JBS Workers to Strike over Unfair labor Practices beginning March 16, 2026
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 9, 2026
CONTACT: Carla Wyatt | cwyatt@ufcw7.com | 303.425.0897 ext. 410
JBS WORKERS ANNOUNCE STRIKE
JBS Workers to Strike over Unfair labor Practices beginning March 16, 2026
UFCW Local 7 will begin an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) Strike at the JBS owned Swift Beef plant at 5:30 a.m. on Monday, March 16, 2026. Workers hoped that the recent bargaining session would have led to a breakthrough in negotiations with JBS, but instead JBS sent the workers a clear message that the Company is putting profits ahead of its people.
The Union’s member-led bargaining committee has met more than two dozen times with the Company in an effort to reach a mutually agreeable contract. JBS is failing to listen to the 99% of its workers who authorized a ULP strike. The Company needs to give them an offer that takes life saving safety equipment seriously, provides wages which meet the rising cost of living in Colorado and ensures rising health care costs do not consume workers’ wages. The Company committed numerous Unfair Labor Practices which are preventing an agreement. The Company continues to threaten to withhold both a proposed bonus and lump-sum pension payment if workers strike. The Company also retaliated against workers who have stood up for their rights and co-workers.
JBS workers absolutely deserve wage increases that keep pace with inflation, that support their health, that protect their retirement, and that allow the workers to work with dignity and respect. Instead, JBS has been charging many workers $1,100 or more in order to offset the Company’s expenses for life-saving equipment needed to ensure worker safety. JBS is continuing to propose wage increases of less than 2% per year on average, hardly enough to pay for the increased cost of living and insufficient to cover increases to healthcare premiums. For some UFCW represented plants across the country, employees who need family healthcare coverage were forced to spend approximately $0.22 of the $0.30 annual raise they received this year just to cover the rise in health care premiums.
Perhaps this effort to suppress wages nationwide is why JBS recently paid a reported $55 million to settle allegations that JBS and the other major players in the beef industry were colluding to lower workers’ wages. Even more telling, the difference between the Union’s wage offer and the Company’s Last, Best, and Final offer was an average of approximately $30,000 per week for the entire plant over the life of the agreement. This sum pales in comparison to the profits for JBS’s flagship plant.
UFCW Local 7 President Kim Cordova, the Union’s chief spokesperson, stated, “The goal of negotiations is never to go on strike, but when the Company violates workers’ rights and ignores workers’ concerns about safety and health, the Company give workers no choice but to stand together in solidarity and show the Company that they cannot be silenced.”
###
Local 7, the largest private-sector Union in Colorado, is affiliated with United Food and Commercial Workers International Union which represents over 1.3 million workers in the United States and Canada and is one of the largest private-sector Unions in North America. UFCW members work in a wide range of industries, including retail food, food processing, agriculture, retail sales, and health care.