A small town’s American Dream is at risk. What happens when its biggest employer shuts down?
LEXINGTON, Neb. (AP) — Rural St. On a cold day after mass at St. Ann’s Catholic Church NebraskaWorshipers descended into the basement and sat on folding chairs, their faces barely masking the fear gripping their town.
A blanket hung over the room, just like the holiday season in Lexington, Nebraska.
“All of a sudden they’re telling us there are no more jobs. Your world is closing in on you,” Alejandra Gutierrez said.
He and others work at a Tyson Foods beef plant and are among 3,200 people who will lose their jobs when it becomes Lexington’s largest meat plant. employer closes factory Next month after more than two decades of operation.
Hundreds of families may be forced to pack up their belongings, leave the town of 11,000 and head east. Omaha or Iowaor southwards Kansas’ meatpacking towns or beyondThe spinoff has caused layoffs at Lexington’s restaurants, barbershops, grocery stores, convenience stores and taco trucks.
“Losing 3,000 jobs in a city of 10,000 to 12,000 people is as big a shutdown as we’ve seen in decades,” said Michael Hicks, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Indiana. He will be “close to the poster child for tough times.”
Job losses are expected to reach 7,000, largely in Lexington and surrounding counties, according to estimates shared with the Associated Press by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Tyson employees alone will lose an estimated $241 million in wages and benefits annually.
Tyson says it will close plant to ‘right-size’ beef business historically low cattle The herd and the company in the US are expected to lose $600 million beef production next financial year.
The plant’s closure threatens to destroy the Great Plains town where the American Dream remains within reach, where immigrants who speak no English and have never finished high school buy homes, raise children in a safe community, and send them to college.
Mortgages and car payments, property taxes and tuition — symbols of economic progress — are bills thousands of Tyson workers can no longer pay.
St. Sitting among his daughters at Ann’s church, Gutierrez recalled being told the plant was closing just before Thanksgiving while visiting a college campus with high school senior Kimberly.
“At that moment, my daughter said she didn’t want to study anymore,” Gutierrez said. “Because where are we going to find the money to go to college?”
A tear ran down Kimberly’s cheek as she looked at her mother and then at her hands.
‘Tyson was our homeland’
If you throw an arrow at a map of the United States, Lexington, called “Lex” by the locals, will be a bullseye.
Half-hidden by barren hackberry trees, cornfields and pastures of Black Angus cattle, it’s easy to miss Interstate 80, but a driver can spy the resort’s massive steam-pumping industrial buildings.
The facility opened in 1990 and was purchased by Tyson 11 years later; It attracted thousands of workers, and within a decade the town’s population nearly doubled.
Many came from recession-hit Los Angeles, including Lizeth Yanes, who initially hated what she called a “little ghost town.”
But soon Lexington flourished and the suburbs sprouted among the oaks and American elms. In the city center of cobblestone streets and brick buildings, there is a Somali grocery store next to a Spanish bakery; locals attend more than a dozen churches and various city entertainment centers.
To this day, the factory creates the rhythm of the town, with workers commuting daily A, B and C shifts, filling restaurants, school pick-up lines and the single-screen movie theater showing “Polar Express.”
“It took me a long time to really enjoy this little place,” Yanes said. “Now that I’ve enjoyed it, I have to go.”
He said the atmosphere inside the Tyson plant, where workers process 5,000 head of cattle a day, work in slaughterhouses, and crews clean or cut cuts of meat, is “funeral-like.”
“Tyson was our homeland,” said factory worker Arab Adan. The Kenyan immigrant was sitting in his car with his two energetic sons and asked him a question he didn’t know the answer to: “Which state are we going to, dad?”
The only thing Adan is determined to do is for his children to finish the school year in Lexington; School officials say nearly half of the students have parents who work for Tyson.
The school district, which speaks at least 20 languages and dialects, has high school graduation and college attendance rates above the state and national average and is one of Nebraska’s largest walking groups. Residents are proud of the diversity and close-knit community where young people return to raise families.
St. During the service at St. Ann’s, parishioners gave money from their pockets to a fund for families in financial need, even though they knew they would be unemployed next month. Francisco Antonio then considered his future job options with a sad smile.
After the plant closed on Jan. 20, the 52-year-old father of four said he would stay in Lexington for a few months and look for work, but “there was no future anymore.” He took off his glasses, paused, apologized and tried to explain his feelings.
“This is mostly home, not work,” he said, putting on his glasses with a shy smile.
“We need another opportunity, another job, here at Lex,” he said. “Otherwise Lex will disappear.”
‘Tyson owes a debt to this community’
The domino effect could go something like this: Economist Hicks said that if 1,000 families left the city — he wouldn’t be surprised if twice that many — it would leave empty seats in schools, leading to teacher layoffs; There would be far fewer customers in restaurants, stores and other businesses.
Most of the customers at Los Jalapenos, the Mexican restaurant down the street from the plant, are Tyson workers. They fill the stands after work, and owner Armando Martinez’s mustachioed grin and “Hola, amigo!”
Martinez’s grandson once told his grandfather that he wanted to work for Tyson when he grew up. The boy’s fifth-grade sister recently met with her classmates to talk about the changes taking place in their parents. Some were going to: Californiaothers in kansas. They were all in tears.
If he can’t pay the bills, the restaurant will close, but Martinez, who is on dialysis for diabetes and has an amputated foot, said “there’s nowhere we can go” and prayed for a miracle: that Tyson would change his mind.
He knows this is unlikely. Asked by The Associated Press for comment on plans for the facility, Tyson said in a statement that it was “currently evaluating how we can reuse the facility within our own production network.” It did not elaborate or say whether it planned to provide support to the community through the facility’s closure.
Many people, including City Manager Joe Pepplitsch, hope that Tyson will put the facility up for sale and that a new company will bring jobs. This is not a quick fix; It requires time, negotiation, renewal, and there are no guarantees for similar work.
“Tyson owes a debt to this community. I think they have a responsibility here to help mitigate some of the impact,” he said, noting that Tyson did not pay city taxes due to an agreement negotiated decades ago.
‘At our age, it is not easy to go back and start over’
At the Dawson County Fairgrounds near the plant, Tyson workers recently filled a long hall as government agencies — responding with the urgency of a natural disaster — provided information on retraining, writing resumes, applying for unemployment and avoiding scammers when selling homes.
The participants’ faces were calm, as if listening to a doctor’s prediction. “Your financial health will change,” they were told. “Don’t ignore the bank, they won’t go away.”
Many of the older workers do not speak English, have not completed high school, and are not computer savvy. The last application some filled out was decades ago.
Kenyan immigrant Adan said, “We only know how to work in the meat industry for Tyson, we have no other experience.”
St. Workers at St. Ann’s also expressed these concerns.
“They only want young people now,” said Juventino Castro, who has worked at Tyson for a quarter-century. “I don’t know what will happen in the remaining time.”
Lupe Ceja said she saved some money, but it won’t last long. Luz Alvidrez has a cleaning job that will keep her going for a while. Others may return to Mexico for a while. Nobody has a clear plan.
“It won’t be easy,” said Fernando Sanchez, who has lived in Tyson with his wife for 35 years. “We started from scratch here, and now it’s time to start from scratch again.”
Tears rolled down his wife’s cheeks and he shook her hand.
