Latest / REAP/SOW / Fighting for workers’ rights – and to stay in this country
Transcript
- Teresa Cotsirilos: You're listening to Reap/Sow, dispatches from the front lines of food, farming, and the environment. I'm your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Last March, workers at a JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado, walked off the job, launching the first US meatpacking strike in 40 years. The stakes were high for these workers. Most of them are immigrants. Many are refugees. A lot of them are Haitian migrants, and the Trump administration recently revoked their legal immigration status. They could now face deportation, but these workers voted by an overwhelming margin to go on strike anyway. The conditions in the JBS plant were that bad. My colleague, FERN senior editor Ted Genoways, has been following this troubled JBS plant for years, and one of the workers he really got to know was Tchelly Moise, a Haitian immigrant and now an organizer with the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, who played a pivotal role in organizing this strike. Tchelly recently sat down for an interview with our friends at Good Food, a podcast produced by KCRW. I'll let Tchelly and host Evan Kleiman take it from here. Tchelly Moise: Not everything that looks good is actually good. Do not go ahead and kill yourself because most likely, you're just a number on the computer for these people. You're not really a human being. Evan Kleiman: From KCRW, I'm Evan Kleiman, and this is Good Food. Tchelly Moise has lived many lives. He survived being shot at close range, crossed three countries, mostly on foot, then landed a job at the largest meatpacking company in the world, and that wasn't the hardest part. Tchelly is Haitian. He is here under temporary protected status. It's a federal law that lets people from countries in crisis live and work in the United States legally. Tchelly was one of hundreds of immigrants recruited to work the night shift at the JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado. It's a factory shift that workers say ran faster and more dangerously than any other. Disillusioned by what he experienced, Tchelly helped organize a vote that led to the first strike at an American slaughterhouse in nearly 40 years. Today, he tells us that story in his own words, and what's happened to him and his community in the aftermath, especially since the US government recently revoked temporary protected status for Haitians. What does it take to vote for a strike when that vote could put your future in this country at risk? Tchelly Moise grew up in Haiti, but by the time he was a teenager, the promise of a normal life there, college, a steady job, a future, had started to disappear. Tchelly: It wasn't really something that I could see happen in Haiti, and it was around 2013. The situation was not as bad as it is today, but it was already really bad. Evan: Haiti and the Dominican Republic share an island in the Caribbean Sea, Hispaniola. Haiti, once a French colony, occupies the western third. The Dominican Republic, once a Spanish colony, occupies the rest. The country was still recovering from a catastrophic 2010 earthquake that had killed more than 200,000 people and left much of its infrastructure in ruins. Amid the resulting instability, gangs were gaining ground, and unemployment was rampant. Tchelly: The Dominican Republic was actually a place where I could escape from all that situation and have the opportunity to go to school at the same time, which is what I did. Evan: Tchelly left Haiti and lived in the Dominican Republic for about nine years until one day. Tchelly: Unfortunately, in 2023, I mysteriously got shot, and then I had to go back to Haiti for a moment, try to live with my mom again. Evan: Tchelly was at a party with friends when gunmen arrived, possibly to hold up the guests. As he tried to close the front door, he was shot at fairly close range. Tchelly: I didn't realize I got shot until after I'd say a few seconds when I realized I was really bleeding. I was bleeding a lot. Evan: Tchelly was lucky. The bullet had gone through his chest and exited under his armpit without hitting any of his organs along the way, but he had to leave the Dominican Republic. Tchelly returned to Haiti, but he couldn't stay there either. Ted Genoways: Haiti is a country of about 12 million people, and right now, the UN estimates that between 5,000 and 6,000 people a year in that country are murdered by gangs. That gives you some sense of the constant danger that people are living under. Evan: That's journalist Ted Genoways. He spent 15 years reporting on the meatpacking industry. He's written about Tchelly and the JBS strike for the Food and Environment Reporting Network, as well as other outlets. Ted: Very often the violence is arbitrary. It is sweeping through a single neighborhood, grabbing up people, killing people, kidnapping people, and the result is just terror. Certainly, when you find out that you have been targeted by a gang and they are extorting you or your family for money and saying that they're going to come and kill you if you don't come up with money, and if you don't have that money, the only thing that people can do is flee. Evan: Tchelly did what hundreds of thousands of other Haitians have done. He left. He made his way to Nicaragua, then Honduras, then Guatemala, and eventually to Mexico. He did this mostly on foot. For several stretches, he walked only at night to avoid being detained and sent back to Guatemala, or worse, deported to Haiti. Tchelly: Yes, I remember we had a lot of situations where we had to walk through those fields for hours and hours, sometimes for days, before we could get to the next part, and either be able to get on a motorcycle with one of those taxis or get on a bus. Sometimes because you really don't have any paperwork for the country, you can't really get on the bus, so a travel that would take you about maybe one or two hours on a bus may take you the whole day to do it by foot. Evan: You can't just show up and get into the United States, so Tchelly spent three months in Mexico waiting for an appointment with Customs and Border Protection. Tchelly: You actually have to go through a process if you really want to do things the right way, which is what we did. Ted: That is something that we hear again and again. It's that we don't want undocumented immigrants jumping the line and squeezing out the spaces that are meant for people who have applied and done things the right way. Tchelly and everyone I was speaking to, they applied through the existing system that then required them to submit DNA samples via a cheek swab and to be fingerprinted, to be researched and background-checked before they could even be admitted to the US. Even then, they had to have somebody on the American side sponsoring them, providing a place for them to live. That whole process is so arduous. This is the definition of people who are arriving here because they are in the greatest need, and they are opening themselves up to the most intense versions of scrutiny, so they can be approved for entry into the US. Evan: Tchelly left Haiti in October 2023 and arrived in the US in February 2024, but crossing the border didn't mean he could stay here permanently. Tchelly was able to register for Temporary Protected Status, known as TPS. It doesn't lead to a green card or citizenship, but it does two crucial things. It protects people from deportation and it lets them work in the US legally. The federal government first granted TPS to Haitians after the 2010 earthquake. Since then, it's been extended several times, most recently in 2024 because of the same gang violence that Tchelly fled. By last year, nearly 350,000 Haitians were living and working in the US under that protection. Tchelly was one of them. When Tchelly Moise arrived in the United States, he hoped the worst was behind him. He was staying in Florida when he heard from a cousin that there were meatpacking jobs in Colorado. He applied online and ended up in Greeley working at the JBS plant. JBS is the largest meat processing company in the world. Its plant in Greeley, Colorado, slaughters and processes thousands of cattle a day. Tchelly was hired onto what's called C shift, working from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM after the kill floor had gone quiet. Tchelly: It's really divided in different parts. You have a slaughter side. Then you have the fabrication side, which is where they cut the meat and process everything on different tables, and then pack them, put them in boxes, to finally stock them in a big storage room before they can finally ship them to whoever's buying the meat from them. I explain it a little simple, but it's way more complicated than that. Evan: Tchelly never worked the floor itself. He got a job stacking boxes of meat onto pallets, 35 to 40 boxes, 50 to 100 pounds each, for 12 hours at a time. Tchelly: It was very repetitive. We're doing the same thing. I was doing that for about 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Every 21 days, I would get one day off. Evan: The pay was good by Greeley standards, more than $1,500 a week after taxes, but missing work came at a cost. Tchelly: You are really allowed to miss only six days every six months. If anything goes over that, then you get terminated the same day. Evan: Tchelly was insulated from the worst of the plant, at least at first, but he started hearing things from a cousin, from an uncle, from friends who worked the fabrication floor. Tchelly: All of my friends were complaining for injury. Everyone has some kind of stuff on their hands. People couldn't close their hands. If anyone was working at JBS at that time, they had some injury on their hand. Evan: In the meatpacking industry, everything comes down to a single number: line speed, that's how many animals move down the production chain each hour. Companies want to process as many animals as possible. Workers want a reasonable pace of work. Meatpacking facilities and unions negotiate an agreement to determine the line speed, but why is that number so important? Ted: When the chain gets going too fast, when the companies press to make the chain go faster than everyone has agreed on, workers start getting hurt, both from repetitive stress and from traumatic injuries, like cuts, breaks, and crushing injuries, but it also has this effect earlier in the supply chain. You see people starting to cut corners, and there's environmental impact. You see that people are rushing to try to get the animals to the loading docks, so there's increased animal abuse. Everything starts to break down when the chain is going too fast. Evan: Line speed is almost never made public, and getting the actual number is nearly impossible. Ted: All of these companies have said that line speed is proprietary information; that this is part of the secrets of how they produce their product. That's not information they make publicly available. They have non-disclosure agreements with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union that represent the workers not to disclose that information. The only thing that we have is the anecdotal information that comes from the workers via those court filings. I guess my opinion is that no one knows better than the people who are working on the line just how fast that line is running. Evan: Journalist Ted Genoways has spent years piecing together those numbers. Ted: On the day side shift, it was about 250 to 300 cattle per hour. On the night shift, where the Haitian workers were, it was 400 or more, and as much as 430 head per hour. Evan: Tchelly Moise didn't need a lawsuit to figure this out. He just had to compare notes with other workers. Tchelly: We started to realize that A shift was not as fast as B shift, which is full of Haitians, and that's how we started. People started to speak up. We started to hear about all those discrimination situations that is happening on the floor. Evan: When the union pushed back, the company didn't slow the night shift down. Ted: I'm told that what happened is that they simply increased the line speed on the day shift where the Hispanic workers were, and said, "If you don't want a two-tier system, then we'll make everybody work this fast." Evan: Tchelly spoke English, a skill he taught himself mostly from YouTube, and that put him in an unusual position from his very first day at JBS. Tchelly: No one really spoke English enough, even to do that interview or even do the paperwork that they had to do that day. I remember that I did offer myself to translate that same day. I translated for about 30-something people for the interviews that day, and then I think I've been translating from that day. Even when I started my orientation week, it was 40-something people who only speaks Haitian Creole, or two or three Spanish workers that were inside of that orientation room, but then everything on the screen was in English. Evan: As Tchelly moved around the plant, he started hearing about injuries that went well beyond sore hands. Tchelly: I've seen people lose their fingers. I've seen people get in to hold hands on the conveyor belt, then they have to be taken by the ambulance to the hospital. It's not something that someone who has never been inside one of those places would expect. I myself was injured because one of those ramp fell on the top of my steel-toe boot, and the steel inside of my boot actually almost cut my toes. Even before they could take me to a hospital, I had to do paperwork for two to three hours and just suffer with my toes just to do paperwork to make sure they do everything right. Evan: None of this, it turns out, is new. The Greeley plant Tchelly worked in has an interesting history, one that connects to the famous Upton Sinclair book The Jungle, published in 1905. It exposed the brutal, unsanitary conditions inside America's meatpacking plants. Ted: It's funny. I think that book is mostly remembered as a book about food safety, but in reality, it's a novel about the exploitation of immigrant workers in the Chicago stockyards at that time. The company that was the subject of Upton Sinclair's investigation was Swift & Company. It was, in fact, the company that JBS bought out in Greeley, Colorado, where these Haitian workers are working today. The lineage is direct. The people who are working in Greeley today, they are working at the same company that Upton Sinclair was investigating 120 years ago. Evan: In July 2007, JBS purchased Swift & Company for approximately $1.5 billion. The conditions that Upton Sinclair described 100 years ago: the injuries, the breakneck pace of the line, the immigrant labor, that's not like The Jungle. In Greeley, Colorado, it is the jungle, just under new ownership, with new uniforms and a new generation of desperate, hopeful workers. When we return, Tchelly becomes a union rep and explains the build-up to the strike. Welcome back to Good Food. We've been talking about conditions at the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado, where workers had reached a breaking point. Tchelly Moise wasn't planning to become a union representative. During orientation for his new job at JBS, a union rep said something he has never forgotten. Tchelly: I remember one of them said, "First thing is, I do not work for this company. I work for you guys." I really liked that when he say that. I felt like it was something that I could do. Obviously, I asked questions: How could I ever be part of that team since my very first day? Evan: By the summer of 2025, issues such as line speed, the cost of protective equipment, and the lack of guaranteed bathroom breaks had become impossible to ignore. Workers were ready to fight back. JBS is owned by the billionaire Batista family of Brazil. In 2020, the company pled guilty in US federal court to bribing more than 1,800 officials across Brazil. The corruption scheme helped fuel JBS's rapid expansion into the US, including its acquisition of poultry producer Pilgrim's Pride. In the end, JBS's parent company J&F Investimentos agreed to pay almost $3.5 billion in fines between Brazil and the US. Although it ended up paying far less. The US agreed to credit much of that fine against what the company had already paid Brazilian authorities for the same conduct. Fast forward to 2025, JBS, through its subsidiary Pilgrim's Pride, was the single largest corporate donor to President Donald Trump's second inauguration, giving $5 million. Ted: This, to me, smells like the same corruption that existed in Brazil being brought into the United States. Evan: By early 2026, contract talks between the union and JBS had dragged on for the better part of a year. Tchelly: We had been negotiating for about eight to nine months already. The company was obviously negotiating in bad faith. It did not look like they wanted to give a reasonable contract to the workers. Evan: As a union rep, Tchelly was organizing publicly, speaking up, pushing back at the exact same moment his own legal status in the country was becoming precarious. Tchelly: Every day, it's some kind of fear, some kind of doubt every day, that I might leave my house today and meet with some ICE agent outside that do not want to follow the process, because I've seen it happen. I mean, it's a fear every day that something like that could happen on a daily basis. During the strike, it's something that I really had to put to the side, and everyone had to really put it to the side and just hope for the best, really, because we don't really have a say in what's happening. There was really nothing that we could do about this. All we can do is wait and hope for the best. Evan: Although the shifts at the JBS plant were segregated by ethnicity, the picket lines didn't split along those same divides. Tchelly: There was solidarity between all of the different ethnic groups, between Haitians and Hispanics and people from Burma, from Southeast Asia, from Somali, Kenya. The only way you would actually make the difference would be the language that you could hear them speak, but people were actually just one. Evan: Ted Genoways has reported on many people caught up in stories like this one. He says Tchelly stands out. Ted: I think that Tchelly is very nearly a singular figure. I mean, he is so charismatic and just radiates a kind of raw intelligence that I've never seen anyone who has just such natural leadership abilities, and the people are just drawn to him. In all of this, the thing that I always come back to is that any system that sees someone like Tchelly Moise and says, "This is not someone we want in our country, that system is broken." Evan: On February 4th, 2026, JBS workers packed into the ballroom of a DoubleTree Hotel to vote on whether to strike. 99% voted yes. It's the kind of number that looks unanimous on paper. For a workforce this vulnerable, it was anything but simple. Tchelly: For anyone who has actually been inside of the plant, it was not surprising at all. It was something that the company had coming for a very long time, just because of the way that they've been treating the workers. Evan: Five weeks later, approximately 3,800 workers walked off the job. It was the first strike at an American beef slaughterhouse since the Hormel strike in 1985. The union accused JBS of unsafe line speeds, charging workers more than $1,000 a year for their own protective equipment, and offering raises that didn't keep pace with inflation. The strike lasted three weeks. In the end, the union and the company hammered out an agreement. JBS employees went back to work, and the union called it a victory. What the strike actually won is harder to pin down. Ted: The place where I guess the doubt creeps in for me is that what the union was asking for in the first place in Greeley was OSHA compliance, so a safe workplace, that the company would adhere to the speed of the line that had been negotiated with the union, and then other guaranteed workplace conditions like being allowed bathroom breaks, being allowed breaks from work during your shift. To me, yes, if the union was able to get those conditions restored, that is a victory. It is also the baseline that everybody is supposed to be operating from already. Evan: Tchelly, for his part, isn't ready to call it a win either. Since the strike ended, the union has had to go to the state legislature just to secure bathroom breaks and stop the company from charging workers for their own safety equipment. Tchelly: A strike itself sends a message to the company that you want better. It's a way of using that democratic process inside of the US. I do believe that it's a way to send a message to the company. I do not think it's enough in a lot of situations, though. Evan: At the end of July, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could legally revoke Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. The decision leaves as many as 350,000 Haitian nationals living here in the US in limbo. That includes Tchelly. Tchelly: It does feel like it's getting worse every day. [chuckles] At this point, even if you have pending asylum, you have a work permit, or even if you have never been in trouble in this country, you have never had not even a traffic violation, even if you came to this country the right way, it does feel like at this time even people who did all that are not safe. Evan: Since the Supreme Court decision, the United States has ramped up the number of deportation flights to Haiti from monthly to weekly. The Haitian Times reports that as of mid-September, the government has deported 401 people to Haiti. Because the capital of Port-au-Prince is so volatile, US planes can't land there. Instead, deportees are flown to Cap-Haïtien Airport in northern Haiti. When they land, they often have no money and no possessions except their court papers and their US government-issued sweatpants and T-shirts. For many people whose families live hundreds of miles away in Port-au-Prince, getting home is incredibly dangerous, if not impossible. Armed gangs patrol the roads connecting northern Haiti to the capital, kidnapping, extorting, and brutalizing travelers. Back in the US, Ted has been tracking how JBS is handling the situation with its workers. Ted: People are starting to get notification that they have been identified in the system and are being processed for deportation. One step in that is canceling the work visas. What happens is that JBS gets a letter that says these people are no longer authorized to work, and they very often are called into the office and told, "You can't return here tomorrow morning." Evan: Yet, even as workers are being pushed out the door, JBS is hiring. Tchelly: Now, recently, JBS has been hiring heavily. It does feel like they're getting ready for something. No one knows. I mean, even last Saturday, they had like a job fair, which is the first job fair that I've seen since I've been here, since 2024. Evan: Are the people showing up to those job fairs the American workers that Donald Trump's administration says it's trying to protect? Ted: They're not. I mean, that's the short answer to that, is that they're not. One of the things that JBS is doing, they're trying to recruit back some of the Somali workers who they fired in order to make space for the Haitian workers when they felt that the Haitian workforce would be more vulnerable and more compliant. They've met a lot of resistance from the Somali community in Greeley and elsewhere. Evan: As Ted points out, there are thousands of workers out of jobs from recent meat processing plant closures like Tyson. There are also workers in Fort Morgan, Colorado, coming off a lockout at Cargill. Then there's the consolidation of the meat industry. In the United States, 85% of the beef processing market is controlled by only four companies: National Beef, Cargill, Tyson Foods, and JBS. On the front end, that likely contributes to the skyrocketing prices for meat we've all seen in grocery stores. On the back end, that means fewer facilities and a smaller pool of workers, and that presents larger geopolitical issues. Ted: In the short term, it may be okay. I think in the long term, it means that almost certainly we're going to see much more offshoring of meat production and maybe food production in general in the US and importation. It's a radical reshuffling of the way everything has been done. Since World War II, our aim has been to be kind of the world's breadbasket. We produce food for the world as a humanitarian tool, but also as a way of exerting influence over countries because of our food production. No longer doing that means that we will have a very, very different place in the world order. Evan: Ted thinks what's happening in Greeley isn't new. It's just the latest draft of the same old story. Ted: It has been this process since the dawn of industrial meatpacking at the turn of the last century. Upton Sinclair is writing about Eastern Europeans, about Lithuanians and Poles. As that group was replaced with another and replaced with another, this cycle has continued for more than a century. What you see in a meatpacking plant is a cross-section of the places that in the world that are most war-torn at that moment, the places that people have fled and come to the United States hoping that they can get to safety and to a better life. Instead, for more than a century, what we have greeted them with is the most difficult and dangerous job that we have to offer and a great deal of discrimination and difficulty on top of that. Evan: We asked Tchelly what he wants people to understand about what's happening to him and to people like him. Not as an issue of public policy, but as something real people are facing right now. Tchelly: I would want a lot of people to know that most of this stuff that they hear are not actually true. When you have the opportunity to be close to one of us. I don't care if it's Haitians or someone from Nicaragua, from Guatemala, someone who had to leave bad situations just to try to find something better; you are going to realize that we are just people just like everybody, and all we want is something better for us and for our family. I would want people to stop seeing us as enemies. Evan: We also asked Tchelly, given everything, what does the United States mean to him now? Tchelly: The United States of America still means a better situations for me, because as for my home, it is getting worse every day, and it doesn't really look like I am going to be able to go back anytime soon. I'm trying to keep a positive mindset. The United States, for me right now, stills mean a place where I want to be, where it's still better for me. Evan: That was Tchelly Moise. His story and the strike he helped organize at the JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado, are part of a much larger investigation into the meatpacking industry. It was conducted by journalist Ted Genoways of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Ted has been reporting on conditions at JBS for years. We'll have links to his work at kcrw.com/goodfood. As for Tchelly, Temporary Protected Status for Haitians has now ended. He is still working as a union rep, and like hundreds of thousands of other Haitians living in the US, his future here isn't merely uncertain. Right now, it's at risk. Teresa: This episode comes from our friends at Good Food, a twice-a-week podcast from public radio station KCRW in Los Angeles. Find it anywhere you download podcasts. Reap/Sow is a production of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Our executive producers are Theodore Ross and Tom Laskaway. Our sound engineer is Cody Nelson. Our producer is Milla Douer. I'm your host, Teresa Cotsirilos. Find out more about FERN and donate to support our independent nonprofit reporting at www.thefern.org.