After workers rejected a Cargill Meat Solutions contract last week, reality hit the more than 1,700 unemployed meatpackers who’ve been locked out of the Fort Morgan plant for nearly 85 days. Now, a worker-led effort to take another vote on a contract has received enough signatures for the union to consider it.
Union leaders with Teamsters Local 455, which had recommended the now-rejected offer from Cargill, want to make sure they get it right this time. Dean Modecker, secretary-treasurer of Local 455, said a revote could come as early as Monday for the same contract that the union and Cargill had tentatively agreed to at the end of July.
“Our job is to listen to our members,” Modecker said Wednesday. “We’ve contacted the employer to let them know that, ‘Hey look, these people would like you to renegotiate.’”
The process may not be as simple as a revote. Cargill spokesperson Hli Yang shared a statement Thursday morning saying that the company was contacted by the union.
“The union has asked Cargill to consider a re-vote. We are waiting for the union to provide details about how that process would work and will review the proposal once received,” said the statement.
Modecker responded that the new offer was already in Cargill’s inbox. He clarified that the union has suggested a tweak but declined to say what it was.
“Either way, we are taking a vote on the change or we are taking a vote on the (same) contract,” he said. “Then the company can make a decision from there. If members vote to approve the contract, why wouldn’t they allow them back?”
Cargill, which had $154 billion in revenues last year, was named the nation’s largest private company in 2025 for the fifth consecutive year by Forbes. It’s also one of the largest meat processors in the U.S., sending beef to grocery stores around the country. The Fort Morgan facility processed about 4,000 head of cattle per day last year.
Fort Morgan employees were locked out of the plant May 20 after rejecting Cargill’s contract the day before. Union workers had not even voted to strike. The company proactively locked out workers to avoid “safety and operational risks with an unplanned production stoppage,” the company said. The plant had actually closed a month earlier and workers were put on paid leave as contract negotiations continued. Cargill redirected cattle to other states with company meat processing plants.
But when union members rejected Cargill’s latest offer Aug. 3, it was a surprise to the community and union negotiators, who had recommended the contract. Modecker called it a “close vote” with 94% of union members voting. He declined to share the margin. But in May, 85% of union members rejected the contract.
There was apparently a lot of confusion about why workers rejected the contract. It may have been due to the language barriers of the workers.
“There’s 26 different dialects out there and to be fair, I don’t think everybody is hearing the same thing as we are trying to communicate,” Modecker said. “I think now that people have found out what is going on in the deal and have taken more time to look at it, they’re making the decision about whether they believe Cargill is at the max amount that they’re going to give. I think the environment in Fort Morgan, the town, they’re scared. Everybody’s scared that this place may not open again. So I think our people are just rethinking that they’d like to vote again.”
After workers rejected the contract Aug. 3, the company updated its Fort Morgan Labor Update page, saying “We are disappointed that employees voted against the union-recommended settlement” and “Cargill remains open to discussing how the contract package could be structured differently within the economic framework previously communicated to the union to address employee priorities and support a stable future for the Fort Morgan facility. We continue to welcome proposals that could help move us toward an agreement.”
Jacob Johnson, a Cargill worker who’s been locked out, said he and coworkers Sergio Aguirre and Melvin Figueroa began organizing the revote petition on their own last week. As of Wednesday, they’d collected 1,000 signatures, or the majority of locked-out workers.
He felt that one reason the contract was rejected earlier this month was because some members didn’t understand what they were voting for. Some didn’t even select an option on the voting slip. On Wednesday, an official from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters stopped by to talk to workers and that helped clear up confusion and “break the language barrier for us (and) helped get the needed info to the ones who didn’t have it,” Johnson said in a Facebook direct message.
“I just petitioned a revote to put (an) option on the table for the people who wanna work to have another shot at a chance to get their job security back,” Johnson said, “because at the end of the day that’s what matters, especially the ones with families.”
Reduced strike pay
While impacted workers used their spare time to picket next to the plant and in the town of Fort Morgan, the financial burden on workers worsened after the latest vote.
Up until then, workers were getting “enhanced” union pay. Modecker said because of the employer lockout, the international and executive board of the Teamsters provided a higher amount of strike pay and Local 455 union doubled its payments ”to ensure that our members would be able to eat and pay their bills,” he said.
That set amount was about $1,250 a week, he confirmed. Now, locked-out union members are getting the normal strike-pay rate, which is much lower. That includes $125 a week from Local 455 plus five times what members pay in dues. Modecker couldn’t provide the average pay because it’s all over the place with “about 42 different job classifications out there so they all get different dues amounts.”
At $1,250 a week, that was more than Cargill’s average hourly pay of $24.78 or about $992 a week under the old contract. In the new contract, the company offered workers $24.20 to $32.10 an hour depending on the job.
While terms appeared to change little between May and June, local negotiators were able to get Cargill to frontload an increased wage compared with what Cargill offers union workers in other states. “It’s an average of a $1,700 to $1,800 difference,” Modecker said.
“Cargill’s been putting out an offer that they’ve put everywhere else in the country. That’s what the fight is about. We felt that people working in Fort Morgan, Colorado, are different from people working in Dodge City, Kansas, and Amarillo, Texas, and all those other places. We felt our cost of living was higher. That’s why we were asking for more than the rest.”
United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 recently negotiated a better deal for workers at the JBS-owned Swift Beef Company plant in Greeley. JBS had also offered union workers the same national contract it offered in other states. Some 3,800 Local 7 members went on strike for three weeks. Ultimately, UFCW negotiated a contract that capped healthcare premiums, unlike the national plan.
But for local Cargill workers, the lockout is nearing three months. As of Tuesday, 551 unemployment claims related to Cargill workers have been filed in Colorado, according to the state Department of Labor and Employment. In Colorado, unemployment benefits provide 55% of a person’s average weekly wage in the past 12 months. The maximum payment is $844 per week.
“We’re worried,” Modecker said. “They cut our insurance off in May and we’ve got kids going back to school and we still don’t have healthcare.”
This story was updated at 7:45 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. on Aug. 13 to add a statement from Cargill and a response from the union. This story was updated at 2:04 p.m. to add comments from an organizer of the worker petition to conduct a second vote on the contract. This is a breaking news story and may be updated.
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This story previously appeared in the Colorado Sun.
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