MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ:  Alright. Welcome, everyone, to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. 

My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and we’ve got a critical strike update episode for y’all today. As Caitlyn Clark and Lisa Xu report at Labor Notes, “In less than a quarter-mile stretch of sidewalk, chatter in 57 languages overlaps with the sound of dancehall, Bachata, Thai pop, Haitian kompa, and Micronesian hip-hop. At sunset, dozens gather for iftar, breaking their Ramadan fast; the music, pulsing from boomboxes and cell phones held up to megaphones, swells into one shared hum. 

“In this sliver of land across from the sprawling JBS beef processing plant—among the largest in the country—workers from around the world have united in the largest U.S. meatpacking strike in 40 years.

“The 3,800 workers at the JBS beef processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, walked off the job on Monday, March 16, launching a two-week unfair labor practice strike. 

“This is the company’s flagship beef plant in the U.S. Its previous contract with Food and Commercial workers (UFCW) Local 7 expired last July. 

“Strikers say JBS has been increasing the speed of the production line while cutting work hours from 40 hours a week to 35, squeezing out more work for less money. … 

“‘We’re demanding our rights, both in terms of wages and working conditions, because before the strike, they really took advantage of us,’ said a worker in the brisket trim department, who spoke in Spanish and asked to remain anonymous. ‘They want the same output, but fewer hours and fewer people.’ 

“After 18 years working at JBS, he said, ‘Everything is so expensive. Everything has gone up, except our wages.’ …

“This is the first strike ever at the Greeley plant, and the first major U.S. meatpacking strike since the 1985-6 strike at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota.” 

To talk about this critical strike, I’m grateful to be joined on the show today by Caitlyn Clark and Lisa Xu. Caitlyn is a national organizer at Essential Workers for Democracy, an organization dedicated to rank and file member education and empowerment for UFCW members in grocery, meatpacking, and retail. And Lisa is a staff writer and organizer at Labor Notes. 

Caitlyn, Lisa, thank you both so much for joining me today. I want to jump right in and ask y’all to pick up where I left off in the intro. Break the strike down for our listeners, like who is striking? What are the core issues here? How are negotiations working in this struggle, and how has JBS responded to the strike?

CAITLYN CLARK:  Thanks so much for having us. I’m really excited to be here. 

So, on Monday, March 16, at 5:30 AM, 3,800 workers walked off the job at the JBS Greeley plant, which is in Greeley, Colorado, a more rural part of Colorado about an hour north of Denver. JBS is the largest employer in Greeley. The Greeley plant is also the flagship JBS plant in the United States, so the corporate headquarters of JBS is based in Greeley. It’s among the largest JBS beef processing plants in the country, and about 5% to 7% of all beef consumed in the United States comes directly out of this one plant. 

So, these workers are coming from all around the world. There’s over 50 different languages that are spoken in just this plant alone. You can hear in the intro of some of the descriptions of the places where the workers are from. I guess it’s hard to pinpoint one particular place where the majority of the workers come from, but some of the common languages that you might hear spoken out on the picket line would be Spanish, French, Haitian, Burmese, Somali. And after that, there’s probably dozens of other languages that are being spoken in this one single plant. The majority of the workers come from Latin America, from French-speaking West Africa, from Haiti, Somalia, and from Burma. 

Some of the core issues that the workers are facing in this contract negotiation, which has been ongoing since July of 2025, so they’re approaching a year under an expired contract and fighting for a new agreement with JBS. The issues that they’re focusing on in this contract negotiation is higher wages that keep up with the rate of inflation and with the extremely difficult and dangerous work that these workers are doing every day. 

They are pushing back against an increase in line speed, which is an issue that comes up really frequently in meatpacking across all the different proteins, which is the way that they break up meatpacking organizing or meatpacking contracts. Across the meatpacking industry, line speeds are going up. This is always an issue for meatpacking workers. And in this contract, the JBS workers are trying to push back against increases to line speed. 

There’s been a particular focus on the ways that JBS has been increasing the line speed on particular groups of workers in recent years. There’s a lawsuit of over 1,000 Haitian workers at the JBS plant in Greeley that have filed a class action lawsuit against the company alleging that the company is discriminating against Haitian workers by increasing line speeds, by pushing all of the Haitian workers onto the evening shift, the B shift, and making the line speed on the B shift faster. The line speed, really can’t stress enough how important the line speed is to the experience of workers on the job. 

For people who have never been inside a meat packing plant before or don’t know at all what goes on inside, I can break that down a little bit. So, the majority of the work happens in what is called fabrication. So this is like breaking down the different parts of the animal carcass. So in this case, a cow carcass. A big cow carcass is going down a conveyor belt and workers are stationed at points along the conveyor belt, taking a sharp meat hook, a sharp metal hook, taking the carcass off the conveyor belt, and then using a knife to trim off the fat and cut the carcass into smaller pieces. Most of the workers that we interviewed for this article work in the fabrication department.

In the JBS Greeley plant, so from start to finish, live cattle come into the plant. There’s people whose job it is to kill the cattle, get all the blood and guts out, and then put that over to fabrication. Then the majority of the workers are in the fabrication department, so they’re taking apart the carcass, breaking it down into smaller parts, trimming off all of the fat and getting it ready for shipping. The final department is the shipping department, which has everything packaged up into boxes ready to go out to the places where JBS supplies meat for. 

JBS supplies meat for almost every place you could imagine that consumes meat in the United States, for large fast food companies like McDonald’s and Burger King and Subway, but also for sale in retail grocery stores like Kroger and for sale in wholesalers like Costco. So almost everywhere there’s meat in the United States, JBS has some fingerprint on it.

JBS is among the largest meatpackers in the world. They’re the largest beef producer in the world. They’re a Brazilian-based company that has had years of scandals for corruption. The owners of the company actually went to jail just a couple years ago for insider trading. They are worth a collective $12 billion between the two brothers that own the company, or have a family share in the company. 

When the speed of the conveyor belt goes up, the pace at which workers are breaking apart the animal carcass also has to go up, so the speed of their work goes up significantly. Line speed really sets the pace for how fast the workers are moving, and that can set the pace for how dangerous the job is. Workers on the job in meat packing plants have reported cutting themselves with their knives, poking themselves with their sharp meat hooks. They’ve reported chemical burns. There was a worker who tragically passed away in 2021 after falling into a vat of chemicals at the Greeley plant. 

This is some of the most dangerous work in the United States, and workers who are out on strike are demanding that their pay reflect the difficulty and the danger of the work that they do, and that the line speed be set at a reasonable pace that allows them to work safely. 

The other thing that speeding up the line does is it reduces hours. So this is something that we’re seeing all across working America right now. We’re especially seeing this in UFCW industries in retail and in meatpacking. These companies are squeezing more work out of less workers for less hours, and workers across the board are seeing their hours getting cut. 

The workers at the JBS Greeley plant are supposed to be working 40 hours a week. They reported working down to 38 or 35 hours a week due to the increased speed of the line. So they’re producing more than ever at the JBS Greeley plant, but the workers are experiencing their hours getting cut and their paychecks getting smaller because the line is getting sped up faster and faster. 

And then the third thing that they’re fighting for in this contract is for the company to pay for personal protective equipment. So, I just talked about how the work that they’re doing in the plant is extremely dangerous, and in order to protect themselves and work safely, they wear a wide range of personal protective equipment. So that includes a cut glove, a metal kind of vest thing that they have to wear, like a thin mesh vest. And all of these different pieces of equipment — Rubber boots, if you’re working on the kill floor, which could be covered in blood. 

All of that personal protective equipment when you first get hired is provided to you by the company. But if you work there for more than six months, you may end up having to replace this equipment either because it’s getting worn out, it’s been damaged, it’s been lost, or it’s been stolen. And any time you have to replace your personal protective equipment, you have to pay for it. And the company doesn’t really give you an option because it’s a requirement to wear the PPE when you’re working. And if you need to replace your PPE, they will give it to you and then take the cost out of your paycheck directly without your consent. 

This cost for PPE can be up to $1,100 per person. I spoke to workers on the picket line who were describing having to pay $70 because they lost their knife sharpener. They had to buy a new one, but it’s not like this is something you’re using for personal use. It’s a requirement of your job in order to work safely, and yet workers are the ones that are paying the cost. There were workers that were describing trying to keep some of their personal protective equipment together with stickers or tape while it was falling apart because they didn’t want to buy new equipment. 

So, this is one of the contract issues that they’re focusing on in negotiations this year, is the right for workers to access personal protective equipment without the cost of it getting taken out of their paychecks or without having to pay for it out of pocket.

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ:  Let’s dig into that a little bit more and take things down to the picket line level. I want to ask if y’all could talk more about the kind of people who work in this plant and the kind of jobs that they do. And if you could convey to our listeners what workers on strike have told you about what it’s like to work there, the kind of working conditions that they face daily, and especially how and why those conditions have gotten worse over time.

CAITLYN CLARK:  Sure. Being out there in person on the JBS Greeley picket line, it’s been just incredible and so inspiring to see all of these workers from all around the world coming together even when they don’t have a shared language. They are sharing music and dancing and food with each other to be able to build solidarity across different language groups. And the organizing that went into building this amount of power and this amount of solidarity that we’re seeing out on the picket line has just been incredible and really, really inspiring. 

The working conditions in the plant can be very difficult and very dangerous. I saw all types of injuries when I was out on the picket line, from hernias and herniated discs to cuts on people’s hands, burns on people’s hands, shoulder injuries. It’s a very difficult job. And I think one of the biggest demands in these contract negotiations is for workers to feel like they’re being adequately compensated for how hard they work on the line and the risks that come to their health and to their personal safety for doing this kind of job.

There are also workers that we spoke to, including one who’s quoted in the article, that enjoy their job. They genuinely like coming to work. They find it fun or enjoyable, but they want to be able to do that work safely and they want to be paid fairly for it. 

Cost of living has gone up significantly over the last several years, and meatpacking workers were really on the front lines of the COVID pandemic in 2020. There were mass deaths in the meatpacking industry during 2020. These meatpacking plants were staying open, which was lobbied for by the government. Meatpacking plants were staying open throughout the pandemic. COVID was spreading rapidly throughout these plants, and workers across the country were dying left and right from COVID, which made an already dangerous workplace even more dangerous.

In the years since the pandemic, meatpacking workers have been fighting to win better contracts to get what they are owed from the hard work that they did during the COVID pandemic, the risks that they took, the ways that they kept the country fed while large parts of the economy and large parts of the country were shut down during the pandemic.

And so workers at the Greeley plant are fighting to make sure that their wages keep up with the rising cost of living, the rising cost of inflation. Workers are fighting to be able to afford the same food that they produce for the rest of the country, to be able to buy beef at the grocery store and not have to buy Top Ramen. This is the way that I think a lot of the workers on the plant are thinking about fighting in this contract, is to win higher wage increases that keep up with the cost of living, and to win longer-term benefits like pension plans and safety protections, protections from speed up on the line that will also allow them to continue to work safely and with dignity on the job.

LISA XU:  Meatpacking has long been an industry with notoriously bad working conditions. It was thanks to the work of unions and activists in these plants that conditions did get better. In the postwar era, up to 90% of meatpacking workers were unionized. We were just looking at the latest figures, and it looks like that dropped to 17% in 2025. 

So, a big part of the story of the deterioration of conditions is union busting, and we’re going to have to rebuild union density in the industry to combat this deterioration. It was a very deliberate strategy that was employed by these companies. They would close plants in union strongholds like Chicago and move them to rural areas, places like Greeley where the workforce was very dependent on them, where union protections were weaker. Also, they would lay off people under the guise of automation. And like Caitlyn was saying, lines speed up.

A big part of the reason why conditions are so horrific is because industry is now very concentrated. In the course of this consolidation, we now have four beef processors, they call it the “Big Four,” which JBS is the biggest in the US. Also Tyson Foods, Cargill, and National Beef, who control 80% of beef processing. And not only is this bad for the workers in the plant, it’s also bad for consumers because as they reap these record profits, beef prices are increasing for everyone, and it’s also bad for small cattle growers. We write in the article that JBS has been fined for price-fixing along with these other companies. So really they operate like a cartel. 

Another important factor, which we’ve been talking about, meatpacking workers, it’s long been an immigrant workforce. Now it’s literally refugees from all these companies coming in under different immigration statuses who are working in these plants. 

And that’s a reason that Local 7 talks about for why there hasn’t been a labor dispute up to this point. There were ICE raids going back to the 2000s. There’s a big one at the Greeley plant in 2006. So this is another tool that these companies are using to discourage workers from organizing. JBS and other companies have been fined for using child labor in these plants. So really we’re talking about caricatureishly bad companies and working conditions. 

So, those are some of the factors as to how things have gotten so bad. And this is one of the reasons why this strike is so important, is because it’s so important to visibly show that it’s possible to organize against these conditions.

CAITLYN CLARK:  JBS, over the last year, has paid well over $100 million in fines for various settlements over price-fixing and illegal collaboration with the other Big Four meatpackers to increase beef prices for consumers, but they’ve also paid a $55 million fine in a $200 million industry-wide meatpacking settlement over employer collusion to illegally repress worker wages. 

So across the board, JBS and the other major meat packers that make up the vast majority of the meat that we consume in the United States are working together to increase prices for consumers and to repress wages for workers.

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ:  Well, and this is the same goddamn story that we hear in different sectors of the economy across the country. You guys report on it at Labor Notes. We report on it here at Working People. Pick your industry and you’ll hear the same kind of thing. The railroads have been consolidated to now they’re like four companies, and they want to merge into two mega companies. Basically every hospital system has been bought up by this or that health care conglomerate. You have almost all of the media owned by a handful of companies, the consumer products that fill our stores and our aisles all come from three to four megacompanies. And you inevitably hear as a result of this kind of corporate consolidation that consumers and workers pay the price for it while profits soar through the roof for Wall Street shareholders and corporate executives. We can’t keep going down this road and expecting a different result, but you can see the horrific results anywhere you look in this damn economy.

And I wanted to circle back to the question of COVID and how that helps supercharge the consolidation of the meatpacking industry, because that is sadly something that hits really close to home. As we covered here on this show during COVID, I remember talking to folks around the time that there were strikes at meatpacking plants in the Dakotas. And these were over COVID protocols and the fact that, as you both mentioned, meatpacking workers were getting sick, they were being exposed to COVID, they weren’t being properly protected, they were doing dangerous jobs, they were feeding the country. 

But that’s not even the half of it. We saw in the years following that there were even plant managers at companies like Tyson who were making bets on how many of their workers were going to get sick with COVID and die. This is how disgusting things have gotten. 

But you both write about in your report that the COVID pandemic and other larger forces at work have allowed companies like JBS to close union-heavy shops and reopen elsewhere with nonunionized workforces. Can you talk a little more, for folks who are listening to this, what this current strike means in the context of the meatpacking industry writ large, and what the strike tells us about that industry as it exists today in the year of our Lord 2026?

LISA XU:  Yeah. I started to allude to this earlier. I think it’s so significant that this is the first major, like you mentioned, there have been other strikes, but this is the first strike of the scale in the meatpacking industry since 1985, 1986, we think since the famous strike against Hormel Foods in Minnesota, which was part of a pattern of a new era of union busting in the ’80s. They really cracked down on those workers. And this is like four or five years after Reagan busted the PATCO strike. And for all the reasons we’ve been talking about, COVID included, that the industry has just been trying to make workers as quiescent and acquiescent as possible since then. 

So to have a strike of this magnitude at one of the biggest beef processing facilities in the US, I think, is really significant. And the workers and Local 7 have to be praised and encouraged for just how visible they’ve made it, because this is why it’s so important to be fighting these companies publicly and openly to demonstrate, well, first, to actually exert leverage over the company, and we know this is a huge source of profits for JBS in the US, but also to demonstrate to workers that it’s possible to fight, it’s possible to organize even across such a diverse workforce.

And yeah, it’s possible to win. That’s why this is already a historic strike. The negative effects of the consolidation we’re talking about workers and unions have a really important role to play in trying to combat that, reverse it. A group of UFCW locals were instrumental in stopping a major grocery merger last year. So it is possible for labor to play an important role here.

CAITLYN CLARK:  I can’t overstate how brave and courageous the workers who are out on strike at JBS are. There are so many conditions that are stacked against them and are working to try to scare them out of taking this kind of action against their employer. 

JBS is the largest meatpacking company in the world. They have also donated $5 million to President Trump’s inauguration fund as part of a ploy to get approval to go IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. There was a years-long process where their attempt to be traded publicly on the New York Stock Exchange was being held up by regulators and politicians, including a coalition of across-the-aisle senators that were concerned that the labor practices and corruption scandals that JBS has been involved in made the company too corrupt to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange, between their personal corruption of those in executive positions at JDS in addition to their working with ranchers in Brazil who have an active role in the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, burning down parts of the Amazon to clear room for cattle rearing, which then goes into the JBS supply chain, as well as their collusion to repress worker wages and increase beef prices, not just in the US, but across the globe. These were all some of the conditions that made it very difficult for them to go public on the New York Stock Exchange.

And shortly after they became the largest single donor to Trump’s inauguration fund, after his election, they donated $5 million. They were waved through and went IPO, and now they’re being publicly traded in the New York Stock Exchange, which has opened them up to potentially billions of dollars in new investment from American investors. 

So this company is making money hand over fist. They have relatively close ties to the Trump administration. These workers, [who] are majority immigrant workers, are facing down this major company. They’re standing up and they’re fighting for not just their wages and their safety on the job, but also dignity and respect. And it’s been incredibly courageous and inspiring to see, and I am hopeful that it may be able to have a ripple effect across the entire meatpacking industry.

As we’ve mentioned, the JBS Greeley strike is the first major meatpacking strike in 40 years. There was a wildcat walkout in 2006 and 2007 in Targill, North Carolina, at a Smithfield plant that was much smaller than the JBS Greeley plant, an industry where we’ve seen so much corporate consolidation, we’ve seen so many mergers and acquisitions. That’s how JBS became the largest meatpacker in the world, is through buying up smaller meatpacking companies. 

We need more stripes in the meatpacking industry. We need more militant action. These employers have been consolidating power and consolidating wealth for the last several decades, and workers like those at the JBS Greeley plant were standing up and saying, enough is enough. We’re demanding fair pay. We’re demanding our dignity. We’re demanding our respect on the job. We’re demanding safe working conditions. That’s how we’re going to stand up to this consolidated corporate power.

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ:  Well, let’s come around the final turn here and end by talking about, again, why this current strike is so significant, and anything we can leave listeners with about where things stand now with this contract fight, and what messages you have for listeners out there who want to know how they can show solidarity with these workers.

LISA XU:  I’ll add, I think we’re about one week into what the local announced was a two-week unfair labor practices strike. So everyone should stay tuned for how this resolves, if it succeeds in moving the company on any of these core demands, if they, in fact, come to the table before the end of the two-week strike, which is what everyone is hoping. 

I should also mention that last year there was actually, for the first time, a national round of negotiations by the UFCW that covered 14 other JBS plants. Local 7 opted out of that national agreement and is actually trying to push for even better conditions than was won in that national agreement. So I would say another thing to look for is if they do succeed in doing that, then hopefully this will lift up conditions not just at UFCW unionized JBS plans, but hopefully even beyond that.

But I wanted to mention that because we did see some locals who are part of that national negotiations come out to support the workers in Greeley on the picket line because they understood that there were stakes for workers beyond just the ones in Colorado.

CAITLYN CLARK:  Other ways that people can support the strike is by donating to Local 7’s strike hardship fund, which is money that will go directly to striking workers who request additional financial support in addition to the strike benefits they’re getting from their local if they have extenuating circumstances. The other place you can donate is to a GoFundMe that’s been set up by essential workers that will be split evenly between the local’s hardship fund and direct support for the picketers on the line. 

We’re working with a community solidarity group that has been showing support on the picket line with snacks, water. There’s been a heat wave in Colorado this past week, so we’ve been going out there with ice cream and popsicles to keep people cool. And 50% of the money from the GoFundMe will go directly to buying supplies for workers on the picket line with our community support group.

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ:  All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, Caitlyn Clark and Lisa Xu. Go and read Caitlyn and Lisa’s vital report on the JBS meatpacking workers strike in Labor Notes, which we’ve linked to in the show notes for this episode, and support the vital work that Labor Notes is doing. We need that work now more than ever. 

And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring about this. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference. 

I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.