Tyson blames a 75-year cattle low for a zero-notice layoff of 2,500 workers.

…(cont) The reason Tyson gave took considerably longer to build than the layoff took to execute. The U.S. cattle herd sits at its lowest point in 75 years — drought across the American West that climate change made worse, diesel and fertilizer prices climbing as the country went to war with Iran, years of corporate consolidation that had already squeezed the ranchers Tyson buys from. None of that happened between the 13th and the 14th. Calling the shortage real is accurate; calling the timing sudden is malarkey, and a company that tracks drought and diesel prices for a living had the numbers to give notice before it closed the plant, same as it had the numbers to close it.

Some of the 2,500 had worked the floor at Joslin for more than fifteen years — long enough that a warning before the doors closed should have been the least complicated part of the deal. Instead it is the part that went missing, which is the kind of shit a company this size gets away with when the workforce on that floor is mostly immigrant. Caitlyn Clark directs Essential Workers for Democracy and is pushing for democratic reform inside the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents more than a million people doing work like this.

The notice period is preceded in death by the ranchers' profit margins, which corporate consolidation finished off years before anyone in Joslin heard the word "shortage."

In lieu of flowers, Tyson is asked to fund the severance the notice would have covered, and the rest of us are asked to back the workers organizing inside UFCW so the next plant that closes overnight has to explain itself first.