Negotiations have come to an end at a meatpacking plant in northern Colorado, where thousands of workers bargained for months over a new contract — a fight that culminated in a multi-week strike, corporate officials announced Sunday.

The Greeley, Colorado, beef processing plant, the flagship of JBS USA, will resume normal operations under a new contract that runs through April 2028 and includes raises, according to a news release from the company.

Contract negotiations resumed last week after a three-week strike at the Greeley plant. United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 officials announced Friday that a tentative deal had been struck between the union and JBS USA.

The new contract includes a 70-cent-per-hour base wage increase upon ratification, and 40-cent-per-hour raises in July 2026 and 2027, according to the news release from JBS USA. It also includes a $750 bonus for each employee at ratification and a one-time payment of $500 in April 2027, but it eliminates the company’s “historic pension,” JBS officials said.

“While JBS USA is pleased that an agreement has finally been reached, the company expressed disappointment that UFCW Local 7 leadership chose to eliminate the historic pension benefit that was part of the national agreement negotiated last year in partnership with UFCW International,” JBS officials stated in the release.

But UFCW Local 7 President Kim Cordova said that the pension was never part of the contract and that JBS officials only offered the national agreement pension as a counter to the union’s own proposal.

“Frankly, their proposal was just not adequate, and no way, no how were we going to sacrifice the rest of the issues on the table to get it,” Cordova said.

The pension plan would have come at the cost of lower wage increases and shifting the cost of healthcare onto workers, Cordova said. It also capped employees’ contributions at 40 hours a week, despite many at the meatpacking plant working far more, she said.

The company trying to force the national agreement onto the Greeley plant is one of the reasons that workers went on strike, she added.

JBS previously charged workers or garnished wages to replace broken or defective personal protective equipment, Cordova said. Now, corporate officials have agreed to replace that equipment for free and to reimburse workers who had to pay, she said.

“When we went back to work, there were lines wrapped around the building of workers who had to have their equipment replaced,” Cordova said.

Other contract wins include more sick time, longer bereavement leave, a capped healthcare contribution for employees and a shorter contract to get back to the bargaining table sooner, she said. The agreement also stipulates that none of the workers will be retaliated against or disciplined for striking.

Ninety-nine percent of unionized workers at the northern Colorado location voted to authorize the strike in February, the first in the Greeley plant’s history and the first strike at an American meatpacking plant in four decades, according to local union leadership. The walkout came as contract negotiations stalled after eight months of meetings between the union, which represents 3,800 workers at the plant, and JBS.

The union filed at least seven unfair labor practice charges against JBS, including for firing a member of the bargaining committee, punishing a worker for filing a grievance against management and making changes to working conditions without giving the union notice. JBS denied those claims and said Sunday that the union agreed to withdraw the allegations to solidify the contract agreement.

Two unfair labor practice charges remain active, Cordova said. All the charges related to interfering with bargaining were withdrawn because the union reached an agreement with JBS, she said.

Cordova said the two still in place are related to alleged incidents where JBS gave non-union supervisors retroactive pay for the collective bargaining period and the firing of a bargaining unit member who raised concerns about faulty protective equipment.

“As soon as he raised that with corporate in negotiations, he was terminated,” Cordova said.

Greeley-based JBS USA is a subsidiary of Brazil-based JBS S.A., the world’s largest processor of beef and pork. The company operates nine U.S. facilities and employs more than 37,000 people at these plants, including the nearly 4,000 workers at the Greeley location.

The flagship Greeley plant, which operates as Swift Beef Co., processes as much as 8% of the country’s beef.

“The strike worked,” Cordova said. “Had we not struck, they never would have replaced that unsafe equipment … for these workers, it was a life or death situation.”

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