These Haitian Meatpacking Workers Face Deportation. They Voted to Strike Anyway.

[Omaha Steve]

A JBS plant’s largely immigrant workforce is refusing to back down after they accuse their employer of poor working conditions.

Ted Genoways February 6, 2026

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.

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.

FULL story: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/02/jbs-tps-haiti-haitian-meatpacking-workers-deportation-immigration-strike-union/


A worker at the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, cast his ballot in the UFCW Local 7 strike vote on February 4, 2026.Mary Anne Andrei