My thought was that, with this threat hanging over their heads, that the Haitian workers and other workers with temporary protected status would be saying, "We want to keep a low profile. We don't want anyone to be aware that there are a bunch of people with TPS who are outside on a picket line who could be rounded up by ICE at any moment." Instead, I think it ended up working the other way, that all these people said, "Look, we have risked everything to get here. There were promises made to us. We are simply insisting that the promises that were made to us by the government, by the company that hired us, that they follow through on those."
Tom: Let's just make a brief note here that it isn't as though the problems happening in Haiti are happening in a vacuum that has nothing to do with the past US policy. Various interventions over the years has contributed greatly to the current chaos in Haiti, like it has in other places like Guatemala and Honduras, where we're also seeing refugees come up. That's something that often gets left out of conversations. Let's go from there. The strike vote happens, I think maybe the day of the strike vote or the day before a judge paused the revocation of TPS. There was a lot of consternation about how the vote would go. How did the vote go?
Ted: The vote was 99% in favor of the strike, which was something else to watch in the room as thousands of workers from all over the world arrived. Again, I am pretty hardened on these things. I don't get mushy about very much, but for a bunch of the people who were arriving, they said that this was the first time that they'd ever been able to cast a vote for anything. That these are people that do not come from democratic countries, in many cases don't come from functioning governments.
This was the very first time that they were able to exercise a democratic right, and the fact that it was done in this old-fashioned, like, "Here's a paper slip, you mark an X, and put it into a giant wooden box that is just marked as the union vote box," it was something else to see. Also interesting to see that there were some groups of workers who came into the room as a ballroom of a DoubleTree hotel, just a giant solace ballroom. People sitting at some of these tables for a very long time, contemplating whether they could really bring themselves to do this, that they understood the risks.
In some cases, coming in groups and asking questions of the union, and a lot of discussion about, "Will I be able to be identified? Will the company know how I've cast my vote?" Especially there were concerns about that as they came in and registered with the union, like, "I'm here, and I'm voting, and here's my ballot," having to be checked off on the list of people who voted. There were people who were like, "Are they going to know then that I voted?" As it turns out, it's 99%. Essentially, they know who voted to strike.
Despite all of that, that's what they did. Almost unanimously they said that what we need to do is strike. I should note the strike was an unfair labor practice strike. There were specific complaints that were made, and they boiled down to questions about PPE that company is supposed to provide but were charging the workers for their own PPE. Also, then questions that all relate to line speed. What kinds of time was allotted to workers? How much time they were given to perform certain tasks.
At the same time, they were also asking for a wage increase, but this was not an economic strike, which I think is also really intriguing that they raised this as like, "Yes, we want a wage increase because the prices of everything, the inflationary rate has increased beyond the wage increase that's been offered by the company." Also, they were saying, "This wage increase is one of the things that helps us offset things like paying for our own equipment. If we're being expected to work more than 50% faster than we were a year or two ago, shouldn't we be getting paid more?"
All of those things were raised as their issues, and they went out to the picket line. I have to say, really moving to see the vote happen, really impressive in the same way to see what happens when you're like, "Okay, we have to get 4,000 workers to a picket line outside of a meatpacking plant along a highway all at the same time." You can't use the company's parking lot because the company has closed it off to workers and said the plant is closed due to the strike.
They rented some parking lots at a nearby fairgrounds, and everybody went on foot over to the picket at about 5:00 in the morning. Watching the patients of thousands of cars come into a parking lot and figure out how this was all going to work and everybody getting their picket signs and figuring out where they were supposed to be positioned, it was really something. It was a vision of this workforce and how they do these complex tasks as a single unit every day. It's just that this time, instead of doing it for the company, they were doing it for themselves.
Tom: How did the strike go? We are recording this on April 14, and I believe yesterday it was resolved.
Ted: They reached a tentative agreement, I guess it was on Friday or Saturday, which they then took to the workforce and said, "This is what JBS has agreed to." They held another vote. This time it was 93% to accept the offer from JBS, which they then announced yesterday. There are certain things that they have publicly acknowledged, like that the PPE will now be paid for by the company, but some of the economic resolution has not been, at least at this point, publicly disclosed. I have to be honest. I have mixed feelings about all of this. I understand. The strike lasted about three weeks, and then there was another week of negotiation while the workers came back and got the plant back up and running in anticipation of the strike being resolved.
That put the pressure on the company for about a full month. It also puts it obviously pressure on the workers to be without a paycheck for a full month as you go through the cycle of your rent being due and all of those sorts of things. Both sides had a lot of incentive. When we start talking about things like JBS paying for the PPE, I'm glad that that's happening. It's also something that they were supposed to be doing already. It's something that is required. You can't charge your workers for their own PPE. The same goes for the resolution of anything that is relating to the line speed.
The line speed has been negotiated, and they declared this to be a trade secret, how fast the lines run. What the lawsuits tell us is that they're not supposed to run over 350, and they were running at 410, 420. If you agree to bring it back down to 350, essentially all that is negotiated and is being won here is the company complying with what they had already agreed to before. It is a victory, but it is hard to feel like that's a major victory for the workers that they just simply are getting what they've been previously promised, and even the wage increase, whatever it may be and if that was part of it, the complaint that they were making was, "Our wages are falling behind the rate of inflation. We're not keeping up with the cost of living."
To me, one of the brutal metrics of this is that talking to workers when they were on the line and people were showing up from the community and saying, "How do we support the workers? What can we do?" The thing that everybody said was, "Bring food. We have the hardest time with right now without our paycheck or reduced paycheck from just the strike wages that the union offers. The hardest thing we have paying for is food." If you're eating a steak, there's a 10% chance that it came from that particular meatpacking plant. The idea that the people who work in that giant plant are struggling to pay for food themselves, I think is a really potent picture of just how dysfunctional the food system is.
Tom: Ted, one thing I've learned from your work over the years is that there's basically been two big inflection points in meatpacking labor since, let's say, the 1950s. Just a really quick history, by the end of the war, by the 1950s, meatpacking was a heavily unionized job and meatpacking workers made essentially a little bit less than what regular manufacturing workers meant, meaning that you could be a meatpacking worker and be part of the American middle class, and there was a time in the post-war era when meatpacking workers participated in the great post-war boom a very unionized workforce. Talk about the huge strike in 1980 and then the big ICE raid in 2006 and how these led us to the point where really some of the most desperate people in the world are packing our meat in the United States.
Ted: Exactly as you say, this was a very unionized job, and often the companies had moved out of the labor centers of the country, especially the '50s forward, had moved out into small towns to try to be closer to where the livestock was raised and reduced that shipping cost. The unionized workforce held for several decades that even though the workers were not in these centralized places anymore, the strength of the union held, and that really started to break apart, as you've mentioned, in the '80s with the union-busting efforts of the Reagan administration. Then it came to a head with the Hormel Foods strike in Austin, Minnesota, which ran from 1985 to 1986. It actually ran for a little bit more than a year.
That strike to me is an important turning point, first of all, because it was a moment that the union was effectively defeated despite having held out for so long. The companies had gotten big enough, the meatpackers had gotten big enough that they could simply shift their production to other plants and weighed out a strike, even a long one like that. The other thing that happened there that I think doesn't get discussed enough is that as soon as this was apparent, that this was going to be a strike that was going to last a long time, that tensions were rising on the line, it was a Democratic governor in Minnesota who called out the National Guard and who helped escort scab workers and union workers who had decided to cross the picket to enter the plant.
This was one of the early moments when all of the union who had been democratic stalwarts for years saw themselves as having been betrayed by the democratic leadership that they had elected top to bottom, in a place like Minnesota at that time. The thing that the union had told the workers from the beginning was, "Look, if we agree to some of the things that Hormel is asking for here, there are some foreseeable outcomes. We're in the moment where Reagan has just extended amnesty to undocumented immigrants who have come into the United States and where there's a huge influx that is continuing to follow."
The union said, "Look, there's essentially a huge scab labor pool that the company will be able to draw from, and if the union doesn't hold, we are going to get replaced top to bottom by scab workers." It's also at a moment where there's automation and mechanization that is coming through that is making it so that the work is less and less skilled. It's less and less about your ability with a knife and more about how much you're able to endure repetitive tasks that you perform on the line. When the international union stepped in and declared an end to the strike, this is exactly what happened.
There was a contract that the union still had with Hormel, but what Hormel did was create a shell company within the company, and in a truly inspired evil move, made that shell company exist wholly inside the plant at Hormel. That was always, to me, one of the most impressive, cynical moves of it all was that the only way to access this new company was through Hormel Foods. They said, "This part of the plant is a different company. We don't have a contract. That new company doesn't have a contract with the union," and that became the gateway for hiring a largely undocumented workforce.
This became the trend for years, and it became such a known way that the meatpacking industry was operating the 20 years later that 20 years later, the workforces at many of these plants was largely made up of undocumented workers. When George W. Bush, with the newly created Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, was looking for some place to perform a raid and be able to, in dramatic fashion, grab up a lot of undocumented workers and make a show of what a problem the immigration policy was, what they did was target six Swift and Company meatpacking plants across the middle of the country, which included the plant in Greeley when it was then owned by Swift before it was purchased by JBS.
This was all supposed to set the stage for immigration reform in 2007, to force that, and then the immigration reform didn't happen. What we ended up with instead was a system where these companies were still reliant on immigrant labor, but now they were pulling from workers, or for their workforce, they were pulling from immigrant pools who had some sort of legal status. That to me is the striking thing about the meatpacking plants these days, is that when you are talking to the workforce, most of the people you're talking to are refugees.
As I said before, most of them, because of the way that they are able to apply for status, they're not just people who have fled war or fled a natural disaster, but they are people who have fled a targeted attempt on their lives. These are truly the most vulnerable people in the world now who are crowded into these large factory settings and are performing the most difficult and dangerous jobs in America in order to keep us fed. To me, it is certainly a compelling situation to see this all unfold, but again and again, I come back to this idea that I feel like we've worked ourselves into the situation where we have some realities that we have to face.
We're either saying, and I think it's a real kind of inflection point for the left, to be honest, people like Chuck Schumer and Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren have been calling for investigations of JBS and other companies like it for years. Well, where are the investigations? Where are the actions? Schumer has introduced with 20 co-sponsors legislation to break up the big four beef packers in order to promote competition that would protect workers and consumers and also cattle ranchers. Great. Why wasn't that introduced when the Democrats had control of both houses and the White House?
One of the things that I think that is becoming a question is, are these things that we care about and that we want to see reformed, or is this just something that we care about enough that we feel bad about it and we're expecting our politicians to side with immigrants when there's a political advantage to be gained, but we're not really doing anything to improve their lives?
I would hope this legislation that 20 senators have signed onto, they're now on the record as that legislation includes a whole section that is outlining why JBS needs to be investigated and possibly either taken over or shut down. Let's see what we do. Can we revisit that language when the Democrats gain control and are in a position to do that?
Tom: Yes. We should also add that JBS is a company that is from Brazil, and it has an extraordinarily shady past in Brazil. Lots of relationships with various governments there, including Bolsonaro's right-wing government. They've been very tight with the Trump administration. This is a very politically powerful and savvy company with a very, very dodgy track record.
Ted: They were the largest donor to Trump's second inauguration, and there was all this upset about the amount of money given by Facebook and Elon Musk for X and all of the tech giants. JBS gave as much to the second Trump inauguration as all those tech giants combined. That's probably worth noting. As soon as they were able to, as they made that donation, it was literally weeks before investigations that had kept them from being publicly offered on the New York Stock Exchange were dropped, and funds came flowing into the company.
Yes, they are very politically savvy within the United States. In Brazil, I feel like all that ever needs to be said is that they were facing 1,800 counts of bribery and corruption, and the way that the owners got out of those charges was providing recordings of themselves bribing public officials all the way up to the president of the country. That's the company that we're talking about.
Tom: Yes, you can't convict us because then you would have to convict yourself, too, so you might as well end this dispute.
[laughter]
Ted, I guess my final is, does this strike, and I get the sort of ambiguous way that it ended; was it a victory for the union? Was it really affirming the status quo for the company? Do you think it augurs more labor unrest, more strike activity going forward? Because, as you make clear, conditions are desperate. I think they're at least as bad in poultry. We went out, CLF, with our journalism fellows in 2024. We went out to the Delmarva Peninsula, which is the major concentration of industrial poultry, and we heard from Haitian workers working in poultry plants out there very similar stories of being thrown out onto the floor without training and then receiving grievous injuries.
It was 2024, so it would have been before the election, before their TPS was suspended, but they knew that they were there in very shaky ground. Also, desperation back home in Haiti, they fled very difficult lives. This is happening; this Greeley plant is a great example of it, but it's by no means an isolated example of it. I guess poultry is concentrated in the right-to-work South, and so union density in poultry is poultry compared to beef and pork, but where do you see labor going from here in this industry? Also, maybe talk a little bit about how we, the people who are able to benefit from this work by having access to this food supply, how can we express solidarity with these workers?
Ted: Let me take the second part first because I think things are so difficult across the entire food system, and it's worth acknowledging that. When the chain came out 10 years ago, people would come to some of the book events and everything, and invariably there'd be somebody who came up and was like, "I'm boycotting Hormel." I'm like, "First of all, good luck with that. They own a lot of other companies. They own peanut butter and guacamole," and you think, "Well, I'm not going to buy industrially raised pork."
Then, Hormel, seeing what was happening with the organic movement, purchased Applegate, and so they're also the largest organic producer in the country now. This consolidation and the size of these companies makes it very difficult to boycott them as an individual consumer. This is like, "Well, I'm going to become a vegan." That eliminates some of the animal welfare issues, but it certainly doesn't address the labor issues. Some of the worst labor abuses are carried out in farm fields where people are raising produce. I always come back to this with people that the estimate is between the fields of some place like the Central Valley in California and making it to your produce aisle.
The estimate is that that piece of produce will pass through the hands of seven children on the way to you, and so there's no way in which you are morally exempted by becoming a vegetarian or a vegan. It's a bigger problem than that. To me, what that means is that the way that we do this is not by expressing our opinions at the checkout aisle and trying to exert that kind of economic control. The reality is that what we need is regulation. We need a functioning government, and that is about making this politically a priority. One of the problems when you've got an overwhelmingly immigrant workforce is that you're talking about a large workforce of people who are not voters. It is really something that has to be prioritized by people who do vote.
That means not just saying, "I'm going to do this with how I cook and eat in my own home," but it's something that you decide is a priority for other reasons. I think that's tough. I think it's tough especially right now. One of the things that has stumped me in recent years, the standard form for the op ed is, what is the one thing that needs to be fixed in order to make things better? There are a thousand problems with something like the food system. You look at the Trump administration and you say, "They're not going to do any of these things."
The worse this makes it for immigrants, the more that fits with their agenda. It really is a top down approach that's necessary. What that means is that there's got to be different leadership with different priorities. That's going to take a while. In the meantime, I think there's a strong chance that there are more of these labor actions, that it will be something that the workers have to do for themselves to negotiate their individual situations because no one is coming from the government to protect them. They understand that full well.
Tom: If they had any doubts about that, the way that the pandemic played out, which is something that you wrote a whole lot about for Mother Jones and people should look that up, the way the pandemic played out proves that the government is not going to come for them. Biden didn't do much to right some of the wrongs when he came to power in 2020. This is an issue that I think consumer solidarity has to be expressed in terms of politics and supporting legislation like the Schumer Bill that you mentioned. Cory Booker's got a bunch of marker bills over the years that would do things for meatpacking workers. Those things are just this marginal. No one really cares about them. They're called marker bills because everyone knows they're not going to pass. Figuring out how to get them from the margins to the center of our politics is the only way that we're going to get out of the situation where seven children are touching our tomatoes or whatever.
Ted: That's the thing, is that when we're zooming out to look at the whole system. I've been focusing on beef for the last couple of years, but it's really just a representative example that these kinds of labor practices and the exploitation that's built into the system is represented by absolutely everything you see in the grocery store. If we're going to make everything more ethical for labor and more sustainable for the planet, we haven't even discussed any of that, almost any of the places that you're looking at that have labor abuses, the reason that those labor abuses exist is because you're trying to narrow margins. The other place that you're trying to narrow margins is getting around environmental controls, getting around any other government regulations.
These companies are all significant polluters, they're all skirting the laws when it comes to emissions that they're supposed to be monitoring. There's a lot here to be fixed. This is not going to be easy. The reason that politicians don't want to go after it is because it is an incredibly complex system that would be very hard to reform. That's why we need leadership. We can't do it ourselves. We as consumers cannot fix a global system that is built to disadvantage us and to disadvantage the people who work for the system.
Tom: All right. On that note, and it sounds like we ended in a really dour place, but I think it should just be a call to action, that this fantasy of voting with our fork, I think that idea came out about 20 years ago now, a little bit more than that. We now know that that doesn't work, that's not going to get us justice for workers. It's not going to stop these companies from polluting. We have to get people in office who care about it. On that note, I should probably shut up before I get myself in trouble. Listen, Ted, what a great pleasure to have you on. As always, I learned much.
Ted: Thank you, Tom.
Tom: Everyone should go check out your work at the Food and Environment Reporting Network and Mother Jones, check out your book. I think we're all ready for a tequila after this.
Ted: For sure.
Tom: I also want to urge people to check out Ted's great book on tequila, Tequila Wars.
Ted: Thanks, Tom. After doing this work, it usually gets balanced out with a drink or two, so I highly recommend it.
Teresa: Special thanks to the Center for a Livable Future for producing this episode. Mike Milli is their sound engineer and produced their theme music. Their hosts are Christine Grillo and Tom Philpott. Paulette O'Leary is their producer, and Natalie Woodwright is the executive producer. REAP/SOW is a production of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are Theodore Ross, Tom Laskaway, and Brent Cunningham. Our sound engineer is Lauren Newson. Our audio and video producer is Amanda Vicari. I'm your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Fern News is our home on YouTube. Find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent nonprofit reporting at www.thefern.org.
This transcript was exported on 06/24/2026 - view latest version here
RS_Episode 34 Master.mp3 (Completed: 06/24/2026)
Transcript by GoTranscript.com 1
My colleague Ted Genoways was in the room when Greeley workers voted to strike. A senior editor at FERN, he's an expert on US meatpacking, as well as its long history of labor violations, and the web of corruption that some meat processing companies like JBS are involved in. He recently sat down with journalist Tom Philpott to talk about his work. This episode is from Unconfined, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. I'll let their host, Tom Philpott, take it from here.
Speaker 2: This is an episode of Unconfined, the podcast of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future in Baltimore, Maryland. Unconfined is a podcast about industrial food animal production and its emerging alternatives. You can find us online at clf.jhsph.edu. The opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Johns Hopkins University or of the Center for a Livable Future.
Tom Philpott: Welcome to the latest episode of Unconfined Podcast. Our guest today is Ted Genoways. Ted is a senior editor at the Food and Environment Reporting Network and a contributing writer at Mother Jones. He has covered the meatpacking industry for 15 years, writing a book called The Chain, which is phenomenal, about Hormel Foods. In recent years, he's turned his attention to JBS, which is an enormous Brazilian meatpacking company that has huge operations in the United States. It's actually the biggest beef packer in the world and probably the second biggest meat company in the world after Tyson.
I should also mention about Ted that he and I share an interest in tequila, and he has a book that came out last year called Tequila Wars that I still haven't gotten my hands on, but I look forward to it. Today we're going to make ourselves focus on meatpacking, which is another interest that we share, covering meatpacking labor. Ted, you have, for about a year now, been covering the situation in Greeley, Colorado, this enormous JBS beef packing plant and the labor issues that have gone on there. Maybe we can set up our conversation by talking a little bit about the demographics of meatpacking. Who are the people who work in this plant and where do they come from and how do they get here? Why don't we start there?
Ted Genoways: That's a great place to start, Tom, and thanks for having me on. This is really a pleasure to talk with you about this stuff. The plant in Greeley, there are about 3,800 workers there, and it's a full-size beef operation. You've got people working in the slaughter side. You've got people who are making what they call the primal cuts, the large packaging or large cutting of the carcasses, and then everything being cut down to the cuts that we are used to seeing in the store, all of which happens on the cold side of the operation.
It's almost 2,000 people working in the plant at any given time, and they run two shifts, and there's a third shift that is sanitation. Of those thousands of workers, the union estimates that probably less than 10% of them were born in the United States. They are overwhelmingly immigrant workers. Just given what has happened in our immigration system in the last 10 years, most of them are people who are here as asylum seekers of one sort or another. Many of them have temporary protected status and are, therefore, in a vulnerable position. They are here legally, but their status is being challenged by the current administration.
As a picture of the background of the plant, there's somewhere around a quarter of the workers who are Haitians who have arrived here recently, who came under the Biden administration. You've got more established groups of Somalis, Hispanic workers primarily from Mexico and Guatemala. There's a large population of Burmese workers. There are workers who are scattered from various parts of the world. There are West African workers, and many of these populations have to do with who's been doing the recruiting, where people have been resettled by our immigration system. You have these odd pockets where there are a large number of people from Benin.
When you put this all together, what you have is a workforce that is not just overwhelmingly immigrant, but one that is speaking many different languages, representing many different cultures. This united nations of workers is partly by design, that this is something that JBS are operating as Swift at this particular plant. They have hired in this way in order to keep the workforce fragmented and difficult for them to organize and to do some of what they've done recently, overcoming those obstacles, which is to essentially form a unified workforce that stands behind the union in labor negotiations. That strategy of fragmenting the workforce has worked for 20-plus years, but just in the last year, conditions have gotten severe enough in the plant that the workers have unified, despite the cultural and language barriers.
[00:07:29] Tom: You had a piece in Mother Jones, the May/June issue that people can find online, called Immigrants on the Line. It tells a pretty extraordinary story of how that plant attracted Haitian workers. Can you tell that story, please?
[00:07:50] Ted: Yes. One of the things that has historically happened over the last 20 years is that there will be a wave of workers that is recruited into the plant, and they become a dominant part of the plant, and then their numbers will face a slow attrition as those workers are able to other kinds of work. Meatpacking is the last thing that anyone wants to be doing, and so those numbers will come down, and then there will be a period where the company starts looking for a new immigrant group.
In this case, as there were a large number of Haitians that were coming into the country amid the gang violence, especially in Port-au-Prince, there was an influx and an available workforce that the company identified kind of by accident. There was this young guy who was interested in being a TikTok influencer. He was a Haitian immigrant who had arrived in Colorado and was driving an Uber. His notion was that if he could get on TikTok and convince people to move to Colorado, then he would be in a position to drive a lot of those people around because he speaks Haitian Creole.
His idea was to go around and find employers who were hiring Haitians so that he could say, "Hey, here's a place where there are a bunch of jobs." When he stumbled onto JBS and found this mid-level HR manager, that person who was from Benin and is French-speaking himself was like, "Here's everything that you need to tell people, and let's start recruiting them in. Tell them, don't worry, we'll guarantee them jobs. We'll guarantee them a place to stay, and this is going to be great for them." What ended up happening was that that video went unexpectedly viral. There were thousands of people who were interested in coming to Greeley all of a sudden.
There were more than enough jobs. In fact, the union alleges that the company started disciplinary actions against people who were current employees in order to make space for people who were inexperienced and didn't know how fast the line should be moving, what the break protocols were, and all of these union-negotiated parts of the job. The problem was that there was no place to put people. They had said that they would provide a place to stay, and their plan was to put them up in a tiny motel near the packing plant, but when they suddenly had hundreds and then more than 1,000 people who arrived, they just kept packing them into this little motel and then into a rental house.
The descriptions, and I was able to get text messages back and forth between the JBS HR manager and the Uber driver, there were periods where there were 6, 8, sometimes even 10 people in a single tiny motel room as they crammed people into this place in order to have this new workforce arriving. What the union alleges, and there's a class action lawsuit that has now been brought by the Haitian workers themselves, they allege that this constitutes human trafficking, that people were promised good-paying, safe jobs, they were promised a clean, safe place to live.
What they found when they arrived was that the job was actually, they were being asked to work more than 50% faster than the workers on the dayside shift. They were all being put on the night shift, and they were being crammed into this tiny motel. Once they arrived, they didn't have the resources to leave. They were trapped in these conditions. What's unexpected about all of this, and the reason that I continue to cover this as more than just this isolated human trafficking story, is that those workers then became a core. They formed a community and were a big part of the union, then saying, "What we need to do is to press the company. We're not going to just leave. We don't have anywhere we can go."
JBS was also in a bind because the Trump administration has essentially shut off the spigot of new immigrant arrivals, and so they can't be easily replaced. They were in a position where they had to really negotiate with their own workforce for the first time in a very long time. As those tensions elevated over a period of about eight months of negotiations, just recently, it finally resulted in the first major meatpacking strike that we've had in 40 years in this country.
Tom: Leading up to the strike, you report that there were wildcat work stoppages where the people in the line would get together and say, "We're going to stop and bang our instruments." That's also something that's unusual, I think.
Ted: One of the things that I think is amazing to picture is that what everyone described is that the wine typically on the dayside runs somewhere between 250 and, at peak periods, can get over 300 head of cattle in an hour. Then, on the night shift, as a standard starting point, was running at 350. More often, it was being described to me that the line would run up to 410, 415, just unbelievable speeds.
You're approaching running twice as fast at night. The worker said they just couldn't keep up. That you have all of these problems, especially on the tables where you're working with a meat hook and with a knife, where you have to take a piece of meat, you have to hit it with your hook, turn it over, trim it, and send it on down the line. They said that they didn't have time to sharpen their knives, so their knives would get dull and the work would get harder and harder as the speed is continuing to increase.
They just, at a certain point, couldn't keep up. What they would collectively start to do, I think spontaneously, is that when they couldn't keep up, they would just take a step back and, in frustration, start beating the hooks and the knives on the tables to indicate to the supervisors, this product is going by untrimmed. We physically can't do this work.
From there, when one person sees that happening and then a whole table says, "We're not going to trim these cuts," they're forced to stop the line. You stop it, you have to trim everything, and then to restart it, you have to go slower for people to keep up. As you know, Tom, so much of everything in the meatpacking industry boils down in the end to the question of line speed. This, to me, was this amazing illustration of how you can push the system to the point that people, human beings, are simply not able to do the work in the way that the machines elsewhere on the line are.
It becomes this question of really of the humanity of the workers and how the company treats them. In the initial reporting, I was really struck by one Haitian worker who told me that when he was coming to work one day and going through the holding pens where the cattle are held right before they're released into the slaughter area, that he was struck by the fact that they are given individual holding pens to reduce the amount of stress that the animal experiences before it goes in to be slaughtered.
He said that they are moved at a pace that is also, again, intended to reduce that stress. He said that it suddenly hit him that they were treating the cattle better than they were treating the immigrant workers. He told me that in that moment, he felt like he was being treated as a slave. When we talk about what is it that these workers are objecting to, I think it's that at the bottom. They are objecting to having their humanity ignored by their employer.
[00:17:37 Tom: There's another element here. You had a great piece in February of 2026, so this year, about a TikTok in Mother Jones about the day leading up to the strike vote, that I recommend everyone read, and it'll be in our host notes. There's another factor of stress on these people, and that is that the Haitians who are working in this plant are here under temporary protected status granted to them by the Biden administration. The Trump administration, fairly soon after coming to office, revoked or tried to revoke that temporary protected status. Talk a little bit about that, and what happened, and how that overlaid with the strike vote.
Ted: That's a really fascinating and heartbreaking element of all of this. I think it's worth stating that, in order to get temporary protected status, what the Haitians who are on the line at JBS and Greeley all had to do was to demonstrate that their lives were in imminent danger if they were in Haiti. The most common way that you can demonstrate that convincingly is to prove that someone tried to kill you.
Many of the people that I have interviewed have visible scars. They have stories of having been held, having been the subjects of gang violence in Haiti. In order to flee the country and to come to the US, many of them went either to Brazil or to Nicaragua and began their journey to the US on foot. You've got people that their backstory is almost to a one, someone tried to murder them, they fled the country, they traveled more than 1,000 miles on foot.
They applied to our immigration system for protected status, applying for refugee status, and have now been brought into the US, given some of the most dangerous and difficult jobs that we have to offer. Now the Trump administration is saying, "We don't want you here. We are going to round you up and send you back." The thing that I think is especially worrisome that the doctrine of temporary protected status is really an executive power that was asserted by Jimmy Carter, it is something that is simply a philosophy. It's saying, "If there are refugees, we're the United States of America, we shouldn't reject people because they haven't been given a formal recognition of refugee status in a time of crisis. We should be willing to just accept people on a temporary basis and work out their status later."
What the Trump administration is saying is, "We don't think that the danger is potent enough in some of these countries to justify being able to stay in the US without question." I don't agree with the Trump administration on very many things, but I think as a legal doctrine, if the President of the United States has the power to extend temporary protected status, I think it holds to reason that there's the same power to rescind that protected status, and that they have challenged exactly this power when it comes to the Venezuelans.
The Supreme Court has already held that yes, that status can be rescinded and the Venezuelans can be deported. I think there's every reason to think that that's exactly what's going to happen with the Haitians. The cases before the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court has said that they're going to take that case up in late April. Now we can expect that to happen very, very soon. The expectation is that they will be facing the prospect of either being deported or having to apply through a new system that may grant them more permanent status. I think that this is another thing that has driven this desire to stand up.
My thought was that, with this threat hanging over their heads, that the Haitian workers and other workers with temporary protected status would be saying, "We want to keep a low profile. We don't want anyone to be aware that there are a bunch of people with TPS who are outside on a picket line who could be rounded up by ICE at any moment." Instead, I think it ended up working the other way, that all these people said, "Look, we have risked everything to get here. There were promises made to us. We are simply insisting that the promises that were made to us by the government, by the company that hired us, that they follow through on those."
Tom: Let's just make a brief note here that it isn't as though the problems happening in Haiti are happening in a vacuum that has nothing to do with the past US policy. Various interventions over the years has contributed greatly to the current chaos in Haiti, like it has in other places like Guatemala and Honduras, where we're also seeing refugees come up. That's something that often gets left out of conversations. Let's go from there. The strike vote happens, I think maybe the day of the strike vote or the day before a judge paused the revocation of TPS. There was a lot of consternation about how the vote would go. How did the vote go?
Ted: The vote was 99% in favor of the strike, which was something else to watch in the room as thousands of workers from all over the world arrived. Again, I am pretty hardened on these things. I don't get mushy about very much, but for a bunch of the people who were arriving, they said that this was the first time that they'd ever been able to cast a vote for anything. That these are people that do not come from democratic countries, in many cases don't come from functioning governments.
This was the very first time that they were able to exercise a democratic right, and the fact that it was done in this old-fashioned, like, "Here's a paper slip, you mark an X, and put it into a giant wooden box that is just marked as the union vote box," it was something else to see. Also interesting to see that there were some groups of workers who came into the room as a ballroom of a DoubleTree hotel, just a giant solace ballroom. People sitting at some of these tables for a very long time, contemplating whether they could really bring themselves to do this, that they understood the risks.
In some cases, coming in groups and asking questions of the union, and a lot of discussion about, "Will I be able to be identified? Will the company know how I've cast my vote?" Especially there were concerns about that as they came in and registered with the union, like, "I'm here, and I'm voting, and here's my ballot," having to be checked off on the list of people who voted. There were people who were like, "Are they going to know then that I voted?" As it turns out, it's 99%. Essentially, they know who voted to strike.
Despite all of that, that's what they did. Almost unanimously they said that what we need to do is strike. I should note the strike was an unfair labor practice strike. There were specific complaints that were made, and they boiled down to questions about PPE that company is supposed to provide but were charging the workers for their own PPE. Also, then questions that all relate to line speed. What kinds of time was allotted to workers? How much time they were given to perform certain tasks.
At the same time, they were also asking for a wage increase, but this was not an economic strike, which I think is also really intriguing that they raised this as like, "Yes, we want a wage increase because the prices of everything, the inflationary rate has increased beyond the wage increase that's been offered by the company." Also, they were saying, "This wage increase is one of the things that helps us offset things like paying for our own equipment. If we're being expected to work more than 50% faster than we were a year or two ago, shouldn't we be getting paid more?"
All of those things were raised as their issues, and they went out to the picket line. I have to say, really moving to see the vote happen, really impressive in the same way to see what happens when you're like, "Okay, we have to get 4,000 workers to a picket line outside of a meatpacking plant along a highway all at the same time." You can't use the company's parking lot because the company has closed it off to workers and said the plant is closed due to the strike.
They rented some parking lots at a nearby fairgrounds, and everybody went on foot over to the picket at about 5:00 in the morning. Watching the patients of thousands of cars come into a parking lot and figure out how this was all going to work and everybody getting their picket signs and figuring out where they were supposed to be positioned, it was really something. It was a vision of this workforce and how they do these complex tasks as a single unit every day. It's just that this time, instead of doing it for the company, they were doing it for themselves.
Tom: How did the strike go? We are recording this on April 14, and I believe yesterday it was resolved.
Ted: They reached a tentative agreement, I guess it was on Friday or Saturday, which they then took to the workforce and said, "This is what JBS has agreed to." They held another vote. This time it was 93% to accept the offer from JBS, which they then announced yesterday. There are certain things that they have publicly acknowledged, like that the PPE will now be paid for by the company, but some of the economic resolution has not been, at least at this point, publicly disclosed. I have to be honest. I have mixed feelings about all of this. I understand. The strike lasted about three weeks, and then there was another week of negotiation while the workers came back and got the plant back up and running in anticipation of the strike being resolved.
That put the pressure on the company for about a full month. It also puts it obviously pressure on the workers to be without a paycheck for a full month as you go through the cycle of your rent being due and all of those sorts of things. Both sides had a lot of incentive. When we start talking about things like JBS paying for the PPE, I'm glad that that's happening. It's also something that they were supposed to be doing already. It's something that is required. You can't charge your workers for their own PPE. The same goes for the resolution of anything that is relating to the line speed.
The line speed has been negotiated, and they declared this to be a trade secret, how fast the lines run. What the lawsuits tell us is that they're not supposed to run over 350, and they were running at 410, 420. If you agree to bring it back down to 350, essentially all that is negotiated and is being won here is the company complying with what they had already agreed to before. It is a victory, but it is hard to feel like that's a major victory for the workers that they just simply are getting what they've been previously promised, and even the wage increase, whatever it may be and if that was part of it, the complaint that they were making was, "Our wages are falling behind the rate of inflation. We're not keeping up with the cost of living."
To me, one of the brutal metrics of this is that talking to workers when they were on the line and people were showing up from the community and saying, "How do we support the workers? What can we do?" The thing that everybody said was, "Bring food. We have the hardest time with right now without our paycheck or reduced paycheck from just the strike wages that the union offers. The hardest thing we have paying for is food." If you're eating a steak, there's a 10% chance that it came from that particular meatpacking plant. The idea that the people who work in that giant plant are struggling to pay for food themselves, I think is a really potent picture of just how dysfunctional the food system is.
Tom: Ted, one thing I've learned from your work over the years is that there's basically been two big inflection points in meatpacking labor since, let's say, the 1950s. Just a really quick history, by the end of the war, by the 1950s, meatpacking was a heavily unionized job and meatpacking workers made essentially a little bit less than what regular manufacturing workers meant, meaning that you could be a meatpacking worker and be part of the American middle class, and there was a time in the post-war era when meatpacking workers participated in the great post-war boom a very unionized workforce. Talk about the huge strike in 1980 and then the big ICE raid in 2006 and how these led us to the point where really some of the most desperate people in the world are packing our meat in the United States.
Ted: Exactly as you say, this was a very unionized job, and often the companies had moved out of the labor centers of the country, especially the '50s forward, had moved out into small towns to try to be closer to where the livestock was raised and reduced that shipping cost. The unionized workforce held for several decades that even though the workers were not in these centralized places anymore, the strength of the union held, and that really started to break apart, as you've mentioned, in the '80s with the union-busting efforts of the Reagan administration. Then it came to a head with the Hormel Foods strike in Austin, Minnesota, which ran from 1985 to 1986. It actually ran for a little bit more than a year.
That strike to me is an important turning point, first of all, because it was a moment that the union was effectively defeated despite having held out for so long. The companies had gotten big enough, the meatpackers had gotten big enough that they could simply shift their production to other plants and weighed out a strike, even a long one like that. The other thing that happened there that I think doesn't get discussed enough is that as soon as this was apparent, that this was going to be a strike that was going to last a long time, that tensions were rising on the line, it was a Democratic governor in Minnesota who called out the National Guard and who helped escort scab workers and union workers who had decided to cross the picket to enter the plant.
This was one of the early moments when all of the union who had been democratic stalwarts for years saw themselves as having been betrayed by the democratic leadership that they had elected top to bottom, in a place like Minnesota at that time. The thing that the union had told the workers from the beginning was, "Look, if we agree to some of the things that Hormel is asking for here, there are some foreseeable outcomes. We're in the moment where Reagan has just extended amnesty to undocumented immigrants who have come into the United States and where there's a huge influx that is continuing to follow."
The union said, "Look, there's essentially a huge scab labor pool that the company will be able to draw from, and if the union doesn't hold, we are going to get replaced top to bottom by scab workers." It's also at a moment where there's automation and mechanization that is coming through that is making it so that the work is less and less skilled. It's less and less about your ability with a knife and more about how much you're able to endure repetitive tasks that you perform on the line. When the international union stepped in and declared an end to the strike, this is exactly what happened.
There was a contract that the union still had with Hormel, but what Hormel did was create a shell company within the company, and in a truly inspired evil move, made that shell company exist wholly inside the plant at Hormel. That was always, to me, one of the most impressive, cynical moves of it all was that the only way to access this new company was through Hormel Foods. They said, "This part of the plant is a different company. We don't have a contract. That new company doesn't have a contract with the union," and that became the gateway for hiring a largely undocumented workforce.
This became the trend for years, and it became such a known way that the meatpacking industry was operating the 20 years later that 20 years later, the workforces at many of these plants was largely made up of undocumented workers. When George W. Bush, with the newly created Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, was looking for some place to perform a raid and be able to, in dramatic fashion, grab up a lot of undocumented workers and make a show of what a problem the immigration policy was, what they did was target six Swift and Company meatpacking plants across the middle of the country, which included the plant in Greeley when it was then owned by Swift before it was purchased by JBS.
This was all supposed to set the stage for immigration reform in 2007, to force that, and then the immigration reform didn't happen. What we ended up with instead was a system where these companies were still reliant on immigrant labor, but now they were pulling from workers, or for their workforce, they were pulling from immigrant pools who had some sort of legal status. That to me is the striking thing about the meatpacking plants these days, is that when you are talking to the workforce, most of the people you're talking to are refugees.
As I said before, most of them, because of the way that they are able to apply for status, they're not just people who have fled war or fled a natural disaster, but they are people who have fled a targeted attempt on their lives. These are truly the most vulnerable people in the world now who are crowded into these large factory settings and are performing the most difficult and dangerous jobs in America in order to keep us fed. To me, it is certainly a compelling situation to see this all unfold, but again and again, I come back to this idea that I feel like we've worked ourselves into the situation where we have some realities that we have to face.
We're either saying, and I think it's a real kind of inflection point for the left, to be honest, people like Chuck Schumer and Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren have been calling for investigations of JBS and other companies like it for years. Well, where are the investigations? Where are the actions? Schumer has introduced with 20 co-sponsors legislation to break up the big four beef packers in order to promote competition that would protect workers and consumers and also cattle ranchers. Great. Why wasn't that introduced when the Democrats had control of both houses and the White House?
One of the things that I think that is becoming a question is, are these things that we care about and that we want to see reformed, or is this just something that we care about enough that we feel bad about it and we're expecting our politicians to side with immigrants when there's a political advantage to be gained, but we're not really doing anything to improve their lives?
I would hope this legislation that 20 senators have signed onto, they're now on the record as that legislation includes a whole section that is outlining why JBS needs to be investigated and possibly either taken over or shut down. Let's see what we do. Can we revisit that language when the Democrats gain control and are in a position to do that?
Tom: Yes. We should also add that JBS is a company that is from Brazil, and it has an extraordinarily shady past in Brazil. Lots of relationships with various governments there, including Bolsonaro's right-wing government. They've been very tight with the Trump administration. This is a very politically powerful and savvy company with a very, very dodgy track record.
Ted: They were the largest donor to Trump's second inauguration, and there was all this upset about the amount of money given by Facebook and Elon Musk for X and all of the tech giants. JBS gave as much to the second Trump inauguration as all those tech giants combined. That's probably worth noting. As soon as they were able to, as they made that donation, it was literally weeks before investigations that had kept them from being publicly offered on the New York Stock Exchange were dropped, and funds came flowing into the company.
Yes, they are very politically savvy within the United States. In Brazil, I feel like all that ever needs to be said is that they were facing 1,800 counts of bribery and corruption, and the way that the owners got out of those charges was providing recordings of themselves bribing public officials all the way up to the president of the country. That's the company that we're talking about.
Tom: Yes, you can't convict us because then you would have to convict yourself, too, so you might as well end this dispute.
[laughter]
Ted, I guess my final is, does this strike, and I get the sort of ambiguous way that it ended; was it a victory for the union? Was it really affirming the status quo for the company? Do you think it augurs more labor unrest, more strike activity going forward? Because, as you make clear, conditions are desperate. I think they're at least as bad in poultry. We went out, CLF, with our journalism fellows in 2024. We went out to the Delmarva Peninsula, which is the major concentration of industrial poultry, and we heard from Haitian workers working in poultry plants out there very similar stories of being thrown out onto the floor without training and then receiving grievous injuries.
It was 2024, so it would have been before the election, before their TPS was suspended, but they knew that they were there in very shaky ground. Also, desperation back home in Haiti, they fled very difficult lives. This is happening; this Greeley plant is a great example of it, but it's by no means an isolated example of it. I guess poultry is concentrated in the right-to-work South, and so union density in poultry is poultry compared to beef and pork, but where do you see labor going from here in this industry? Also, maybe talk a little bit about how we, the people who are able to benefit from this work by having access to this food supply, how can we express solidarity with these workers?
Ted: Let me take the second part first because I think things are so difficult across the entire food system, and it's worth acknowledging that. When the chain came out 10 years ago, people would come to some of the book events and everything, and invariably there'd be somebody who came up and was like, "I'm boycotting Hormel." I'm like, "First of all, good luck with that. They own a lot of other companies. They own peanut butter and guacamole," and you think, "Well, I'm not going to buy industrially raised pork."
Then, Hormel, seeing what was happening with the organic movement, purchased Applegate, and so they're also the largest organic producer in the country now. This consolidation and the size of these companies makes it very difficult to boycott them as an individual consumer. This is like, "Well, I'm going to become a vegan." That eliminates some of the animal welfare issues, but it certainly doesn't address the labor issues. Some of the worst labor abuses are carried out in farm fields where people are raising produce. I always come back to this with people that the estimate is between the fields of some place like the Central Valley in California and making it to your produce aisle.
The estimate is that that piece of produce will pass through the hands of seven children on the way to you, and so there's no way in which you are morally exempted by becoming a vegetarian or a vegan. It's a bigger problem than that. To me, what that means is that the way that we do this is not by expressing our opinions at the checkout aisle and trying to exert that kind of economic control. The reality is that what we need is regulation. We need a functioning government, and that is about making this politically a priority. One of the problems when you've got an overwhelmingly immigrant workforce is that you're talking about a large workforce of people who are not voters. It is really something that has to be prioritized by people who do vote.
That means not just saying, "I'm going to do this with how I cook and eat in my own home," but it's something that you decide is a priority for other reasons. I think that's tough. I think it's tough especially right now. One of the things that has stumped me in recent years, the standard form for the op ed is, what is the one thing that needs to be fixed in order to make things better? There are a thousand problems with something like the food system. You look at the Trump administration and you say, "They're not going to do any of these things."
The worse this makes it for immigrants, the more that fits with their agenda. It really is a top down approach that's necessary. What that means is that there's got to be different leadership with different priorities. That's going to take a while. In the meantime, I think there's a strong chance that there are more of these labor actions, that it will be something that the workers have to do for themselves to negotiate their individual situations because no one is coming from the government to protect them. They understand that full well.
Tom: If they had any doubts about that, the way that the pandemic played out, which is something that you wrote a whole lot about for Mother Jones and people should look that up, the way the pandemic played out proves that the government is not going to come for them. Biden didn't do much to right some of the wrongs when he came to power in 2020. This is an issue that I think consumer solidarity has to be expressed in terms of politics and supporting legislation like the Schumer Bill that you mentioned. Cory Booker's got a bunch of marker bills over the years that would do things for meatpacking workers. Those things are just this marginal. No one really cares about them. They're called marker bills because everyone knows they're not going to pass. Figuring out how to get them from the margins to the center of our politics is the only way that we're going to get out of the situation where seven children are touching our tomatoes or whatever.
Ted: That's the thing, is that when we're zooming out to look at the whole system. I've been focusing on beef for the last couple of years, but it's really just a representative example that these kinds of labor practices and the exploitation that's built into the system is represented by absolutely everything you see in the grocery store. If we're going to make everything more ethical for labor and more sustainable for the planet, we haven't even discussed any of that, almost any of the places that you're looking at that have labor abuses, the reason that those labor abuses exist is because you're trying to narrow margins. The other place that you're trying to narrow margins is getting around environmental controls, getting around any other government regulations.
These companies are all significant polluters, they're all skirting the laws when it comes to emissions that they're supposed to be monitoring. There's a lot here to be fixed. This is not going to be easy. The reason that politicians don't want to go after it is because it is an incredibly complex system that would be very hard to reform. That's why we need leadership. We can't do it ourselves. We as consumers cannot fix a global system that is built to disadvantage us and to disadvantage the people who work for the system.
Tom: All right. On that note, and it sounds like we ended in a really dour place, but I think it should just be a call to action, that this fantasy of voting with our fork, I think that idea came out about 20 years ago now, a little bit more than that. We now know that that doesn't work, that's not going to get us justice for workers. It's not going to stop these companies from polluting. We have to get people in office who care about it. On that note, I should probably shut up before I get myself in trouble. Listen, Ted, what a great pleasure to have you on. As always, I learned much.
Ted: Thank you, Tom.
Tom: Everyone should go check out your work at the Food and Environment Reporting Network and Mother Jones, check out your book. I think we're all ready for a tequila after this.
Ted: For sure.
Tom: I also want to urge people to check out Ted's great book on tequila, Tequila Wars.
Ted: Thanks, Tom. After doing this work, it usually gets balanced out with a drink or two, so I highly recommend it.
Teresa: Special thanks to the Center for a Livable Future for producing this episode. Mike Milli is their sound engineer and produced their theme music. Their hosts are Christine Grillo and Tom Philpott. Paulette O'Leary is their producer, and Natalie Woodwright is the executive producer. REAP/SOW is a production of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are Theodore Ross, Tom Laskaway, and Brent Cunningham. Our sound engineer is Lauren Newson. Our audio and video producer is Amanda Vicari. I'm your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Fern News is our home on YouTube. Find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent nonprofit reporting at www.thefern.org.
This transcript was exported on 06/24/2026 - view latest version here
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