Birds fly by the JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colo., one the largest in the world, on Monday, Sept. 9, 2024.
Slaughterhouse Dreaming: Life for Haitian Immigrants Inside the World's Largest Meatpacker
"JBS, the world’s largest meatpacking company, bills itself as the path to the American dream for the immigrants who staff its slaughterhouses and meat-cutting lines," writes Wall Street Journal reporter Patrick Thomas.
"The company erected employee housing near some plants, where as many as 60 languages are spoken, and workers can learn English after hours and take free community-college courses.
Here in Northern Colorado, though, at one of the company’s biggest beef plants, recently arrived workers from Haiti described grim living conditions."
Through moving stills and photographs, I visualized this investigation into living conditions for new JBS employees and the meat processing behemoth's recruitment tactics that found an 'underground recruitment network' ripe for exploitation. I spent time among cattle trucks coming and going outside the Greeley plant, with a former worker, at the rainbow motel, and even further down JBS' massive beef supply chain – McDonald's.
As Thomas continues, "A JBS human-resources supervisor arranged for some of the immigrant workers to stay at the Rainbow Motel, a mile down the road from the plant, where they lived for weeks. They slept on the floor, as many as eight to a room, and cooked meals on hot plates on the carpet. JBS footed the bill.
The supervisor, himself an immigrant from the African nation of Benin, set up others to stay in a five-bedroom, two-bathroom unit he had leased in a house in town. There, too, they slept on floors. At one point, 30 or more people were living there, workers said. When the power went out in the winter, they cooked in their coats. They were charged $60 a week in rent."
Rain drops fall in front of The Rainbow Motel as dusk sets in. Sometimes as many as eight men, women and children would be packed into one room, sharing one bed among three or four people.
JBS workers cross a bridge over the Cache la Poudre River on their way to begin their shifts. Recently arrived workers from Haiti described grim living conditions associated with the meatpacking plant in Northern Colorado.
Trucks full of cattle wait to enter the plant.
Cattle stand in one the many trucks before entering the plant to be killed. More than a dozen current and former Greeley beef plant employees described being treated outside of work like the cattle they were slaughtering.
Dusk falls over one of the houses where newly arrived workers have been placed by Mackenson Remy and Edmond Ebah. Workers in the four-bedroom, two-bedroom complex, which several former residents said had previously housed 30-40 people, marked their places with blankets.
A JBS worker hops on a train as dozens of reefer trailers, used as cold storage for meat, sit parked at the JBS meatpacking plant.
JBS workers come in and out of work at the meatpacking plant’s parking lot. Some 60 languages are spoken by employees at the plant, which heavily relies on immigrant labor.
People order at a McDonald’s drive-through in Brighton, Colo. JBS is one of McDonald's beef suppliers.
An anonymous former JBS employee poses for a portrait outside the plant.
