Fight the Power
Episode 30 of Unconfined, in which journalist Ted Genoways recounts the unlikely story of how some of the world's most vulnerable people took on a giant meatpacking company in Greeley, Colorado.
How vulnerable meatpacking workers fought meatpacking goliath JBS to a standstill
By Tom Philpott Subscribe to Host Notes
In a coordinated operation involving six large meatpacking plants across the Great Plains, ICE agents arrive unannounced, many of them clad in riot gear. They arrest 1,300 undocumented workers. It's the largest workplace immigration raid in US history.
The spectacle sounds like it could be ripped from today's headlines, but it happened in 2006 under President George W. Bush. It transformed the way the meat industry staffs its vast slaughter and packing houses, reports journalist and author Ted Genoways on the latest episode of Unconfined. After a union-busting drive in the 1980s, the industry drove down wages, sped up the kill lines, and relied increasingly on undocumented workers to keep its plants humming. The 2006 ICE raid sent them searching for workers who could be expected to both tolerate harsh conditions—and not be prone to arrest by federal authorities. The answer the industry seized on: refugees, i.e., people accepted into the United States because they're fleeing desperate conditions in their home countries. In other words, some of the world's most vulnerable people.
In the 20 years since that big crackdown, Genoways says, people with refugee status have emerged as the industry's lifeblood. In the Trump II era, they endure not only brutally demanding jobs, but also a severe challenge away from the shop floor: a government-created atmosphere of open hostility to immigrants, and in particular refugees.
In our conversation, Genoways lays out the dramatic story of how such workers at a massive beef-packing plant in Greeley, Colorado, became so fed up with their lot that they initiated the first major US meatpacking strike since the 1980s—and fought JBS, a Brazil-based, Trump-aligned global behemoth, to a standstill. And they showed up on the picket line despite the credible risk of being arrested and detained by ICE at any moment.
Genoways, a senior editor at the Food & Environment Reporting Network and a contributing writer at Mother Jones, has been providing crucial coverage of the meatpacking industry's labor practices for 15 years. His 2014 book The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food, is the most hard-hitting and important work on the topic since Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). The Chain grew out of Genoways' 2011 Mother Jones blockbuster "The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret."
More recently, Genoways has turned his attention to the Greeley, Colorado, plant. His must-read articles on the brutal conditions that led to the strike and the dramatic vote that initiated it appeared in Mother Jones. In our conversation, I asked him whether the extraordinary courage of the workers who mounted the Greeley strike augured a new wave of meatpacking labor militancy. Given the current political climate, he said, "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, because no one is coming from the government to protect them."
In Host Notes, the voices behind Unconfined podcast deliver additional context to supplement our interviews. Their views do not necessarily reflect those of the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future or the Johns Hopkins University.