The public did not hear about the worker walkouts at slaughterhouses in Greeley, Colorado, and Monmouth, Illinois, earlier this year for the same reason it does not hear about worker injuries in general in the plants.
Heavy machinery combined with wet floors, sharp knives, and frenzied line speeds makes meat and poultry plants some of the most dangerous workplaces in the U.S. Across industries, an average of 27 U.S. workers a day suffer an amputation or a hospitalization, according to U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data, and meat and poultry companies remain among the most dangerous employers. Food producers, advertisers, and news stations know such information does not sell food; in fact, it does the opposite.
Workers at the Smithfield Foods slaughterhouse in Monmouth walked out in September when, they said, they were told to keep working despite the death of a co-worker in a workplace incident earlier in the day. Safety was also a concern for striking workers at the JBS plant in Greeley, who said they were being charged for their own personal protective equipment.
Three worker deaths between June 2025 and April 2026 at the Smithfield slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina, were also barely reported, including worker Abundio Villa Miranda’s fatal fall into a pit where gas is used to stun hogs in January of this year. Miranda’s death shows that the meat production revelations in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, which led to the U.S.’s Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, still shock.
Real physician voices, twice a week
Free, and one click to unsubscribe.
COVID-19 took a disturbing toll on workers in the U.S.’s tightly packed, unhygienic slaughterhouses. Smithfield Foods closed its Sioux Falls, South Dakota, slaughterhouse after at least 80 workers tested positive for the virus. Workers died from COVID-19 at Tyson’s poultry plant in Camilla, Georgia, and at the aforementioned Greeley plant, according to published reports.
But worker harm, when reported, antedated COVID-19, like the case of Jose Navarro, a federal poultry inspector who died after his lungs bled out, and the progressive inflammatory neuropathy (PIN) disease that affected workers breathing pulverized brain material at Quality Pork Processors in Austin, Minnesota; Indiana Packers Corp. in Delphi, Indiana; and Hormel Foods Corp. in Fremont, Nebraska. PIN led to limb weakness, paralysis, wheelchairs, and hospitalization, and employees protested at the Quality Pork Processors plant in Austin holding signs that said “Hormel and QPP Guilty For Our Disease.” A tuberculosis case was identified at a JBS plant in Louisville, Kentucky.
In 2008, during a campaign stop in Davenport, Iowa, when he was an Illinois senator campaigning for president, Barack Obama said of the notorious Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse, also in Iowa, that it had kids “wielding buzz saws and cleavers,” adding, “It’s ridiculous.” Amputations were common at Agriprocessors, according to the Forward. Even “acronizing,” or routine dunking of chicken into antibiotic baths as reported in the muckraking book Big Chicken, created stubborn and dangerous staph infections on workers’ hands and forearms.
Wholesomeness and residue questions
In the interests of productivity, the speed of kill and production lines continues to increase in U.S. slaughterhouses. In 2022, 26 groups of poultry worker representatives, worker rights advocates, occupational safety experts, animal rights advocates, consumer rights advocates, and public and community health organizations warned government officials that the speeds jeopardize worker safety, food safety, and animal welfare. The fast lines and demotion of federal inspectors to mere figureheads (a Tar Heel employee told me they can seldom “stop the line” because of plant managers) also present food contamination dangers.
In 2008, a “mad cow” scare at the Westland/Hallmark plant in Chino, California, in which downer cattle were processed for sale, shut down the entire operation for good. In 2017, ABC settled a defamation suit brought by Beef Products Inc. over its “pink slime” news coverage of lean finely textured beef, which is treated with ammonia to reduce E. coli; Disney, ABC’s parent company, reported a $177 million charge. Pink slime is still sold in the U.S., now just called ground beef, representing a win for the meat industry. Antibiotic residues given to livestock to prevent disease in cramped conditions are routinely found in meat, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, especially in young and dairy animals and in animal organs. Whether worker injuries or food impurities, the dearth of slaughterhouse news coverage stems from “ag-gag” laws that, in some states, prohibit the filming and transmission of on-site slaughterhouse video footage and even penalize reporters for receiving documentation.
The need for such laws should raise eyebrows, especially for the risks for slaughterhouse workers they hide.
Martha Rosenberg is an investigative reporter whose work has appeared in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Consumer Reports, Public Citizen, the Center for Health Journalism at USC Annenberg, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and other outlets. She studied at Rush Medical School and writes on health care, food, medicine, and public policy.
Rosenberg’s reporting has been cited by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Public Library of Science Biology, ScienceDirect, the Journal of Pain & Palliative Care Pharmacotherapy, the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, Britannica, National Geographic, Hastings Law Journal, and Wikipedia. She is the author of several books, including Multidisciplinary Management of Chronic Pain: A Practical Guide for Clinicians, Born With a Junk Food Deficiency, Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Lies, and Food, Clothes, Men, Gas and Other Problems. She publishes on Substack, OpEdNews, and her Amazon author page.
