Labor publication In These Times recently ran the piece "Can Iowa Meatpacking Workers Take on Tyson?", which covers a low-profile yet very important ongoing unionization efforts which is that of approximately 1,800 Iowa meatpackers employed by Tyson and the West Liberty Foods plant. If successful, the effort will create the largest new meatpackers union in over a decade–the industry is notoriously under-unionized due to its heavy use of immigrant and noncitizen labor.
It should come as no surprise that meatpackers would want a union, particularly if you've ever been in a slaughterhouse. Slaughter of this sort is hard and disgusting work at the best of times when done at the industrial scale. At worst it is both physically and biologically dangerous and deeply exploitative of the people who do it, and at the plants being unionized here the second is certainly the case. In These Times noted that:
[...we] heard complaints ranging from understaffing to abusive supervisors to punitive attendance policies. Meatpacking workers say a union would also address the breakneck pace of the line and the unremitting production pressures, which they say make injuries all but certain. They lift heavy turkey carcasses onto hooks at West Liberty and cut into pork limbs with dull knives at Tyson. Workers say they have soiled themselves trying to keep the line going by skipping bathroom breaks and suffered cuts and stab wounds from wielding knives elbow-to-elbow.
Typically, however, unionization is hard to come by in the industry due to its circumstances. Turnover is heavy and workers in the industrial slaughter process are nowadays almost exclusively immigrants or non-citizens because of the nature of the work. (Child labor has also been repeatedly employed at slaughterhouse facilities.) Many workers do not speak English as a first language and do not know their rights; when they do, it's still a battle because corporations like Tyson are ruthlessly anti-union and frequently punitive. At the plants profiled, workers grimly note that the pigs they slaughter are generally given more welfare than they are–even COVID-19 only temporarily lessened their exploitation–and are looked out for with more urgency. Ethnic tensions within the industry are frequent due to its diversity, and exploited by corporations with clinical precision–and in extreme cases, wings of a slaughterhouse are effectively segregated. All of this makes for a very complicated terrain to seek unionization in.
But that hasn't deterred workers from trying to self-organize, particularly after the worst excesses of the pandemic ravaged the industry and many noncitizen workers were left out of relief efforts. Escucha Mi Voz, which was founded to provide relief the federal government would not and is made up of many such workers, has been essential to the efforts to unionize thus far. It also helps that they have a sympathetic ear in the UFCW Local 431, with which one of the plants has attempted to unionize in the past. Both groups are now collaborating, as the article notes:
In late 2022, [Escucha Mi Voz] was tasked with distributing $600 checks from the Department of Agriculture’s new relief program to cover farm and meatpacking workers’ pandemic-related expenses. Escucha also surveyed workers about their working conditions. According to Escucha, a survey of 927 workers at Tyson and 426 workers at West Liberty Foods revealed that more than 85 percent wanted a union.
A typical workplace union campaign would take years to compile such detailed information, but Escucha offered UFCW Local 431 access to the survey results and invited union staff to table the relief clinics where Escucha was distributing the aid in late December 2022 and early January 2023. Since, worker-organizers with Escucha have been meeting at churches and going door-to-door talking with meatpackers about pandemic relief and workers’ rights.
That collaboration will be vital if the effort is to succeed–union cards are being signed as we speak, and in this case they're time-sensitive. There are perhaps six or seven months left before many of the cards expire, which would force the collection process to be redone. Tyson has also been aware of the unionization effort since at least December of 2022, and has hinted that they will spring to bust any union that forms. It's likely that this effort has only one shot, and if it's squandered then there will be no union at either plant.