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Last week, Tyson Foods announced it will close its massive beef plant in Lexington, Nebraska, a facility that directly employs roughly 3,000–3,200 workers in a town of about 11,000 people.
The closure is scheduled to take effect on or around January 20, 2026, according to the company’s WARN notice to the Nebraska Department of Labor. Workers have been told that they have no guaranteed transfers, meaning these are essentially permanent job losses.
Built in 1990 and later acquired by Tyson, the plant has been an economic backbone of the city, employing a significant portion of the local workforce. Its ability to slaughter up to 5,000 heads of cattle per day—about 5 percent of total US capacity—turned Lexington into a crucial node in the beef supply chain.
The impact will have devastating consequences for workers and for the community of Lexington, creating a chain reaction in which other small businesses depending on these workers will suffer as well. Workers and their families will be forced to uproot themselves in search of new jobs.
The layoffs come on the heels of a massive jobs slaughter that has seen hundreds of thousands of jobs destroyed at UPS, Amazon and more.
Slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants are among the most dangerous and deadliest workplaces in the United States. A study published this year by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that 81 percent of poultry workers were at high risk of developing musculoskeletal injuries. In 2023, the Economic Policy Institute reported an average of 27 workers a day suffer amputation or hospitalization, according to new OSHA data from 29 states.
In addition, many workers are often immigrants—in some cases, undocumented—because these are the only jobs available to them. They face the dual threat of injuries inside the plant and the danger of being kidnapped and disappeared by ICE on the outside.
Tyson has been carrying out a series of plant closures and mass layoffs across the country. In 2024, the company announced the closure of its pork plant in Perry, Iowa—a small town on the outskirts of Des Moines—resulting in the loss of over 1,200 jobs, one-eighth of Perry’s population of approximately 8,000. In 2023, Tyson Foods announced it would close four chicken plants across the country between late 2023 and early 2024, cutting 3,000 jobs.
Despite claiming its beef division is under financial pressure, Tyson Foods is still one of the biggest and most profitable meat companies in the world. In 2025, the company brought in $54.4 billion in sales and made more than $2.2 billion in operating income, mostly from its chicken and prepared-foods businesses.
The announcement is inseparable from broader political and economic forces. Although Tyson has not pointed to Trump’s nationalist tariff policy as the cause of the Lexington shutdown, recent shifts in federal trade posture, including moves that would expand access for cheaper imported beef from countries, such as Brazil and Argentina, intersect with a domestic market straining under soaring beef production costs. Retail beef prices have risen sharply, with prices up over 13 percent for ground beef and 16 percent for steaks over the past year.
The plant is non-unionized. However, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), whose members include thousands of meatpacking workers, sought to blame foreign workers by declaring: “This decision also raises serious questions about our national priorities. The Administration and Congress should be working to strengthen these workers and their communities by boosting production here at home. Instead, our leaders are flirting with importing beef from Argentina and unleashing tariffs that cut off foreign markets to American beef, pork, and chicken. Meatpacking workers across this country deserve better.”
The unions have long promoted nationalism, which seeks to tie workers to this or that country and this or that ruling class, and the UFCW’s comment fundamentally reflects this. The issue is not native-born workers versus foreign-born, but the working class versus the capitalist ruling class. That is, workers confronting the dictatorship of capital, which decides at will to destroy jobs, communities and livelihoods across the United States and the world.
Workers should not accept the closure. What can be saved and won will only be decided through struggle.
What is required is rank-and-file organization—democratic, worker-run committees that can coordinate resistance across plants, states and borders. Rank-and-file committees do not accept the inevitability of closures or the “costs” imposed by corporate accounting. They begin from what workers need: full pay, safe conditions and a fight to keep jobs where people live.