March 28, 2026
Lallan Schoenstein – Struggle-La Lucha
https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2026/03/28/immigrant-meatpackers-strike-bosses-and-ice-in-greeley
Tchelly Moise leads chants with a megaphone as hundreds of JBS meat processing plant workers picket along Greeley’s 8th Avenue on the first day of a strike.
On Feb. 4, workers gathered in a Greeley, Colorado hotel to vote for strike authorization, empowering the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) meatpackers union members Local 7 to go on strike if negotiations broke down.
Familiar unmarked vans circled the hotel building. Workers recognized them as ICE. They approved the authorization anyway. More than 2,000 ballots were cast. Roughly 25 opposed the strike.
On March 16, about 3,800 UFCW workers walked off the job at the JBS Swift Beef plant in Greeley. Workers the bosses expected to intimidate refused to back down.
The strike began as a two-week unfair labor practices walkout, with the option to extend. As of March 27, no settlement has been announced.
JBS employs roughly 25,000 workers across nine facilities. It is one of four corporations that control 85% of U.S. beef production.
JBS has shifted production from Greeley to a plant in Cactus, Texas. The anti-labor “National Right to Work” foundation has distributed materials urging workers to leave the union to avoid fines.
The business model
The meatpacking industry has deliberately hired a workforce drawn from Haiti, Somalia, Eritrea, Burma and Latin America.
Beginning in the 1980s, major industry leaders attempted to break UFCW’s union power by moving plants to rural areas — away from urban density and scrutiny — and by recruiting immigrant labor.
The meatpacking bosses began hiring workers who were far from home. Many had precarious legal status. Community ties were weak. Job loss carried the threat of deportation.
The bosses thought they wouldn’t need to break unions at these plants — if they collaborated with ICE. At JBS Greeley, the company’s reliance on ICE was on full display.
Roughly 90% of the 3,800 union workers are immigrants. The night shift is largely Haitian.
Some Haitian workers report being recruited through TikTok ads promising stable jobs and housing. They say they arrived to find overcrowded housing — 40 to 60 people in a house — sometimes without running water or electricity. A December lawsuit alleges human trafficking tied to a company’s HR supervisor. JBS denies the claims.
This is the workforce the company expected to stay passive.
The calculation breaks
On Feb. 3, many Haitian workers at the plant were scheduled to lose Temporary Protected Status.
Late that night, a federal judge blocked the move, ruling it was driven not by improved conditions in Haiti but by “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”
Workers went to sleep unsure if they would be deportable by morning. The next day, they showed up and voted to strike.
The 99% authorization vote is not just about wages and the rotten work environment. It is a collective decision that immigration status will not be used as a weapon against them.
Kim Cordova, president of UFCW Local 7, spoke about the company’s miscalculation: “There’s 50 languages spoken at this plant. And where JBS thinks that they can hire a vulnerable workforce, they do that by design, hoping that workers can’t talk to each other about wages and benefits or working conditions. They’re hoping that we have a division in the plant. But they underestimated their workers. The workers are smart. They’re strong. They’re hard workers. And they deserve dignity, and they deserve respect.”
Cordova is one of the few Latinas elected to union leadership in the U.S. She is helping to pave the way for a new generation of women of color in organized labor. Local 7 represents more than 23,000 grocery, meatpacking, food processing, health care, cosmetology and barbershop workers in Colorado and Wyoming.
“For months now, JBS has been insisting on poverty-level wages for workers at the plant, offering less than 2% in average annual wage increases, far below the level of inflation in Colorado, while at the same time putting all the risk of rising healthcare costs on workers,” said Cordova in a statement.
“Make no mistake, JBS chose this strike to lower workers’ wages nationwide.”
What workers face
The meatpacking workers on the picket line have been direct about the dangerous working conditions and the impossible line speed-ups. One showed a reporter his hand — swollen, discolored from years on the line. Another described a coworker forced to keep working with a ripped protective apron that left vital areas exposed. Workers report being denied bathroom breaks and forced to soil themselves on the line.
“They don’t care about the workers,” one said. “They only care about production.”
JBS presents the strike as a routine labor dispute. The union is accused of walking away. The record shows something else:
- JBS paid $83.5 million to settle price-fixing charges. It was part of broader cases involving hundreds of millions tied to wage suppression.
- It paid $5.5 million for discrimination against Muslim workers in Greeley.
- Federal investigators found children as young as 13 working dangerous overnight cleaning shifts for its contractors.
- During COVID, at least six workers died at the Greeley plant. JBS rejected hundreds of workers’ compensation claims even as the federal government ordered the plant to remain open.
- The company made $2 billion in profit last year.
- Its subsidiary, Pilgrim’s Pride, gave $5 million to the Trump–Vance inaugural committee. JBS paid for access to ICE enforcement.
That is the administration that is now sending ICE into the communities where JBS recruits its workforce. That is the company telling 3,800 workers it has bargained in good faith.
Divide and rule failing
ICE raids, detention and deportation are part of their management plans. The meatpacking industry depends on a workforce whose legal status can be used against it. The state enforces that system.
What is happening in Greeley is a break in that system. The courageous workers are refusing to submit to fear as a condition of their own exploitation. In Greeley, Colorado, workers have held the line for ten days.
The strike is unfolding alongside national organizing for May Day actions.
When the boss uses fear, the answer is to stop being afraid — together.
The brave strike action of UFCW Local 7 commands our solidarity.
ICE Out Now!
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