“NORTH PLATTE, Neb. -- Angela Jones feels fortunate to have landed a job at the new meatpacking plant in this stagnant prairie town she's long called home. She earns $24.50 an hour -- far more than she made as a convenience-store clerk, custodian or construction flagger -- and has health insurance for the first time in over 20 years.
But she's also felt stress learning her quality-control duties, such as scrutinizing meat cuts moving down the line and ensuring workers properly sanitize their tools. Days before the May opening, she confided her concerns to the human resources and safety manager, who tried to buck her up with a pep talk.
"I just don't want to disappoint the company," Jones, 58, said from under her yellow hard hat. "Or myself."
A similar mix of optimism and nervousness grips North Platte as the roughly $400 million Sustainable Beef operation roars to life.
For decades, this old railroad hub was stuck. Some employers departed, Union Pacific cut rail-yard positions and young people fled. Now, officials are pinning their hopes on a slaughterhouse, which promises an economic jolt but represents a risky bet and a crucial question: Will Americans work there?
"We needed to do something to stay relevant," said Pete Volz, a city council member. "Sustainable Beef was the catalyst."
Opportunity and hope have ebbed away in parts of rural America, including North Platte, as farming has declined and economic dynamism has concentrated in urban centers.
Taking matters into their own hands, North Platte leaders have embraced an industry that has long conjured images of bloody, hazardous working conditions while supplying products for American dinner tables. The company believes the gleaming plant will appeal to locals who never would have considered doing such work.
Nationwide, over half of all front-line meatpacking workers are immigrants, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and turnover is high.
Steep challenges loom. Sustainable Beef is taking on the Big Four meatpackers -- JBS, Tyson Foods, Cargill and National Beef -- that control 85% of the beef industry. Cattle herd sizes have hit a 75-year low.
And President Trump's immigration crackdown is targeting the backbone of an industry known for some of America's most-grueling jobs.
Among other policy shifts, the administration ended a parole program that authorized residency and work for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, nations that provide an estimated 10% to 20% of the meat industry's workforce.
Migrants are moving to the town anyway -- unsettling some longtime residents. Fear of rising crime is a common refrain. Amy Minor, a bartender who lives near the plant, recently bought a gun, "because I don't know who's coming," she said.
Sustainable Beef has tried to lure local workers, including Americans such as Jones, with starting pay of $22 an hour -- about $46,000 a year -- on par with average wages locally. The facility's single daytime shift lets employees attend their children's sports games after work. The company touts ergonomic work stands and individual lockers -- even the plentiful toilets are an upgrade from typical meat plants.
"This isn't the same old meatpacking plant!" its hiring ads promise. The implicit pitch: In a city that is 85% non-Hispanic white, this work isn't just for immigrants. Whether locals step up remains uncertain, especially on the production floor where knife workers slice cattle into cuts.
Like many rural states, Nebraska faces persistent labor shortages, as workers age out or leave. Small towns struggle to diversify their economies, leaving them vulnerable to industry downturns.
Sustainable Beef, a concrete behemoth the size of 10 football fields just off Interstate 80, aims to process 1,500 head of cattle daily, with most of the beef going to Walmart, an investor in the project. The plant expects to hire about 850 workers by year's end, which would make it the city's third-largest private employer. Ancillary businesses such as trucking and food services, by some estimates, could yield 1,200 more jobs -- if the slaughterhouse survives.
Sustainable Beef's story began six years ago in a Hanoi bar, where rancher Rusty Kemp joined Nebraska's then-Gov. Pete Ricketts on an Asia trade mission. Kemp groused about cattle prices cratering after a fire shut down a Tyson plant in Kansas. Ricketts, a Republican who is now a U.S. senator, said he urged him to challenge the Big Four.
Kemp recruited other cattlemen for the venture during the pandemic. At that time, short-staffed meatpackers were accepting fewer cattle, creating a glut that hurt prices and ranchers' bottom lines.
Finding a location presented a challenge. Another western Nebraska city had rejected a different plant proposal over concerns about immigrant labor, said David Briggs, Sustainable Beef's chief executive.
But North Platte officials got wind of Sustainable Beef's proposal and saw an opportunity. In August 2020, they made a hard sell to win the plant during a meeting with the project's investors. Led by Chamber of Commerce Chief Executive Gary Person, they pitched a city-owned site -- a dry sewage lagoon -- and local and state incentives that would eventually top $50 million.
"Our strategy was to convince this group to spend millions of dollars on this giant old shithole, and we had to be convincing," Person recalled.
The founders were sold. And the location in Nebraska's sandhills made sense: about 13% of all U.S. beef is processed within 200 miles.
In early 2021, the city and Sustainable Beef went public with what Mayor Brandon Kelliher declared "an economic opportunity like we have not seen for many, many, many years."
Some residents spoke out against the proposal. "It's just too many things that are iffy," Jim Jackson said at a City Council meeting. "What's that going to do to the crime rate that we have now?"
Others supported it. Kelle Dikeman said she commuted 35 miles for work because North Platte had so few options. "This Sustainable Beef project is a boon for our town," she told the council.
Even critics agreed North Platte needs more jobs and less reliance on Union Pacific, which established the city in 1866. After World War II, the railroad expanded its operations and developed the world's largest classification rail yard, where trains are sorted and routed across the U.S. Employment peaked at around 3,000 in the 1970s, said Jim Griffin, director of the county historical museum.
While Union Pacific remains the city's largest private employer, its ranks have thinned to between 1,700 and 2,000, Person said. The railroad declined to give job numbers. Other big employers include a health system with 1,300 employees and a Walmart distribution center with about 600 workers.
Overall, employment in the North Platte area is down 20% since 2008, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The city's population over that period fell from around 24,000 to about 22,500 last year, lower than 1990 levels, Census Bureau data show.
"We had to do something that was going to stimulate the economy here," Person said, "and give people hope."
Hanging over the project from the start was a central question: Who would fill the jobs at Sustainable Beef, and how would these workers change the community?
Company officials have said the operation would attract a few hundred laborers already living in a 60-mile radius. That includes Lexington, home to a large meatpacking plant that opened in 1990, run by Tyson.
Some North Platte residents view Lexington as a cautionary tale. Serious crime soared countywide during a 10-year period that straddled the opening, according to a 1998 Government Accountability Office report examining the impact of two dozen meatpacking plants in Nebraska and Iowa. The report said police officials attributed some of the increased crime to plant workers, though people who committed crimes weren't tracked by their place of employment. Once mostly white, Lexington is now 65% Hispanic.
North Platte leaders have prepared for an influx. The city is offering developers incentives to build housing, and up to 2,000 units are in the pipeline. Schools are boosting English as a Second Language instruction. The police department has outfitted officers with portable translation devices.
"Will there be changes? Yep, probably so. But we're just going to have to adapt," North Platte Police Chief Steve Reeves said.
Aidelin Milian recently landed a job on Sustainable Beef's production line after a multiyear journey from Cuba. After leaving the island in 2019, she worked in Uruguay, then trekked with her husband across South America, through Panama's Darien Gap and on to Mexico. They presented themselves at the border, and after a brief detention, were released. They petitioned for political asylum, obtained work permits and later filed for permanent residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act. The couple first headed to Miami, then drove to Nebraska two years later. They found work at Tyson in Lexington and saved up to buy a trailer in North Platte, which they found more desirable. The trailer happened to be near Sustainable Beef, and both work there now, as do Milian's two sisters, a brother-in-law and a nephew.
She describes the plant as far better than the Tyson one -- brand new, with a dining area just off the production floor, nice lockers and restrooms "like in a hotel."
"I left Cuba with the dream of having a better future, and I've achieved it," said Milian, 30. "I'm not leaving here."
Jones, the quality-control worker, didn't strike those who know her as the meatpacking type. She's an animal lover who buries earthworms after it rains. Friends joked she would try to free the cattle. She also heard worries about how the plant would tarnish North Platte, where she has lived since age 10.
But Jones saw the job as financially attractive and a good way to supplement her husband's income as an auto detailer. She can enroll in a 401(k) after a year.
The new facility is airier and more spacious than typical meatpacking plants, many of which came online in the 1960s. It provides workers with more space and reduces movements that can cause strain -- one of its employment ads touts "no overhead throwing."
Unlike traditional plants with dual shifts that require some employees to work late into the night, Sustainable Beef said it wanted to promote quality of life and family time for its workers, so it operates on a single, daytime shift.
It has sparkling stainless steel equipment and features technology to maximize the meat taken off a carcass and track workers' efficiency.
Keenan Taylor, who is white, took a job at Sustainable Beef as a forklift driver. He works in a warehouse, chilled to around 35 degrees, moving boxes of beef. He recalls tense arguments with fellow North Platte residents who griped about minorities arriving to work at the meatpacking operation.
"All of these locals that want to complain, 'Oh, it's all going to be Mexicans,' I have no nice words to say other than stop being lazy, go get your hands dirty and stop saying it's somebody else's job to do," said Taylor, 31.
Some of his acquaintances have complained they have grown kids living at home not earning enough. He suggested they apply at Sustainable Beef. "Their response was, that's beneath them. That's a dirty job for immigrants," he said.
Sustainable Beef leaders said they are confident they can fill the jobs, having received more than 2,000 applications. They are ramping up slowly and have brought on more than 400 workers so far, close to half their goal. But industrywide, anxiety is mounting.
A recent ICE raid at a meat-processor in Omaha -- even though it used the government's E-Verify program to confirm employment eligibility -- caused employees to stay home at other plants. Sustainable Beef also uses E-Verify.
Trump's actions to end certain immigration programs and work authorizations are expected to reduce the available workforce and raise costs.” [A]
How the jobs become fit only to immigrants? You hire people for low pay. No brainer. It is lucrative. To explain low the pay, you treat people like animals: Not enough dirty bathrooms, dangerous work conditions, night shifts… Sure, locals don’t go there.
These observations touch upon some complex and challenging aspects of the labor market and the experiences of immigrant workers.
The life of those who are undocumented or on certain temporary work visas is particularly challenging:
1. Economic Incentives and Exploitation:
Low Wages and "Undesirable" Jobs: Industries like agriculture, construction, and hospitality often have jobs that involve demanding physical labor, night shifts, and exposure to challenging conditions. Some of these positions offer relatively low pay, which may be unattractive to many native-born workers with other options.
Immigrant Workers' Vulnerability: Immigrants, particularly those who are undocumented or on certain temporary work visas, may face additional vulnerabilities. They might have less knowledge of labor laws, limited English proficiency, and fear of deportation, which can be exploited by unscrupulous employers.
Employers' Motivations: Some employers may knowingly hire undocumented immigrants to reduce labor costs and increase profits, sometimes operating outside legal labor laws. This practice can involve wage theft, denial of benefits, and unsafe working conditions.
2. Unequal Treatment and Discrimination:
Fear of Retaliation: Immigrant workers, especially those with precarious immigration status, may be hesitant to report workplace violations or unsafe conditions due to the fear of employer retaliation or deportation.
Limited Access to Justice: Undocumented workers may face barriers in seeking legal assistance or reporting exploitation due to their status and lack of access to federally funded legal services.
Language and Cultural Barriers: Difficulty communicating or understanding workplace rules and safety procedures can put immigrant workers at higher risk of injury or exploitation.
3. Economic Realities and Labor Market Dynamics:
Competition and Complementarity: Immigrants can contribute to economic growth and employment, but their impact on wages for native-born workers can vary. Some studies suggest they can slightly raise average wages, while others point to potential wage declines for less-educated workers.
Important Considerations:
Labor Laws and Worker Protections: It's crucial to note that labor laws apply to all workers, regardless of immigration status. However, enforcement can be challenging, particularly for vulnerable workers.
Complex Motivations: While some employers exploit immigrant workers, others may hire them out of necessity to fill labor gaps because they have specialized skills.
Focus on Policy and Enforcement: Addressing the exploitation of immigrant workers requires strengthening labor protections, improving enforcement of labor laws, and potentially creating legal pathways for immigrants to work in the United States.
It's important to differentiate between illegal hiring practices and the broader issue of immigrants working in low-wage sectors. While the latter reflects economic realities and labor market demands, the former involves unethical behavior that harms both immigrant workers and the broader economy.
A. Meatpacking Plant's Pitch To Attract American Workers --- Nebraska factory has ergonomic stations, no night shift as immigration crackdown threatens traditional labor force. Calvert, Scott; Campo-Flores, Arian; Thomas, Patrick. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 24 June 2025: A1.
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