Slaughterhouse Workers Seek a ‘Brave New Life,’ but Challenges Remain

A man smiles as he cycles by on a Monday in May, on his way into the slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colorado. Just outside the gates, trucks line up along 8th Ave. They contain the cattle scheduled to be killed that day by people like George Smith, who requested we use an alias for this story out of fear of retaliation.

When Smith originally immigrated to the United States and settled in the Denver area, he struggled to find work. “[Employers] were looking for people with experience,” he says. We have used an alias and omitted details about his home country for safety reasons.

The slaughterhouse was different. “Someone told us that there is good pay even though it’s a hard job,” he says, “but they don’t care about your English. They don’t care about your experience.” His family was told by a friend that if they moved to Greeley for the job, it would be good for them. And while there are good things — pay and plentiful employment — the work is dangerous and undignified.

Smith has now been trying to get out for almost as long as he’s worked there. Father to nine children, Smith has worked closely with Brave New Life, a volunteer-run non-profit focused on helping slaughterhouse workers find a less grueling job. And it is grueling. A typical day consists of slaughtering or dismembering hundreds of animals, repeating the same motions over and over again and increasing the risk of injury.

Since the group’s founding in 2020, they’ve had mixed success helping their clients find new jobs. Limited resources and the benefits — high pay and reliable hours — of working at the slaughterhouse are just two important challenges the group faces.

Having started as a client, Smith moved on to working with the organization as a paid translator — a role he no longer fills. For his part, Smith became frustrated with what he says is a long job search process that didn’t end with better prospects. While he was able to leave the slaughterhouse for a short stint to take a job in a restaurant, lower pay and less predictable hours forced him to go back to the slaughterhouse, where he still works today.

Slaughterhouse Employment Has its Draws

Greeley, Colorado is home to 109,000 people. Inside the town’s slaughterhouse, up to 1,500 of those residents spend their shifts either slaughtering or carving cattle into sellable cuts of meat.

One challenge in working with slaughterhouse workers is finding someone to translate. “One of the misconceptions we come across is that a lot of employees are Spanish speaking,” says Dana Orr, who spearheads employment services for Brave New Life. “None of our [clients] are Spanish speaking. They’re from different countries in Africa — most are multilingual. They’re speaking five different languages but none of them are English,” says Orr.  “One of our clients had a doctorate degree. There is so much we don’t know about the culture in the slaughterhouses.”

The slaughterhouse offers new employees between $18 and $22 per hour starting. For recent immigrants who often don’t speak English, that’s a lot of money — much more than they’re likely to get elsewhere. “They’re looking at getting a paycheck that’s half of that to work at a job that’s more fulfilling,” says Orr.

The high pay at the slaughterhouse allows workers to send money back to loved ones in their home countries or to save for large expenses like buying a car, says Smith. Because of his tenure, he makes significantly more per hour, making it even harder to find comparable employment outside the slaughterhouse. Yet, due to the conditions of the job, many workers want to leave.

Brave New Life struggles to find roles for their clients that compete with the slaughterhouse when it comes to pay. “When people do leave, [the pay] usually is what brings them back,” says Dana Orr.

Those difficulties lead to frustration, as job placement efforts stretch on for months. While the organization tries to increase the accessibility of their programs by breaking up intake interviews, offering different meeting formats and working with translators, the barriers to finding new jobs can cause frustration for clients excited to leave the slaughterhouse.

“They take so long to find a job, so long to find a solution,” says Smith. “In the meantime, we are weak and we are hopeless. We give up on waiting,” he says of his experience with the organization’s slow process, one he views as largely ineffective. Language barriers, lower pay and transportation are just a few of the challenges to finding work elsewhere.

The Downsides of Leaving

Breaks in the slaughterhouse are rare and timed, says Smith. Some employees will lie that they have stomach pain or diarrhea, so they’re allowed to go to the bathroom. Even then they only receive ten minutes. Others will claim to be religious, ensuring they get breaks throughout the day intended for prayer. “If you don’t lie,” he says, “you’re going to work as a slave.”

The lack of dignity combined with the job itself, has a profound impact on worker mental health. Depression and anxiety are more prevalent among slaughterhouse workers than the population at large. In her conversation with clients and potential clients, Orr points to not just the nature of the job but also to the bullying — such as restricting bathroom breaks —they endure in the workplace and the lack of support for something as simple as getting a translator. “The mental health [improvement] of those who have transitioned, from what I’ve seen, it’s almost astronomical,” she says.

Yet for now, there are few paths for leaving slaughterhouse work behind. Though there are other organizations aimed at supporting agricultural workers, Brave New Life might be the only organization with the sole purpose of helping slaughterhouse workers find new jobs — work that afford them a better work life and greater dignity. But the organization is run by volunteers with a limited annual budget.

When employees do leave the processing plant, they’re often sent another job offer even if they left due to unsafe work conditions, says Smith. Under Colorado law, the subsequent job offer and refusal to take that job makes them ineligible for the unemployment benefits that the slaughterhouse would have been responsible for paying.

Smith says most of the former workers he knows have struggled to get government assistance. If you leave a job in Colorado, you can be eligible for food stamps or other aid but only if you can show evidence that the job was unsafe, for instance. And the state contacts employers for their side of the story, all of which makes an already notoriously difficult process even more out of reach.

Volunteers for Brave New Life also struggle to contact potential clients, as many do not want to publicize their interest in leaving out of fear they will lose their job. For that reason they have relied heavily on word of mouth to attract new clientele. “The hardest barrier that we have faced right now is actually finding workers,” says Jessi Geist who runs Brave New Life alongside Orr, “being able to contact them and having somebody that can translate.”

Placing Clients in New Jobs

So far they’ve helped just one person successfully transition out of working at the slaughterhouse and placed them in a job at the local Wal-Mart. The organization is currently working with five other clients.

Brave New Life follows a strategy developed by Employment First, a government initiative originally conceived with the goal of placing people with disabilities in jobs. The goal is not just to find the client a new position but to find them work that they find meaningful and interesting, which is no easy feat. Many new clients express interest in fields for which they have limited experience.

Representatives for Brave New Life hope to one day meet this challenge with work that provides educational opportunities. This could one day be a job with an employer like Starbucks, for instance, or other companies that offer some tuition assistance.

In the meantime, they work to craft a resume for each client that highlights their skills. “When we build their resumes, we are really highlighting everything we can, even if it’s past education or partial training they’ve done for anything,” says Orr.

Brave New Life’s services go beyond job search assistance. “We provide all [types of] support,” says Orr. “Aside from translation services, transportation is a really big barrier [to getting a new job]. A lot of them live within walking distance of the slaughterhouse.” The organization also offers “housing support, food supply [and] health care, especially mental health,” she says. Most of those services are offered in the form of referrals or support towards accessing government programs.

Underfunded and Volunteer-Led

Both Orr and Geist volunteer their time for Brave New Life and do not earn a salary. Geist estimates that she dedicates between 15 and 20 hours monthly, on top of her full-time day job, which isn’t in Greeley. The only people paid by Brave New Life are translators, which adds an additional challenge to the mission.

So far, the team of two has been able to secure a small amount of grant funding to grow. They plan on using some of that money to buy tablets to lend to their clients, hopefully to serve as a more reliable and convenient way to meet.

In the future, Brave New Life hopes to provide job support in places where slaughterhouses have recently closed. That work requires someone on the ground, says Geist, someone who reaches out to them and says, “Hey, I would love to start a Brave New Life in North Carolina or something like that.” Geist and the reset of Brave New Life hope for future partners to emerge someday soon to help more former workers looking for a better life.

This story is part of a series called How Food Justice is Made: Stories and Solutions, in which Sentient dives into four different communities, and the unique ways they’re combatting slaughterhouses.