Tyson closing its Emporia meatpacking plant just a sign of dark times ahead in Kansas | Opinion

I pulled off Interstate 35 in Emporia about 5:15 p.m. on Monday, on the way to my home in Iowa after a trip to Albuquerque and Santa Fe to visit family for Thanksgiving weekend. It was lovely.

During the trip, I spent more time watching the temperature gauge of my 2000 Chevy pickup than the gas gauge, but she held steady, and I made it home safely Tuesday morning.

In Emporia, I checked into my hotel and decided to head out, find a bar and make some new friends — maybe have a couple of beers and then get dinner. As I edged out of the hotel parking lot onto the highway, I looked left and right, but no watering hole was in sight. The bright lights of a nearby Casey’s General Store called to me, and after 12 hours of driving, I decided to go there instead for a sandwich and a six-pack of Miller Lite, and then go back to the hotel room to relax and watch TV.

I stood in a long line of men buying beer and other stuff. It looked like they had just gotten off work. A friendly woman quickly worked the one open checkout line, speaking to most of her customers in Spanish.

It finally was my turn to pay and no one was in line behind me.

“You must work at Tyson’s too,” she said.

“No, just passing through,” I said. “What made you think I work at Tyson’s?”

“Because you’re buying beer just like the other guys. They’re going to go home and get drunk. They learned today that the plant’s closing and they have lost their jobs, and they have to go home and tell their wives and girlfriends and kids they don’t have jobs no more.”

It was heartbreaking, in part because I’ve had to do the same.

We talked for another minute or so until I felt the presence of another man behind me. He was buying beer, too.

“And just wait until Trump’s mass deportations begin,” I said as I walked away.

She rolled her eyes and shook her head as the man behind me put his beer on the counter and she scanned it.

Trump’s undocumented immigrant crackdown

Approximately 800 workers will lose their jobs when the Tyson plant in Emporia closes, according to The Kansas Reflector. The company said the plant will close permanently in February 2025. The population of Emporia is just over 24,000, and Tyson is a major employer.

The Reflector wrote:

“In the fiscal year ending in September 2023, the company’s beef unit had income of $233 million. The unit reported a loss of $291 million in the 2024 fiscal year that closed in September.

“Tyson Foods has struggled with market forces that included a declining fed cattle population and higher costs for livestock for processing. The company didn’t indicate the Emporia plant closure was tied to promises by President-elect Donald Trump to crack down on undocumented immigration.

“Demise of 800 jobs in Emporia would follow layoffs involving thousands of Tyson workers amid closure of six U.S. chicken plants and an Iowa pork plant since the outset of 2023.”

While Trump’s plans for mass deportations may or may not have played a role in Tyson’s decision to close the Emporia plant, the company was in trouble long before November’s election.

According to Talk Business and Politics, the compensation of Tyson CEO Donnie King was a base salary of $1.396 million last year, with a performance bonus of $436,154.

Tyson is a member of the S&P 500. Fortune Magazine reports that the average salary of an S&P 500 CEO is a staggering $16.3 million.

While King’s performance package is much lower than the average of the S&P 500 CEOs’, it’s still hard to believe that “taking care of our team members is our top priority,” as a statement from Tyson Foods about the plan closure said.

The bottom line is the meatpacker’s top priority.

Thinking back to my conversation with the woman at the Casey’s checkout line in Emporia, that local community will be greatly impacted not only by the Tyson plant closing, but also by soon-to-be President Trump’s proposed mass deportations. And whether or not they are related is irrelevant in many ways. But the combined impacts will be significant — not only in Emporia, but also across Kansas and the rest of the United States. There are approximately 80,000 undocumented immigrants in Kansas, and 12 million in the United States.

Mass deportations of undocumented workers would be devastating to our economy, and to the lives of the undocumented and the communities they live in.

Trump’s priority should be a strong guest worker program with a path to citizenship, not mass deportations.

And that President Joe Biden didn’t build a strong guest worker program with a path to citizenship while in office — even if there was strong Republican opposition — is a failure of his presidency.