Gloria Ortiz’s parents spotted a sign one day looming over the fields of strawberries in California’s Central Coast. It was announcing $11-an-hour wages for meatpacking in Iowa. They had been picking strawberries for $35 a day.
“So we came from Santa Maria, California, to this town, for Tyson,” Ortiz says.
Her parents took jobs at the Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Columbus Junction, Iowa, in 1994, just as the meatpacking industry was in a race to the bottom. In the 1980s, meatpacking companies had begun vertically integrating their operations to control the whole supply chain, from the farmers who raise the animals to the workers who kill them and package the meat. Companies shuttered plants in union strongholds like Chicago (famously dubbed “Hog Butcher for the World’’ by Carl Sandburg), Omaha, Neb., and Kansas City, Mo., to flock to low-wage outposts like Columbus Junction in right-to-work states. There, the industry could hold off union drives and take over bankrupt farms.
Companies recruited immigrants, mostly undocumented, to work the nonunion plants. Wages and benefits plummeted while injuries soared. Human Rights Watch, in its 2004 report on meatpacking industry abuses, “Blood, Sweat and Fear,” details how meatpacking transformed from an industry in which “workers had secure organizations bargaining on their behalf to one where self-organization is a high-risk gauntlet for workers.” Meanwhile, union density in the industry fell from 90 percent in 1952 to 33...
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