This story was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.
This week, hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants faced an uncertain future as the Trump administration fought in federal court to revoke their legal status and deport them. But despite these threats, the largely immigrant union workers at a JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado, many of them recent arrivals from Haiti, still voted on Wednesday by an overwhelming margin to strike over poor working conditions in what could become the first sanctioned walkout at a major meatpacking plant in decades.
The strike could become the first sanctioned walkout at a major meatpacking plant in decades.
Outside the plant on the day before the strike vote, semis idled on either side of Highway 85—the cattle trailers full and waiting to unload, the cows’ warm breath rising in clouds through the slatted sides. Across the highway, Tchelly Moise and other representatives of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 union walked through the employee parking lot, passing out handbills to workers coming and going from their shifts. The fliers (in Moise’s native Haitian Creole but also in Somali, Spanish, Burmese, and other languages spoken inside the plant) informed union members of a vote to be held the following day in the ballroom of the DoubleTree Hotel, a little over a mile away.
The daylong secret balloting was no surprise to members who had been demanding a strike vote for weeks, as tense and often contentious contract negotiations over pay and work conditions at JBS, the Brazilian multinational and world’s largest producer of beef, have dragged on for eight months. Haitian workers, who comprise a plurality of the plant’s night shift, have been especially upset. In 2023 and 2024, they were recruited to work at the Greeley plant under what the union characterizes as false pretenses amounting to human trafficking. (A JBS spokesperson told me that the company takes the safety and welfare of its employees seriously and that it follows all laws and regulations. The spokesperson also said that no substantiated evidence was provided that tied the recruiter or company leadership to the claims outlined by the union.)
In December, a group of those workers filed a class action lawsuit alleging that they were promised free housing but, upon arrival, were charged “to live in overcrowded, uninhabitable housing” nearby at the Rainbow Motel. Worse still, the suit alleges, after being recruited to the B Shift, that they were made to work some of the hardest jobs on the line and at “dangerously fast speeds.” The suit claims that the line on the daytime A shift usually averages 300 head of cattle processed per hour, while the B shift runs at 370—and has reached as high as 440 head per hour.
Despite the lawsuit, the conditions, employees say, have remained largely unchanged—or even gotten worse. Some workers have told the union they struggle to keep up with the speed of the line at times. (JBS did not respond to a request for comment.) In recent weeks, some began coordinating short work stoppages, letting beef slide by on the conveyor belt uncut and untrimmed while banging their meat hooks on the sides of the metal work stations to alert supervisors that the chain conveyor system needed to be stopped.
Union officials told me it became clear that these kinds of spontaneous stoppages—known in the industry as “wildcat” actions, which can legally result in disciplinary action or termination—were only going to continue or increase as contract talks stalled. After months of fruitless negotiations with JBS, there was no choice but to hold a vote. This was no longer about whether or not to accept the company’s latest contract offer, Moise explained. The vote would be a simple ballot: strike or no strike.
In the union offices on the night before the vote, he told me he had no doubt about how workers would cast their ballots. “People at the plant,” he said, “they’re pissed off.”
For the previous few days, union leadership had quietly worried about turnout for the vote. A large number of Haitian workers—part of a group of roughly 353,000 migrants nationwide—were scheduled to lose their temporary protected status (TPS) and accompanying work authorization on February 3, the day before the vote was scheduled to take place. But then, late on the night of February 2, US District Judge Ana C. Reyes, of the District of Columbia, paused termination of TPS for Haitians. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem had not decided to end their legal status because order had been restored in Haiti, Reyes wrote in her ruling, but rather because of a “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” Reyes cited a social media post by Noem in December, calling immigrants “foreign invaders,” who are “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”
When Reyes’ ruling was reported, Moise said, his WhatsApp group chat lit up. “It was a very big relief,” he said. “People were literally celebrating.”
But Moise, who once worked as a forklift driver at the JBS plant but left in 2024 to become a union representative, cautioned everyone not to make too much of the ruling. “It is not a final decision,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that we’re going to have [TPS] forever.” He noted that Venezuelans with TPS had received a similar reprieve from the courts, only to have the Supreme Court rule in October that the termination of their 2023 TPS designation could take immediate effect. (Indeed, within hours of Judge Reyes’s ruling to halt the deportation of Haitians, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of Homeland Security, posted on social media: “Supreme Court, here we come.”) Still, the ruling would buy the union enough time to hold the strike vote. “Now we have at least a few days,” Moise said. “We cannot get deported for the next few days.”
Still, at the DoubleTree on the day of the vote, as workers from the overnight C shift began to check in shortly after 6 a.m. to cast some of the first votes, a sense of apprehension was palpable. Rumors circulated that unmarked vans had been seen circling outside the hotel, raising fears of detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Many workers reminded each other that, in recent weeks, proof of legal status had been little help to immigrants in Minneapolis. Nevertheless, workers lined up in the hallway, waiting to give their names and receive a blue slip of paper to record their vote and deposit it in an old-school wooden vote box.
Later, as workers from the B shift started to arrive, a group of Latino men in their twenties expressed deep concern about having been checked in by the union and registered as voting. Would JBS be able to access that information? The company was the largest donor to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration. Shortly after that donation, Trump changed the composition of the National Labor Relations Board, which then dismissed the union’s formal complaint alleging human trafficking by JBS. Months later, company CEO Joesley Batista met in person with Trump in a successful bid to lift US tariffs on Brazilian beef. JBS has the ear of a president already eager to deport immigrants, in the name of saving American jobs.
A union rep assured the young men that the vote will be 100 percent anonymous—“cien por ciento,” he emphasized—but they sat for hours, unsure whether to cast votes. “The fear of retaliation is very real,” Moise told me.
And yet, soon after, Carlos Saint Aubin arrived to cast his vote. Saint Aubin was identified as “Auguste” in my story published last year in Mother Jones about the plight of Haitian workers at the plant. At that time, he said of working conditions at JBS: “I feel like I was being treated as a slave.” He couldn’t fully close his left hand after months of working with a meat hook on the line. But he was afraid then to have his name appear in print. Now, he is one of the named lead plaintiffs in the class action suit against JBS. As he dropped his ballot into the vote box, he broke into a wide smile.
The vote stretched into the evening.
I asked Kim Cordova, the president of Local 7 who had driven in from Denver, what the union would do if the Supreme Court reinstated the Trump administration’s right to immediately terminate TPS for the Haitians on B shift, as they had done for Venezuelan TPS recipients. Was she concerned that workers might vote to strike and then be on picket lines just as the court ruled that they could be rounded up by ICE? She conceded that it was a worry, but she noted that there are 3,800 workers at the plant. JBS wouldn’t be able to replace so many workers on short notice, she said. “Locals aren’t exactly lined up to take these jobs.”
“Locals aren’t exactly lined up to take these jobs.”
Precisely at 7 p.m., Mathew Shechter, the general counsel for Local 7, called out, asking if there were any remaining uncast ballots. When no reply came, he called for counting to begin. The vote box was unlocked and the blue ballots—with x’s marked beside STRIKE / HUELGA or NO STRIKE / NO HUELGA—were dumped out on a round table where members began sorting yes votes into stacks and wrapping them with rubber bands and putting the no votes into a tiny pile. A respectful distance away, Moise stood with Dahir Omar, a fellow union representative who works with the plant’s Somali members.
Omar shook his head and smiled at Moise. “Democracy,” he said.
Moise smiled back and nodded.
“This isn’t how we do it in Africa,” Omar laughed. “In Africa, they’re like, ‘Hey, you guys go home, and we’ll count for you,’ you know?”
In less than an hour, the ballots were tallied. Nearly 99 percent were marked for STRIKE.
The mood among the union representatives was jubilant. I texted Cordova, who had driven home by then, to give her the results. “The workers have spoken,” she replied. Now, the union would give JBS a week to come back to the bargaining table and address worker complaints. Cordova said she hoped that JBS would resume negotiations, but a press release issued by the union soon after was clear: “Workers are prepared to take immediate and serious action if JBS continues to violate federal labor law and prevent workers from securing a fair contract.” If workers do walk out, it would be the first time in the history of the Greeley plant—and the first major strike by meatpacking workers since the Hormel strike of the 1980s.
In a statement issued on Thursday morning, JBS said: “We respect the collective bargaining process and remain hopeful that the local union will choose to move forward with this agreement.” But in an email sent directly to workers on Thursday afternoon, which focused on a 60-cent wage increase and a pension plan, the company’s tone was less rosy. “[T]he union has not allowed you to vote on the Company’s Last, Best, and Final offer,” the email obtained by Mother Jones reads. “Demand the union lets you vote on this offer!” (JBS did not respond to a request for comment about whether this email indicated that the company would not be resuming negotiations.)
At the end of the day, Moise sat alone in the union office. “It looks like they’re willing to see us go on strike for real,” he said. “They’re ready for the consequences.”
He laughed quietly. The union, he said, has already ordered 4,000 picket signs.