The meatpacking industry shifted out of the older multi-story brick buildings in places like Chicago and Kansas City and into sprawling facilities in states like Nebraska and North Carolina. In some places, factories stayed in the same places but remodeled and then hired back workers at reduced wages and without union protection. For example, Wilson, the last remaining company of the former trust, declared bankruptcy in 1983 allowing the company to restructure a pork processing plant and reduce worker pay from $10.69 an hour to $6.50 an hour after reopening.[15] Another, more famous example, is Hormel in Austin, Minnesota.[16] The company made peace with its union in the 1940s but, by the late-1970s, began to reconsider this relationship when it started hiring workers from outside the local area. Management looked for workers who would work for the new wage of $9 per hour, down from $15.[17] Tensions flared until 1985 when local P-9 went on strike. Hormel managed to break the strike, which resulted in white, native-born Austin residents permanently losing their meatpacking jobs.
To undercut unionization efforts and reduce labor costs the meatpacking industry decided to rely on a mostly immigrant workforce. This increasingly immigrant workforce was made up of both documented and undocumented workers, with undocumented workers making up an estimated 25 percent of the workforce in two meatpacking states.[18] With a workforce unable to resist the new management techniques that prioritized speed and efficiency above all else, working conditions quickly deteriorated. Injuries rose throughout the 1980s and 1990s, becoming a scandal that the industry spent the first two decades of the 21st century fixing.[19] By the 1990s, workers faced increasing line speeds that gave them little time to respond to mistakes or to rest. For example, in a Sioux City plant, two women trimmed 540 hog tongues an hour in the 1960s. By 1988, one woman had to trim 785 tongues per hour.[20] Hormel’s subsidiary, which it created in 1987 to get around its union wages in Austin, Quality Pork Processors Inc., sped up the line “from 750 heads per hour when the plant opened to 1,350 per hour in 2006, though the workforce barely increased.”[21] The company had been given special permission to speed up lines without checking with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.