The Meat Cartel: How America’s Biggest Processors Conspired to Steal Your Paycheck

EvilCorporations.com • Case No. 22-cv-02946-PAB-STV, D. Colo. • 32 min read

What a Stolen Wage Feels Like at 5 a.m.

Meatpacking is one of the most physically brutal jobs in America. You stand on a slick concrete floor for eight, ten, sometimes twelve hours. You swing a knife thousands of times a day in a cold, loud room that smells of blood and ammonia. You develop repetitive stress injuries. You go home exhausted in ways that don’t wash off in the shower. You do it again the next morning.

Ron Brown did this at a Smithfield plant. Minka Garmon did this at a National Beef facility. Jessie Croft did this too. So did tens of thousands of others whose names are not on the lawsuit caption because class actions don’t work that way. Their names are in a database somewhere, filed away as “class members.” They did the same work. They suffered the same injury. The law just gives them a number instead of a byline.

What the complaint alleges these workers were robbed of is the most basic promise of labor in a market economy: that if you do hard, dangerous, skilled work and your employer competes for your labor against other employers, you earn what your work is actually worth. That competition is the mechanism that pushes wages up. It is the reason employers have to offer more to attract people to difficult jobs. It is, in theory, the protection workers have in a system that gives them no union contract, no guaranteed minimum beyond the legal floor, and no seat at the table when executive compensation is set.

The lawsuit alleges that the fifteen processors named as defendants agreed, over at least two decades, to eliminate that competition. They allegedly shared wage data through a consulting firm so each knew what the others were paying. They allegedly coordinated so that no one would break ranks and offer more to attract workers. The market that was supposed to protect workers from poverty wages was, if the allegations are proven true, a staged performance. The competition was theater. The wages were a product of collusion, engineered in boardrooms and transmitted through a data firm, while workers bled and froze and shook on the line.

The people most harmed by this are not abstract. They are disproportionately immigrants, people of color, and workers in rural communities where a single meatpacking plant is often the dominant employer. When the dominant employer in your town is also allegedly colluding with every other major employer in your industry to keep your wages down, you have nowhere else to go. You take what they offer or your family does not eat. That is the specific cruelty buried inside the legal language of “wage suppression in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.”

A $200.2 million settlement sounds like justice until you divide it by tens of thousands of workers across more than two decades of stolen wages. The math does not produce a life-changing check. It produces a payment that may not cover the cost of a single emergency room visit for the repetitive stress injury you got doing the job you were underpaid to do. The non-financial ledger, the one the settlement will never fully close, includes the years of financial stress, the medical debt, the family strain, the deferred dreams, and the quiet knowledge that the people running these companies looked at your labor and decided, collectively and allegedly illegally, that it was worth less than the market would have paid.

What the Court Documents Actually Say

These are direct quotes from the court order and complaint. No paraphrase. No spin. The court’s own language.

“Beginning by at least January 2000 and continuing to the present day, Defendants have conspired with each other to fix and depress the compensation paid to employees of Defendant Processors, their subsidiaries, and related entities at red meat processing plants in the continental United States, in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1.”

— Amended Complaint, Docket No. 260 at 61–62, ¶ 170

• This quote is the core allegation. It names the Sherman Antitrust Act, the same law used to break up oil and railroad monopolies, as the legal basis for what these meat companies allegedly did to their workers. The Sherman Act prohibits conspiracies in restraint of trade. The plaintiffs are arguing that the trade being restrained here is the market for human labor.
• The phrase “at least January 2000” is significant. It means the plaintiffs believe the conspiracy started no later than that date, but could have started earlier. The evidence available at the time of filing set the floor at 2000, meaning this may be an undercount of the conspiracy’s actual duration.

“Defendants include fifteen red meat processors and several of their subsidiaries. . ., which collectively produce more than 80 percent of the red meat sold to consumers in the United States, and two consulting companies.”

— Amended Complaint, Docket No. 260 at 7–8, ¶ 2

• This is the market power statement. The defendants together control more than 80 percent of the U.S. red meat supply. When the entities controlling 80 percent of a market allegedly coordinate on wages, workers in that industry have essentially nowhere else to go for comparable employment. The cartel structure, if proven, eliminated the competitive alternatives workers would need to secure fair pay.
• The inclusion of two consulting companies, identified as Agri Stats, Inc. and Webber, Meng, Sahl and Company, signals that the alleged coordination required dedicated infrastructure. These were businesses paid to facilitate the data exchange that allegedly allowed the processors to keep wages in lockstep.

“The WMS settlement requires WMS to cooperate with the representative plaintiffs’ prosecution of this case in the following ways: permit George Jonathan Meng, Scott Ramsey, and Cynthia Porter to be deposed and called as witnesses at trial and to use reasonable efforts to provide and authenticate testimony and documents necessary for plaintiffs’ prosecution of the case.”

— Court Order, Docket No. 306 at 11

• These three individuals, George Jonathan Meng, Scott Ramsey, and Cynthia Porter, are employees or principals of WMS, the consulting firm named in the lawsuit. Their depositions and trial testimony are a direct condition of the settlement. This means the plaintiffs secured live witnesses who worked inside the alleged data-sharing operation and will now be compelled to testify about how it functioned.
• WMS settled without paying a disclosed cash amount into a settlement fund. Instead, the price of WMS’s exit from the lawsuit is the testimony and documents of its own people. Plaintiffs’ attorneys accepted this trade because the testimony of insiders is worth more to the remaining litigation against JBS, Tyson, Cargill, Smithfield, and the other non-settling defendants than any sum WMS could plausibly pay.

“The Seaboard settlement requires Seaboard to cooperate with the representative plaintiffs’ prosecution of this case in the following ways: producing data on members of the class employed by Seaboard Triumph Foods, LLC, or Daily’s Premium Meats, LLC, authenticating documents, providing documents through designated document custodians, allowing five current employees of Seaboard to be deposed and called as witnesses at trial, assisting the representative plaintiffs in their efforts to obtain phone records from third-party carriers.”

— Court Order, Docket No. 306 at 10

• The reference to “phone records from third-party carriers” is a detail that reveals the nature of the evidence plaintiffs are chasing. Phone records are used to document direct communication between executives at competing companies. If processors were coordinating wage levels, they were almost certainly doing so through calls and messages that left a trail.
• Seaboard’s cooperation extends to its affiliated entities: Seaboard Triumph Foods, LLC and Daily’s Premium Meats, LLC. The web of subsidiaries is part of how these corporations segment liability. Getting data on workers across all three entities matters for calculating class-wide damages.

Who Gets Hurt, and How

Public Health

Meatpacking plants are among the most dangerous workplaces in the United States. Suppressed wages compound those risks in concrete, documented ways.

• Workers earning below competitive market wages are less able to afford quality healthcare. A repetitive stress injury, a knife laceration, or a respiratory issue from ammonia refrigerant exposure becomes a debt crisis rather than a recoverable medical event when you are being underpaid relative to what the market should have provided.
• Financial stress directly correlates with worse physical and mental health outcomes. A workforce that has been underpaid for two-plus decades across an industry that employs tens of thousands is a workforce living with chronic financial precarity, which research consistently links to higher rates of anxiety, depression, cardiovascular disease, and reduced life expectancy.
• Workers who cannot save emergency funds are more likely to continue working through injuries, accelerating long-term physical damage. When the job pays less than it should and there is no competitive alternative because every major employer is allegedly in the same cartel, the economic pressure to stay on the line injured is significant.

Economic Inequality

Wage suppression at this scale, in an industry this concentrated, does not stay contained to the people directly employed. It radiates outward.

• The class covers all beef and pork processing plant workers at these companies and their subsidiaries from January 1, 2000 onward. With defendants collectively controlling more than 80 percent of U.S. red meat production, the alleged cartel effectively set a suppressed wage floor for the entire red meat processing labor market in the continental United States for over two decades.
• Rural and working-class communities where meatpacking plants are the dominant employers bear the sharpest economic blow. When the plant is the largest employer in a county and that employer is allegedly colluding to pay workers below competitive wages, the entire local economy, including the retail stores, restaurants, and service businesses that workers spend wages at, is suppressed along with the paycheck.
• The class includes workers across multiple subsidiaries and related entities, meaning the harm extends through corporate structures deliberately designed to diffuse liability. Workers at Daily’s Premium Meats, Seaboard Triumph Foods, Murphy-Brown of Missouri, Washington Beef, and other named subsidiaries were all subject to the same alleged wage conspiracy as workers at the parent brand facilities.
• Named plaintiff Minka Garmon worked at National Beef Packing Co. Named plaintiff Ron Brown worked at Smithfield Farms. The third named plaintiff, Jessie Croft, is also listed in the court caption. These individuals earned wages that the lawsuit alleges were the direct product of illegal coordination, meaning every paycheck they received during the conspiracy period may have been smaller than the law required the market to produce.
• The total settlement reached $200.2 million according to ClassAction.org, spread across tens of thousands of class members spanning more than a decade of eligible claims. Even at the most optimistic distribution, individual worker recoveries are a small fraction of the wages the complaint alleges were stolen over a period starting in 2000.

The Numbers in Human Terms

Who Is Still Fighting This, and How You Push Back

The case against the largest defendants, JBS USA, Tyson Foods, Cargill, Smithfield Foods, Hormel, National Beef, and the others, continues in federal court in Colorado. Three early defendants settled. The cartel’s biggest members are still litigating.

Corporate Defendants Still Facing Claims

• JBS USA Food Company: one of the world’s largest meat processors, Brazilian-owned through JBS S.A.
• Tyson Foods, Inc.: the largest U.S. meat company by revenue, publicly traded on the NYSE.
• Cargill Inc. and Cargill Meat Solutions Corp.: the largest privately held company in the United States by revenue.
• Smithfield Foods Inc. and Smithfield Packaged Meats Corp.: owned by Hong Kong-based WH Group, the world’s largest pork producer.
• Hormel Foods Corp.: publicly traded, maker of Spam, Jennie-O, and dozens of consumer brands.
• National Beef Packing Co., LLC; American Foods Group, LLC; Agri Beef Co.; Washington Beef, LLC; Indiana Packers Corporation; Quality Pork Processors, Inc.; Nebraska Beef, Ltd.; Greater Omaha Packing Co., Inc.; Murphy-Brown of Missouri, LLC; Rochelle Foods, LLC; and Agri Stats, Inc.: all named as non-settling defendants in the amended complaint.

Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies That Can Act on This

• Department of Justice Antitrust Division: the primary federal enforcer of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The DOJ has jurisdiction to pursue criminal charges against wage-fixing conspiracies. File tips at justice.gov/atr/contact-us.
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): the FTC has broad authority over anticompetitive labor market practices and has signaled increased enforcement interest in no-poach and wage-fixing arrangements. File a report at ftc.gov/complaint.
• Department of Labor (DOL) and Wage and Hour Division: while this case is antitrust rather than wage-theft law, the DOL’s ability to enforce prevailing wage requirements and investigate labor conditions in the meat processing industry is a complementary tool. Reach them at dol.gov/agencies/whd.
• State Attorneys General: multiple state AGs have antitrust enforcement authority and have filed independent actions in related meat industry price-fixing cases. Contact your state AG and ask what action they are taking on wage fixing in meat processing.
• OSHA: workplace safety violations in meatpacking facilities can be reported directly at osha.gov. Unsafe conditions and economic pressure to work through injury are direct byproducts of the wage suppression this lawsuit describes.

Mutual Aid, Organizing, and Grassroots Resistance

• If you or someone you know worked at a beef or pork processing plant in the continental United States at any point from January 1, 2014 onward, you may be a member of the settlement class. Follow the case at ClassAction.org and look for notice filings from Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP, or Handley Farah & Anderson PLLC.
• Connect with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which represents workers in meatpacking and food processing. A union contract is the most reliable structural protection against exactly the kind of wage coordination alleged in this case. Find your local at ufcw.org.
• Support local mutual aid networks in communities where these plants operate. Rural meatpacking towns often have no social safety net beyond the plant itself. Food banks, worker centers, and community health clinics serving these communities are direct targets for support.
• Push your elected representatives to support the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act or equivalent legislation that increases penalties for wage-fixing conspiracies and makes it easier for workers to bring antitrust claims. The Sherman Act was written in 1890. Its damage caps have not kept pace with the scale of corporate power.
• Share this case. The companies named in this lawsuit sell product under household brand names. Consumer awareness of antitrust misconduct has historically influenced purchasing decisions and generated the kind of public pressure that accelerates settlement and deters future collusion.