“ICE Took Half Their Work Force. What Do They Do Now?”

Eli Saslow reported for the New York Times that: “For more than a decade, Glenn Valley[ Foods was] … one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. But, in a matter of weeks, production … plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone” – courtesy of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) worksite enforcement action (or, perjoratively, “raid”) in June.

Glenn Valley’s owner exclaimed in exasperation that “[t]here are some jobs Americans don’t want to do” and “[i]t’s a wipeout[!]” Cue the Ventures. The article’s headline writer invoked an existential crisis – “the company is wondering how it can keep going”. In defense of Glenn Valley, Saslow proclaimed that it “paid well, with an average hourly wage of almost $20 and regular bonuses”, but tellingly also felt compelled to acknowledge that “the work was repetitive and demanding”, involving operating “dangerous machinery in a cold factory”.

First, let me note that $20 an hour is about average for meatpackers nationwide, with a national median hourly wage for slaughterers and meatpackers of $19.13 in 2024, translating into a yearly wage of $39,790 ($40,866 in 2025 dollars). But that wage rate is 41 percent less than it was in 1980 ($8.49 an hour/$17,659 a year ($69,635 in 2025 dollars) – and wages started their free fall long before 1980.

And therein lies the rub. In 2009, journalist Jerry Kammer, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that “the meat packing industry has lost its status as a source of well-paid jobs in the blue collar middle class that flourished in our country after World War II” because, “[b]eginning in the 1960s, the industry was transformed by a series of cost-cutting measures.”

Kammer explained in a report for the Center for Immigration Studies that: 

In 1960, meatpacking workers, heavily urbanized and unionized, earned 15 percent more than the average manufacturing wage in the United States.

During the next decade, however, corporate leaders…. relocated processing plants to rural areas—closer to livestock supplies and farther from organized labor’s urban strongholds. They replaced skilled butchers with less-skilled workers who made the same repetitive cuts thousands of times a day on the “disassembly line.” They slashed wages, so that by 2002 workers were earning 25 percent less than the average manufacturing wage.

Th[e] system created incentives for managers to increase the speed of the line, aggravating the physical and emotional stress of the job and making the industry one of the most dangerous in the U.S. economy.

William Whittaker, Specialist in Labor Economics in the Domestic Social Policy Division of the Congressional Research Service (CRS), concluded that the genesis for this transformation can be traced to “two veteran packinghouse executives, Currier Holman and Andy Anderson”:

In the late 1950s, [they] reassessed conditions in the beef packing industry. “Why should meat companies,” they queried, “remain wage-locked in heavily unionized cities when unorganized workers could be hired at far lower wages out in the country?” In March 1960, having accepted their own challenge, Holman and Anderson set up a new company: Iowa Beef Packers, Inc. — later, just IBP.

What was the inevitable result of this transformation of meat packing from a high wage to a low wage occupation? Whittaker came to the obvious conclusion that “[w]hen operating a labor-intensive facility in a sparsely populated area, labor scarcity might be anticipated.” He elaborated that:

If an employer has determined, in so far as possible, to work union-free (and to avoid hiring workers with trade union backgrounds), that might further reduce the pool from which a firm can recruit. The recruiting process may be further limited (and focused) by a policy of payment of low wages for work that is unpleasant, dirty, and dangerous. If recruitment for such jobs is directed toward persons of limited work experience, few marketable skills, and slight English language proficiency, then a demographic shift may not be unexpected. In pursuit of such a strategy, critics suggest, firms “deliberately recruit … immigrants” who “almost universally lack any knowledge of U.S. working conditions, labor practices, or of their legal rights.”

Kammer concluded in his CIS report that:

At the same time as compensation deteriorated dramatically, the share of meatpackers who are immigrants has increased enormously…. [A]ny suggestion that native-born Americans are not interested in this type of work cannot be taken seriously given the huge decline in average hourly wages for these jobs. 

Labor historian Roger Horowitz has noted that as unions lost power, wages fell, and working conditions deteriorated, the industry “drew on workers with limited job options, especially immigrants and those without the resources or skills to find more desirable employment.” 

[T]here is no question that the jobs paid a great deal more a generation ago when the vast majority of workers were native-born. There is also no question that as the foreign born share of this workforce has increased, wages have fallen significantly. The desirability of any job is heavily dependent on compensation. 

In his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Kammer pointed out that at Smithfield’s pork plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina:

There is strong evidence that the company had a preference for illegal immigrants because they were more likely to accept low wages and poor conditions and they were vulnerable to what a federal court called the company’s “intense and widespread coercion” aimed at defeating the union’s organizing efforts. 

In fact, according to Wade Baker, an African American who had earlier worked at the plant: “They started hiring Mexicans to help beat the union[.] They would fire blacks for penny-ante things because they knew there were lots of Mexicans ready to come to work. And they knew they could control the Mexicans and make them afraid to vote for the union.”

CRS’s Whittaker explained that:

Some have argued that work involving “blood, unpleasant odors and repetitive tasks, is not attractive” to U.S. workers. But other factors including low wages, high line speeds, little job security, rural-sited facilities, and diminished union protection may also make domestic recruitment difficult. “A decline in wage levels,” together with other workplace considerations, [Michael] Broadway says, “… has served to make meatpacking an unattractive employment option for many Americans.”

“If the job were ‘decent,’” some critics argue, “they would willingly do it.” 

In practice, immigrants (and aliens unauthorized to work in the United States) constitute an almost “inexhaustible supply” of low-wage labor. In this view, once employers become accustomed to the “flow of new immigrants,” they may continue to recruit them — often at the expense of “native workers” and of less recent immigrants…. [Edna] Bonacich concludes that “availability of a ‘cheap labor’ alternative” has enabled employers “to avoid improving the job and raising wages.” 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. As a case study, let’s look at what happened following ICE worksite enforcement actions in December 2006 at six Swift & Co. meat processing plants in six states. Jerry Kammer noted that: “After the raids Swift had to curtail production for a time. A company official said that it took four months to resume full production at the two pork plants, and five months at the four beef plants.”

What did Swift do to return to full production so quickly? Jerry Kammer told the House Judiciary Committee that “To replenish its depleted ranks, Swift launched a campaign to recruit American citizens, green card holders, and refugees. It raised wages, provided bonuses to new workers, and paid relocation expenses.”

Kammer elaborated in his CIS report:

Swift implemented a multi-pronged strategy…. increase[ing] wages and offer[ing] bonuses both to workers who recruited others and to newcomers who stayed on the job for specified periods of time. It opened recruiting offices in the Texas border towns of El Paso and McAllen and sent recruiting teams across the Plains States. It bought newspaper, radio, and television advertising, particularly in Spanish-language media…. 

Swift … launched a major transportation initiative. The Cactus[, Texas] plant, which had the greatest difficulty in rebuilding its workforce, dispatched buses to bring workers from Amarillo, 60 miles south. Swift also dispatched buses from its Worthington, Minn., plant to shuttle workers the 55 miles from Sioux Falls, S.D. 

All the Swift plants began drawing more refugees … who had been living elsewhere in the United States.

Overall, wages increased … 7.7 percent on average.

Let’s also look at what happened at Smithfield’s Tar Heel plant. In his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Kammer noted that:

The 2007 raids at Tar Heel removed many illegal workers. Vacancies were soon filled by blacks, who were less subject to intimidation by the company and more likely to favor affiliation with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which the company fought for years. As local newspapers noted, the demographic shift in the workforce after the raids was a key factor in the 2008 victory of the union in a vote at the plant. 

And my colleague Mark Krikorian testified before the House Judiciary Committee in 2011 that:

As a result of the departure of more than 1,500 illegal workers, mostly Hispanics, local black Americans were able to find jobs at the plant again, as they had when it opened in 1992 before they were slowly but steadily replaced with illegal workers from Latin America. The black American share of workforce climbed from just 20 percent before the raids to 60 percent afterwards.

This all goes to reinforce what Kammer reported that he “was frequently told by current and former Swift workers, these are jobs Americans are willing to do – if they are provided decent wages and working conditions.”

But won’t “go[ing] back to when a meatpacking job was one of the most prized jobs in industry”, in the words of a United Food and Commercial Workers official, slam consumers with higher meat prices? Glenn Valley’s Human Resources Director seems to think so, telling the New York Times that “I’ve seen whole companies go under after a raid. The supply chain stalls. Beef prices go up. Consumers pay more.” 

But, as Kammer concluded in his 2009 report for CIS:

[A] 1999 paper by economists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture[] showed that labor represented 8.3 percent of the production cost of beef…. not includ[ing] markup at the retail level…. In pork production, labor represented about 11 percent of total production costs….

In general, retail outlets mark up meat and pork about 20 percent. This means that, on average, 6.9 percent of the retail cost of beef and 9.2 percent of the retail cost of pork are the result of wages and benefits paid to production workers…. [I]f wages were increased for production workers by one-third the average rise in retail prices for meat would be 2.3 and 3 percent, respectively. This assumes that all of the increase in compensation was passed on to consumers.

Here is some news that’s fit to print: We don’t have to continue to allow America’s immigration policy to butcher the wages and job opportunities of American meatpackers.