On slaughterhouse floor, fear and anger remain
GREELEY, Colo. — Tin Aye died without ever laying hands on her newborn grandson.
Through her six decades of life, she endured a harrowing exodus from her homeland in Myanmar while pregnant with her only child, followed by 15 years in a refugee camp. She and her daughter, San Twin, managed to forge new lives in the United States.
But she could not survive her job inside a slaughterhouse run by the world’s largest meat processing company, JBS. She died last year, one of six people who succumbed to COVID-19 while working at a plant in Greeley.
In crucial ways, much has changed for workers inside the long, low-slung slaughterhouse in this city of roughly 100,000 people on the high plains of northern Colorado. In a new contract secured last summer, the union gained substantial raises from JBS, the Brazilian conglomerate that owns the plant. Colorado passed legislation mandating paid sick leave after the state shut the plant for more than a week last year. Inside the slaughterhouse, dividers and partitions have been installed to help maintain social distancing.
But workers complain that many of the changes have been aimed at managing perceptions, while stubborn problems remain: not enough distance between people stationed at some parts of the assembly line, inadequate stocks of hand sanitizer and subtle pressure to come to work even when they are ill.
“It gets thrown in our faces if we’re sick,” said Mariel Pastrana, 23, who has worked at the plant for nearly three years, and whose wages jumped from about $18 an hour to more than $26 under the new contract. “They keep saying, ‘Production is slow; demand is going up.’ ”
A spokeswoman for JBS, Nikki Richardson, disputed that characterization.
“Our focus throughout the global pandemic has been, and continues to be, to protect our team members from the virus and do everything possible to keep it out of our facilities,” she wrote in an emailed statement.
The Greeley plant, which paid $2,100 bonuses to workers who got the coronavirus shots, has achieved an 80 percent rate of vaccination, Richardson added. The facility has increased wages more than 50 percent over the past five years.
The experiences of workers at the plant reflect the lopsided apportionment of risk and reward within the business of turning cattle into beef.
The four largest meatpackers — including JBS — have collectively paid out more than $3 billion in dividends to shareholders since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a recent analysis from the White House.
At the same time, many cattle ranchers are going broke. People who work in slaughterhouses — among them immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa — say they still face a grim choice between their safety and their livelihoods.
“People are scared,” said Anthony Martinez, 52, a father of six who has worked at the slaughterhouse for more than three years. “We are putting our lives on the line.”