Last year, Tyson Foods shuttered a meat processing plant in Perry, Iowa. The company said it made the decision because the plant was old and inefficient. But the closure was devastating for the residents of Perry. The plant had employed some 1200 workers in a town with a population of only 8000.At the same time, Tyson was also busy hiring workers elsewhere. It was working with a non-profit group that helps connect companies with asylum seekers and refugees looking for work. Tyson ultimately hired hundreds of new workers through this partnership.Was this just a coincidence? Or were these two stories actually one story - a story about one of the country's biggest meat processors forcing out American workers and replacing them with migrants? On today's show we take a look at the controversy surrounding Tyson's hiring moves and how things look from the perspective of the workers themselves.Find more Planet Money: Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / Our weekly Newsletter.Listen free at these links: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the NPR app or anywhere you get podcasts.Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Planet Money from NPR. So do you mind introducing yourself?
Yeah, I'm Simone Foxman. I'm an equality reporter for Bloomberg News.
So, like, what does that mean? What are you covering?
All the, like, completely uncontroversial topics. So inequality with respect to race, gender, religion, immigration at times. So last March, Simone Foxman published an article on that last topic, immigration.
And that story ended up exploding for a pretty unusual reason.
She started working on the story in February. It was about Tyson Foods, the enormous company that makes chicken nuggets and ground beef and pork chops. They were in New York City to hire some of the migrants who had come to the U.S. in the last few years. What kind of job was Tyson hiring for?
Really low-skilled jobs. And that's the vast majority of Tyson's workforce. Tyson employs about 120,000 people. Of them, about 100,000 are in these very low-skilled jobs. Jobs like washing meat, placing the cuts in the trays, all of those things. You don't need a ton of expertise in order to do them, but you need a lot of people. And they really struggle to keep workers in a lot of these jobs.
These have an extraordinarily high turnover rate of about 40 percent. So from Tyson's perspective, they're constantly trying to fill these jobs.
The CEO of Tyson said that it had been even harder over the past few years with such a tight labor market. Unemployment has been historically low, sitting right around 4%.
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