Meatpacking workers are on strike for the first time in four decades. These are people standing in freezing plants for ten hours a day dismembering animals at line speeds that would make an ER doctor flinch, and they finally said enough. Meanwhile the companies posting record margins on your $9 ground beef can’t be bothered to negotiate in good faith. The last time meatpackers walked out, Reagan was president. It took forty years of getting ground down for these workers to hit the breaking point again.
And where’s the coverage? Wall Street gets a live ticker for every quarter-point rate adjustment, but thousands of workers walking off the line in one of the most dangerous industries in America barely cracks the news cycle. SpaceX and Amazon are literally trying to get the NLRB declared unconstitutional so they never have to deal with a union election again. Billionaires lawyering the right to organize out of existence while meatpackers bleed for poverty wages in silence. If you’re not paying attention to labor right now, you’re missing the only story that actually matters.