JBS Strike Adds Fuel to Growing Worker Strife Over Health Costs

A strike involving mostly immigrant employees at one of the nation’s largest beef packing plants is the latest evidence of expanding worker concerns over rising health-care costs and faltering wages that unions say aren’t keeping up with inflation.

Roughly 3,800 workers affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 at the JBS Swift Beef plant in Greeley, Colo. walked off the job last week in a two-week unfair labor practice strike. The strike has the potential to disrupt the meatpacking industry already in the throes of a cattle shortage and rising production costs.

The work-stoppage represents growing discontent among workers and labor unions over rising costs, particularly with regard to health care where federal cuts have driven up prices. Earlier this year, health-care workers in New York City, California, and Hawaii went on strike in part over high premiums and lagging wages.

“For the last 25 years, many workers have made a trade off, accepting stagnation of wages as long as they have health care that they could afford,” said Patricia Campos-Medina, executive director of the Worker Institute at Cornell University.

“That is no longer the case, health care costs are increasing even in unionized places. So therefore there’s not an offset for not demanding higher wages if the companies are not going to continue to provide affordable health care,” she said.

The US health-care system has been under strain since Affordable Care Act subsidies lapsed at the end of last year and Republican lawmakers cut nearly $1 trillion to Medicaid in President Donald Trump’s signature policy bill.

Those cuts have led to nationwide anxieties over rising costs. Two thirds of surveyed Americans reported worrying about rising health-care costs over groceries and utilities, according to research by KFF released earlier this year.

Negotiations Stalled

The JBS workers walked off the job after the union alleged the company committed unfair labor practices by engaging in regressive bargaining tactics and retaliating against workers. About 99% of workers voted to authorize the strike, according to the UFCW.

The company’s latest offer included wage increases “less than 2% per year on average” which the union said wasn’t sufficient to keep up with the cost of living in Colorado.

The UFCW also said workers on the company’s PPO insurance plan are seeking a rate freeze to prevent JBS from unilaterally raising costs in response to federal cuts.

The company’s current offer puts “all the risk of rising healthcare costs on workers,” UFCW Local 7 president Kim Cordova said in a statement.

At other UFCW plants, some JBS workers who received the same wage increase as the one proposed at the Greeley plant spent more than two-thirds of their annual raise on increased premiums, the union said.

“Health-care costs are largely outside of the employer’s control,” said Rebecca Givan, associate professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University. “But when a huge portion of any negotiated raise is eaten by a health care increase, it doesn’t feel like a raise.”

Work at the JBS plant is also physically demanding and often dangerous, so workers require comprehensive health plans to stave off long-term injuries, said Mathew Shechter, general counsel at UFCW Local 7.

“It is a very dangerous job, most of the workers who remain at the plant for an extended period of time, ultimately when they leave the company’s employment they are leaving with serious debilitating injuries, repetitive stress injuries,” Shechter said. “And sometimes preventing bad health outcomes in the long run is about good health care in the short run.”

Nikki Richardson, head of corporate communications at JBS, said in a statement that the company stood by its latest contract offer, noting that wages at the Greeley plant had increased by about 46% since 2019.

Our contract “is strong, fair, and consistent with the historic national contract reached in 2025 in partnership with UFCW International — an agreement that has already delivered higher wages, secure pension, and long-term financial stability for team members at our major facilities,” Richardson said.

Growing Problem

With premiums expected to continue to rise, those expenses will likely be a key sticking point in future union negotiations and strikes across the country, labor observers said.

About 15,000 nurses in New York City walked off the job earlier this year over allegations that management wanted to cut health benefits, amid other demands. Last week, about 10,000 nurses at a metro Detroit hospital system similarly voted to authorize a strike for higher wages and lower health-care costs.

“There are strains put on the whole health-care industry, which might lead to health care providers charging those with insurance more, which leads to price increases and premium increases and greater strain on unionized employers and the workers who work there,” Givan said.

“It’s a bit of an indirect relationship, and it’s hard to predict exactly what it’ll look like, but one thing we know for sure is that health-care costs aren’t coming down anytime soon.”

And for workers protesting at JBS, the consequences of those rising costs are even more dire, as evidenced by the vulnerable position the meat packing workers are already in, said Harley Shaiken, professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley.

Strikes are typically a last resort for immigrant workers, especially in an era of aggressive federal enforcement, Shaiken said. “This isn’t some marginal thing around the edges, this is deep dissatisfaction.”