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Name one industry where workers come home and can't sleep. Where they develop nightmares — not about things that happened to them, but about things they did. Where psychologists have documented depression rates 550% above normal, aggression scores comparable to incarcerated populations, and a psychological split so severe researchers gave it a clinical name.
No, not combat. Not prisons. Slaughterhouses.
The same slaughterhouses that sell you a pound of ground beef for $6.99. The same corporations — JBS, Tyson, Cargill — that have spent decades lobbying governments, buying scientists, and making sure the conversation stays focused on price, taste, and tradition. Never on what happens to the human beings at the start of that supply chain.
Right now, as I'm writing this, 3,800 workers at JBS's Swift Beef plant in Greeley, Colorado are on strike. Week three. They want $33 an hour. They want healthcare that doesn't bankrupt them. They walked out on March 16, 2026, after eight months of failed negotiations — the first US beef slaughterhouse strike since Hormel in 1985.
Everyone's covering the wages. I want to cover the part nobody talks about.
There's a Diagnosis for What This Job Does to People — and JBS Doesn't Want You to Know It
In 2002, psychologist Rachel MacNair published a book called Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress. PITS. A form of PTSD where the trauma doesn't come from having violence done to you — it comes from doing violence to others. Repeatedly. Under orders. As a job.
MacNair identified it in veterans. In executioners. In police officers who kill. And in slaughterhouse workers.
The mechanism is the same. You kill something. Your brain registers it as a violation of something fundamental — because it is. Your brain doesn't stop doing that after the 20th time, or the 200th, or the 2,000th. It adapts instead. It builds walls. It numbs. It disconnects you from what you're doing so you can keep doing it. And the cost of that disconnection — nightmares, emotional flatness, aggression, substance abuse, dissociation — is what the research documents, and what nobody at JBS headquarters is accounting for.
A 2023 systematic review by Slade and Alleyne, published in Trauma, Violence & Abuse, analyzed 14 empirical studies on slaughterhouse worker mental health. Let me give you the numbers directly:
- 48% depression prevalence among female poultry workers — vs. 20% in working women generally
- Severe depression 550% higher than control populations
- Depression rates four times the national average
- Aggression scores "substantially higher" than farmers and the general public, comparable in some studies to incarcerated populations
And the critical finding: these effects were not distributed evenly across all plant workers. They were concentrated specifically among kill floor workers — the ones doing the stunning, the sticking, the evisceration. Not the packaging line. Not the loading dock. The kill floor.
The killing itself is the source of the trauma. Not the factory conditions in general. The killing.
The Official Statistics Are Bad Enough — and They're an Undercount
Before we even get to the psychology, look at the physical injury data. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks NAICS 3116 — Animal Slaughtering and Processing:
DART rate (days away, restricted duty, or transfer due to injury): 4.7 per 100 full-time workers. The private industry average is 1.7. Nearly three times the baseline.
Occupational illness rate: 278.9 per 10,000 workers. National average: 45.2. More than six times higher.
Carpal tunnel syndrome: seven times the national rate.
That's the official data. A 2017 study by Leibler and Perry at Boston University found self-reported severe injury rates more than double official estimates. Why the gap? Workers underreport. They're scared. Many are undocumented. Complaining about conditions — or taking days off for injury — could get them fired, or worse. So the real numbers are worse than the already-damning numbers.
A 2019 Human Rights Watch report, based on 49 worker interviews across 15 plants in six US states, found meatpacking workers nearly twice as likely to suffer injury and more than 15 times as likely to suffer an occupational illness compared to the average private-sector worker.
Fifteen times. Let that sit.
Who's Actually Doing This Work
About 38% of US slaughterhouse workers are foreign-born. The workforce is overwhelmingly immigrants and people of color — from communities with limited political power, limited access to legal resources, and limited ability to seek mental health treatment even when they recognize they need it.
I've written before about the class and race dimensions of veganism — how white middle-class veganism often floats in a bubble disconnected from who actually does this labor. This is that bubble, specifically. The people killing animals on the kill floor aren't the powerful ones in this system. They're the most expendable.
In Greeley, Colorado — or Lexington, Nebraska, or Tar Heel, North Carolina — the meatpacking plant is often the largest employer within 50 miles. You take the job or you don't eat. There's no "choose a different career." There's this job or no job.
Deborah Rodarte is an inside skirt cutter at JBS Greeley. She described being denied knife replacements mid-shift — forced to work with dull blades that make lacerations more likely, not less. Chris, another production worker, described supervisors refusing bathroom breaks for 30 minutes or longer. Workers wetting themselves at their stations. He found hooks, broken conveyor belt pieces, and wood fragments on the line. His mesh glove had a chunk missing from the back. Supervisor said no.
"We cannot continue to be worked like slaves," said Kenny, who started in January 2026 and is now standing on a picket line in week three of a historic walkout.
These aren't abstract labor statistics. These are people who go home to kids, to partners, to communities — carrying something the industry has no legal obligation to acknowledge.
JBS's "Worker Safety" in Practice
JBS had revenues of $72 billion in 2023. Its Greeley plant processes 2,600 cattle per shift — that number came directly from Edison, one of the striking workers.
When the strike started, JBS spokesperson Nikki Richardson said workers can leave for "approved and necessary reasons" and that protective equipment is replaced at no cost "under normal wear." That policy, she said, has been in place 25 years.
And yet: 30-minute bathroom holds. Dull knives. Missing glove sections. Wood fragments on the line.
The script never changes. These companies — backed by billions in government subsidies and decades of regulatory capture — issue a statement about their "deep commitment to worker safety" while their production workers wet themselves waiting for bathroom approval. They've been doing this exact thing throughout COVID, throughout every congressional probe, throughout every NGO report that gets written and filed and forgotten.
Here's what's especially grotesque: while this strike continues and JBS routes production elsewhere, industry analysts are noting that reduced US beef sector capacity is actually raising profit margins for the largest companies. A strike that's supposed to hurt JBS is, at least partially, benefiting JBS. The system was designed to not lose. It doesn't.
What the Vegan Movement Gets Wrong About Slaughterhouse Workers
Some vegans treat slaughterhouse workers as villains. They're not. They're casualties.
The PITS research describes a specific psychological arc. Workers start with moral distress — they feel what they're doing is wrong, because it is. Then comes emotional numbing. Then desensitization. Then what researchers call "doubling": a split psychological self, one that kills at work and one that tries to come home and function as a human being.
One worker, quoted in the Yale Global Health Review's 2016 piece on slaughterhouse psychology, described it: "I've had ideas of hanging my foreman upside down on the line." That's not a person who chose violence. That's a person who was submerged in it, professionally, until it started to leak.
A 2025 study in Agriculture and Human Values examined how slaughterhouse workers build "professional emotional neutrality" — the deliberate psychological partition between what they're doing and how they're allowed to feel about it. It's not that they stop feeling. It's that the job requires them to dissociate from feeling in order to function. And then they go home.
The meat industry profits from that dissociation. It's built into the business model.
It Took Until 2023 for One Medical Journal to Even Ask the Question
The AMA Journal of Ethics published a piece in April 2023 — "How Should Clinicians Respond to Patients Experiencing Ongoing Present Traumatic Stress in Industrial Meat Settings?" — calling on doctors to recognize PITS as a legitimate clinical condition requiring treatment.
Twenty-three years after MacNair named it. The depression studies had been accumulating for over a decade. And 2023 is when mainstream medicine started asking how to treat it.
There's still no line item for PITS in any JBS contract negotiation. No workers' compensation category that covers it. No corporate mental health program designed for kill floor workers. The legal and medical infrastructure that exists to protect workers was built by people who never had to think about this. And the companies that should be building it have every financial incentive not to.
The Part That Never Makes It Into the Contract
The workers in Greeley deserve $33 an hour. They deserve healthcare. They deserve to replace a broken glove without begging a supervisor. None of that is a radical ask. It's the minimum.
But even if they win every demand on the table — and I hope they do — nobody at that bargaining table is talking about PITS. Nobody is asking what this work does to a person over ten years. Nobody is asking how you un-numb someone who spent a decade professionally dissociating from killing 2,600 animals a day.
The slaughter causes harm — to the animal, obviously, and I'll never stop saying that. But also to the person doing it. And the companies know. They've known since MacNair published in 2002. Probably longer. They just decided that the psychological cost to workers was, like the environmental cost and the animal welfare cost, an acceptable externality. Something to externalize and ignore until the next congressional hearing, the next HRW report, the next strike.
Your hamburger is not a personal choice. It's a decision made on behalf of the animals killed, the communities poisoned, the planet heated, and the people who go home from that kill floor carrying something nobody will ever name in their employment contract.
The workers in Greeley are three weeks in with no resolution. Follow UFCW Local 7. Read coverage that includes the conditions, not just the wage demand. And if you've got a friend who says they support workers' rights but won't touch veganism — ask them to name one industry that does what this one does to the people inside it. Ask them to name one. And then ask what their $6.99 pound of beef is actually buying.
References
- Slade, J. & Alleyne, E. (2023). "The Psychological Impact of Slaughterhouse Employment: A Systematic Literature Review." Trauma, Violence & Abuse. PubMed Central
- MacNair, R.M. (2002). Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress: The Psychological Consequences of Killing. Praeger. APA PsycNET
- Human Rights Watch (2019). "When We're Dead and Buried, Our Bones Will Keep Hurting." Full Report
- Leibler, J.H. & Perry, M.J. (2017). "Self-reported occupational injuries among industrial beef slaughterhouse workers." Journal of Occupational and Environmental Hygiene. PubMed
- Bureau of Labor Statistics. Industry injury/illness rates, NAICS 3116. BLS.gov
- Lander, L. et al. (2015). "Is depression a risk factor for meatpacking injuries?" Work. PubMed
- AMA Journal of Ethics (2023). "How Should Clinicians Respond to Patients Experiencing Ongoing Present Traumatic Stress in Industrial Meat Settings?" AMA Journal of Ethics
- Springer Nature / Agriculture and Human Values (2025). Emotional labor in slaughterhouses. Springer Link
- Colorado Sun (2026). "JBS Greeley meatpacking strike enters third week." Colorado Sun
- Yale Global Health Review (2016). "A Call to Action: Psychological Harm in Slaughterhouse Workers." Yale Global Health Review