The CPUSA Labor Commission proudly stands in solidarity with the 3,800 members of UFCW Local 7 on strike at the JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado. It is the first major meatpacking strike in 40 years since a bitter strike against Hormel in 1985.

These workers, the vast majority of which are immigrants, are fighting not just for a better contract but for their very dignity and safety. They have rejected JBS’s decades-long strategy of recruiting a vulnerable workforce precisely so they can impose poverty wages, dangerous speed-ups, and brutal conditions without resistance. The company bet that immigrant workers would keep their heads down out of fear. Instead, they are out in the front and leading the picket lines.

We cannot ignore the weaponization of anti-immigrant hysteria in this fight. JBS has systematically exploited workers’ immigration status as a tool of control—charging them for safety gear, denying bathroom breaks, and retaliating against those who speak up. This is a textbook example of capitalism’s strategy that relies on the threat of deportation and racism to generate fear, precarity, and heightened exploitation which undermines all workers.

The meatpackers’ strike is a direct challenge to that fear. The same monopoly that has paid millions in settlements for price-fixing and even employed children as young as 13 in its plants now faces a unified, multiracial workforce saying: enough!

The workers at the center of this fight are showing the entire labor movement that immigrant workers are not a threat to living standards—they are our sisters and brothers in the fight for a better life for all workers.

We call on every worker, organized or unorganized, and the whole labor community to rally behind these strikers. Send your support, honor their picket lines, and spread their story.

Image: Day 2 of the UFCW Local 7 strike at JBS Foods. UFCW Local 7 on X.