Josh Funk/AP Photo
Cuts of beef move along a conveyer belt above workers at the Greater Omaha Packing beef processing plant in Omaha, Nebraska, November 2, 2022.
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
As the CEOs of some of the largest corporations in the world tripped over their feet to throw cash at President Trump’s inauguration fund, one outspent the rest: JBS, one of the largest meat processing companies in the country, was the single largest contributor with a colossal $5 million gift. As the Trump administration got under way, we began to see what the other inaugural contributors seemingly hoped to gain from their gifts: JPMorgan Chase was subject to an ongoing FTC price-fixing inquiry that Trump’s admin shut down; Palantir has secured a number of defense contracts; and the crypto industry, which faced a litany of SEC investigations and lawsuits under the Biden administration, is now seeing all oversight efforts drop like flies.
JBS, the biggest contributor toward Trump’s inauguration, has plenty of regulatory hurdles it could use Trump’s help to overcome. The company has long been engaged in sordid monopolist behavior: It has paid over $150 million in settlements over price-fixing allegations, has an extensive list of workplace safety violations too long to summarize, and was charged by the SEC in 2020 for “an extensive bribery scheme that took place over multiple years” during its purchase of Pilgrim’s Pride.
This behavior is, unfortunately, pretty typical for the meatpacking industry, which has spent decades consolidating into just four big meatpacking companies (Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef). Together, these companies control 80 to 85 percent of the beef market, and are dominant across pork and poultry markets as well.
During the Biden administration, the meatpacking industry came under increased scrutiny, including investigations into its high degree of concentration and use of child labor. JBS’s “investment” in Trump’s inauguration will likely benefit not just their company, but the entire industry’s deregulatory agenda. Just witness what Trump’s appointees are already working on.
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In meatpacking, “line speed” refers to how quickly the animals are moved through the process of slaughtering, butchering, and processing. As a rule, companies want to speed it up, while workers—who are doing this grim work with very sharp knives and saws—want to keep it slow, for safety reasons. Sure enough, Trump’s USDA pick Brooke Rollins announced in March that she would be extending line speed increase waivers granted to poultry and pork processing plants. At the same time, she announced that the USDA will immediately begin to write a rule codifying maximum line speed increases for plants beyond the waiver system.
Trade associations representing the Big Four have engaged in a protracted lobbying effort for the changes, as increasing production speed obviously increases meatpacker profits. The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) applauded Rollins’s announcement, citing their consistent push for line speed increases since 2019, and claiming they look forward to “continued engagement with Secretary Rollins and FSIS to increase NSIS line speed adoption at additional plants.” The NPPC has a formal partnership with Cargill, and executives from the largest pork producers, such as Clemens and Smithfield, are board members.
Similar to the NPCC, the Meat Institute has also been forward in urging Brooke Rollins to finalize the new rules for poultry and pork processing. The industry association is known to hire high-ranking USDA officials, revolving out of the agency into lucrative jobs at the Meat Institute—a problem that has undermined the USDA’s ability to aggressively enforce its regulatory authority.
Only a week after Trump was inaugurated, the Meat Institute sent an open letter to the president providing him with suggestions for meat industry regulations to throw in the trash. The suggestions included rollbacks to the USDA’s enforcement of the Packers and Stockyards Act, such as repealing a recent rule prohibiting discrimination and deceptive practices enabled by high corporate concentration.
Big Meat preys on some of the most marginalized workers for its aggressive exploitation.
On the other hand, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), the largest union representing meat workers, has denounced Rollins’s moves to weaken line speed regulations: “Increased line speeds will hurt workers—it’s not a maybe, it’s a definite—and increased production speeds will jeopardize the health and safety of every American that eats chicken.”
The pork processing plant waiver extensions are part of a drawn-out implementation of a rule finalized during Trump’s first term known as the New Swine Inspection System (NSIS). The NSIS allowed meat companies to reduce the number of independent federal inspectors on the processing line, instead replacing them with company-employed inspectors, who are not required to receive federal training, and who would have to go through their bosses if they want to enforce safety measures that often incur high costs. Simultaneously, the rule got rid of speed limits entirely.
The implications for food safety of an accelerated and self-regulated meatpacking process are clear. Scaling down the number of independent federal inspectors while increasing line speeds makes it more likely they will miss contaminants, such as feces, sex organs, toenails, bladders, and hair, as well as bacteria such as E.coli, salmonella, and campylobacter.
Indeed, when Trump’s USDA finalized the swine rule changes in 2019, former federal inspectors blew the whistle, warning that the company-employed inspectors had little experience and were doing minimal inspections “in an effort to maintain line speeds and keep plant owners happy.”
To make matters worse, Brooke Rollins has already implemented additional regulatory changes suggested by the Meat Institute that weaken food safety. She withdrew a proposed rule that required poultry companies to keep salmonella bacteria under a designated threshold while also testing their meat for six particularly dangerous strains.
For workers, it will likely be even worse. Federal regulations have long focused most attention on food sanitation standards, because of how tainted food seizes public attention, while neglecting the safety of workers. Emboldened by their concentrated economic power, meatpackers have already become infamous for abusive factory conditions that violate their workers’ human rights, and the Trump administration seems primed to look the other way.
Even though Rollins’s USDA claims that line spread increases are safe for workers, the extensive studies done on the topic show that the opposite is true. The agency’s own trials show that faster speeds increase the risk of “developing carpal tunnel syndrome and other crippling upper extremity disorders.” Almost every meat worker who spoke to Human Rights Watch in 2019 said that increased line speeds are dangerous—which is backed up by “decades of research that has found that rapid work speeds compound the highly repetitive, forceful movements required by meat and poultry slaughtering and processing work and increase the risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders.”
In swine slaughterhouses, hog carcasses are suspended above a conveyor belt while workers have to quickly slice or package the cuts as the line moves along—with current line speed caps, workers perform each cut in about three seconds, 8,848 times a day. Poultry and cattle processing facilities have a similar structure. Even under capped line speeds, worker deaths and serious injuries occur often—an average of 27 meatpacking workers have to get amputations or are hospitalized every day. In 2023, a 16-year-old Guatemalan immigrant was sanitizing machines at a poultry plant when the machine pulled him into its gears and killed him. A worker at a Colorado JBS plant that same year died after he fell into a chemical vat used to process animal hides. Another JBS worker had his arm ripped off by a conveyor belt in 2021, and others have had their fingers crushed.
Meat workers are often intimidated to keep the speed up, afraid to stand up to their bosses to slow things down even when exhaustion sets in and their knives get dull. In fact, line speeds are so strict that 80 percent of workers have reported not being able to use the bathroom when needed, with some workers testifying that people are even forced to soil themselves to keep working.
Many of these workers are children. In February 2023, the Department of Labor found that JBS, Cargill, and Tyson all contracted a cleaning service that employed over 80 children at meatpacking facilities across the country. Some of the children were as young as 13, and they worked overnight shifts in slaughterhouses using hazardous chemicals to clean jagged processing equipment designed to rip through flesh. Tyson didn’t seem to learn their lesson, since additional federal court records unsealed in 2024 showed the company was being investigated for employing minors under the age of 16 at two plants in Arkansas.
In general, Big Meat preys on some of the most marginalized workers for its aggressive exploitation. Somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of the workers in the meat industry are undocumented, with Latin Americans making up about two-thirds of that segment. Additionally, many workers are displaced refugees or asylees who would be affected by Trump’s threats to end Temporary Protected Status. The industry’s support for Trump despite his stated plan to deport such a significant segment of the workforce is no mistake. His administration’s systemic denial of these workers’ human rights makes them more vulnerable to some of the most predatory kinds of exploitation. Not only are workers who live in fear of federal agents storming their homes and putting them in handcuffs easier to scare away from forming unions, but they are more likely to put up with wage theft, dangerous workplaces, grotesque injuries, harassment, and countless other abuses. Better keep quiet, or the boss will call ICE.
In a sense, we are returning to the status quo of a century ago. When the Packers and Stockyards Act was written in 1921, just five companies controlled meat markets: Swift, Armour, Cudahy, Wilson, and Morris. Armour was the real-life inspiration for Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, an infamous 1906 work of muckraker journalism that horrified the public with its vivid descriptions of children being crammed into dangerous machinery and workers falling into vats before coming out the other end packed into cans. When President Theodore Roosevelt dispatched investigators to see if the plants were as bad as the book depicted, they came back attesting that they were even worse.
Conditions improved somewhat thanks to subsequent regulations, but not nearly enough. Now, with Trump in charge, openly embracing corporate money and installing industry stooges at the regulators, and fleets of ICE agents ready to deport any meat worker who puts a toe out of line, they’re going to get worse. Just like in the 1920s, you might think twice before eating a burger in this country, lest you end up inadvertently committing cannibalism.
