Federal Spies Hunt Minnesota Unions in Search of Conspiracy, But Find Solidarity

By Luis Feliz León

August 15, 2026

Source: Labor Notes

Image from PBS

Yesterday news broke of a sweeping undercover investigation by the Department of Homeland Security in Minnesota early this year to infiltrate and surveil meetings and obtain the financial records of nonprofit groups and two of the country’s largest unions, the Communications Workers (CWA) and the Service Employees (SEIU). This investigation was behind the indictments of 15 people in June.

The news should unite the labor movement in defense of constitutional rights and democracy as its members face what one defendant’s attorney calls “political prosecution.”

“CWA 7250 has learned that we have been subject to an illegal and aggressive federal investigation that used undercover agents to enter our office, infiltrate meetings we co-sponsored, subpoena our finances, and surveil one of our officers,” said CWA Local 7250 President Kieran Knutson.

“We know that this is because our members, from across the workplaces we represent,
were active in the fight against the federal occupation and racist campaign of terror by ICE. CWA 7250 members joined neighborhood rapid-response groups, distributed warning whistles, protested at the Whipple Federal Building, marched in the streets and the snow, and helped build the January 23rd Day of Truth and Freedom.

“We are proud of our work and will never apologize or back down because of these dirty tricks and intimidation.”

“The most notable revelation to me was their infiltration of the February 15th Workers Assembly to Defeat ICE, a great event that brought over 300 unionists and community members together to democratically debate on next steps for the movement,” said UFCW Local 663 executive board member Paul Kirk-Davidoff, a meat cutter at Cub Foods supermarket.

“I helped put this together, and multiple unions sponsored the event. Four undercovers attended, and made sure to take detailed notes of all the speakers and political positions. This, along with the surveillance of unions, leads me to believe that the feds were frightened by the January 23rd mass strike and the possibility of more labor action.”

BOGUS CONSPIRACY

Federal Deputy Attorney General Brian Lynch participated in the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Now he is leading a taskforce dedicated to prosecuting left-wing activism, which the administration calls political violence. The taskforce is using Trump’s National Security Policy Memorandum (NSPM-7) to investigate the funding sources of the president’s opponents.

Lynch is casting a wide net to go after Trump’s perceived enemies. The investigation targets, among others, the AFL-CIO, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, and the Minneapolis Federation of Educators. A slide that prosecutors showed to a grand jury portrays the unions, along with some nonprofits, left groups, and a bike shop, as part of an antifa conspiracy.

Minnesotans are responding with solidarity.

“This winter, Minnesotans stood together in rejecting the Trump regime’s occupation of Minnesota,” said a statement from a broad coalition of unions and nonprofit organizations, including many who had not been targeted in the investigation so far.

“Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol agents broke countless laws while kidnapping Minnesotans based on racial profiling, violating our constitutional rights, and murdering our neighbors… Across the state, Minnesotans joined with community, faith, labor, and neighborhood organizations to build networks that protected our neighbors and defended our constitutional rights.”

“Minneapolis educators worked in union to exercise our constitutional rights to peacefully protest Operation Metro Surge and other discriminatory policies of the president—and we will continue to do so,” said Minneapolis Federation of Educators Teacher Chapter President Marcia Howard in a statement. “For now, we have no further comment about this so-called investigation into whatever they’re calling ‘Antifa’ today.”

FOLLOWED TO CHURCHES, PARKS, AND UNION HALLS

In January, after federal agents killed Renee Good and union nurse Alex Pretti, investigators with the Department of Homeland Security launched the undercover mass surveillance and infiltration campaign, called “Operation Puppet Master,” targeting the widespread community and labor organizing against ICE and Border Patrol agents.

“These agents surreptitiously recorded dozens of conversations with ordinary people who were simply exercising their First Amendment rights to protest ICE’s lawless rampage in our state,” wrote attorney Kevin Riach in a brief as part of a discovery filing on behalf of Isaac Sant, one of the “Minnesota 15” who were charged in June with conspiracy to impede federal officers.

“These wild conspiracy allegations are born from the fantasies of political retribution that animate the Trump Administration,” wrote Riach. Undercover agents followed protestors to public meetings at churches, parks, libraries, schools, and union halls.

At one meeting organized by Sunrise Movement at Minneapolis Public Library, where participants learned about the history of peaceful sit-ins and de-escalation tactics, an undercover agent posing as construction worker tried to entrap a speaker, saying he “could build items that might assist with more ‘direct action,’” according to newly disclosed documents. The agent told the person “going to jail did not bother him.”

Federal agents also used facial recognition software called Clearview AI to compile photo dossiers of activists and protestors. In one diagram shared with Labor Notes, the federal government mapped faces of union leaders, members, and staff to their affiliations into an organizational chart as evidence of a conspiracy.

Homeland Security agents used administrative subpoenas to obtain the financial records of SEIU, CWA, and the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, as well as the climate group the Sunrise Movement and the nonprofit Voices for Racial Justice.

When they pored over SEIU’s wire transfers looking for alleged “domestic terrorist financing,” a release of information filing showed, all that Homeland Security investigators could find were “various types of debits and credits to include annuity payments, strike payments, strike supplies, investigations, union member dues, retiree dues, medical expenses, and pension fund expenses.”

A PROUD TRADITION

Minnesota AFL-CIO President Bernie Burnham called the targeting of the labor movement an “unhinged conspiracy theory.”

“Instead of holding federal agents accountable for shooting and killing Renée Good and our union brother Alex Pretti, or addressing the dangerous and deadly conditions within immigration detention facilities,” Burnham said in a statement, “the Trump administration continues to weaponize our federal government to intimidate our unions, our communities, and anyone who peacefully opposes their radical authoritarian agenda…

“They are now bringing back McCarthyism to paint unions and organizations that advocate for workers and families as threats to the nation. “It didn’t work in the 1950s when Joseph McCarthy accused anyone he didn’t like of being unamerican and it won’t work for Donald Trump.”

“We are part of the proud tradition of ordinary Americans who join together in union halls and church basements to make this country better,” CWA President Claude Cummings, Jr. said in a statement. “But our values of unity, of community, are under attack by a president and his Department of Homeland Security that sends government spies to surveil community meetings in church basements…

“CWA is a union with a long history of standing up to bullies and billionaire bosses. We will not be intimidated, and we will not be silenced in our solidarity with our members, with our communities, and with our neighbors.”

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This article was originally published by Labor Notes; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.

Luis Feliz León

Luis Feliz Leon is a staff writer and organizer with Labor Notes.

 

What Amazon Workers Can Learn From the Successes (And Failures) of the Fight for 15

If the labor movement is to maintain and raise standards, then we must organize Amazon—one of the largest employers and most powerful corporations in the U.S. today. Already thousands of Amazon workers have engaged in organizing campaigns in dozens of delivery stations, fulfillment centers, and air hubs. Although Amazon has responded by raising its starting wage to around $21, so far workers have won only one big unionization election, at a Staten Island warehouse, and as yet, no union contracts.

By Rand Wilson, Peter Olney

July 29, 2026

Source: Labor Notes

Fast food workers in Boston went on strike and committed civil disobedience in 2014 as part of the Fight for 15. Photo: Rand Wilson

If the labor movement is to maintain and raise standards, then we must organize Amazon—one of the largest employers and most powerful corporations in the U.S. today.

Already thousands of Amazon workers have engaged in organizing campaigns in dozens of delivery stations, fulfillment centers, and air hubs. Although Amazon has responded by raising its starting wage to around $21, so far workers have won only one big unionization election, at a Staten Island warehouse, and as yet, no union contracts.

Some of these campaigns began as independent union drives; today they’re supported mainly by the Teamsters. But now that Amazon’s aggressive expansion into groceries, health care, entertainment, and Internet web services are threatening labor standards in those sectors, the UFCW, SEIU, and other unions are considering making a serious commitment of resources to support a broader Amazon campaign.

The prospect of a better-resourced and more comprehensive campaign is an exciting development. While the efforts so far have made some inroads, winning against Amazon will require unions to spend tens of millions of dollars and sustain a multi-year campaign.

We believe there is much to be learned from the successes and shortcomings of another ambitious union campaign: SEIU’s Fight for 15.

Amazon organizers can learn from the Fight for 15’s success at building pressure through a broad public campaign—and from its failure to really build an organization of, by, and for workers. At Amazon, we need to succeed at both.

WHAT WAS IT?

For a decade, SEIU waged a national campaign that raised wages for millions of low-wage workers, dramatically improved many states’ minimum wage laws, and led to innovative sectoral bargaining (with mixed results) in California and New York City.

SEIU locals in New York City began organizing fast food workers in 2012, and grabbed national attention with a one-day strike by 200 workers demanding “$15 [an hour] and a union.” This was more than double the federal and state minimum wage, $7.25.

The bold demand and strike inspired a national Fight for 15, backed by SEIU and allied unions. It spread to 58 cities in 2013 and more than 500 cities by 2015, and gradually broadened its focus to include home care, airport, and retail workers.

Over the course of the campaign, thousands of low-waged workers, mostly women and mostly people of color, risked their livelihoods and went on strike. As at Amazon, these were usually non-majority strikes. Still, in April 2015 alone, organizers claimed, 60,000 workers took part in demonstrations across the U.S.

The objective wasn’t to organize store by store—there were 200,000 fast food outlets in the U.S., mostly owned by franchisees—but to raise the federal minimum wage to $15, improve working conditions, and build public and regulatory pressure on the major fast food employers that could eventually be leveraged to demand union recognition and collective bargaining.

WAS IT A SUCCESS?

The campaign won $70 billion in raises for 24 million workers across the country, plus other improvements like paid sick days. Seventeen states raised their minimum wages to at least $15.

SEIU pushed for joint-employer rules to force the big fast food companies, rather than just their franchisees, to bargain with workers and answer for violating their rights. And it won the utilization of a previously untapped regulatory body, the New York State Wage Board.

The movement helped link minimum wage demands with the civil rights issues of the Black Lives Matter movement, the call for immigration reform, and the insistence on equal pay for women, especially women of color. It trained a national spotlight on income inequality and inspired new worker-led organizing at Starbucks and Amazon.

Often overlooked is the campaign’s impact on union members. Hundreds of thousands of them were also making less than $15. SEIU’s campaign raised members’ expectations and put tremendous pressure on its local affiliates (and many other unions) to get their contracts above this floor. For instance, at SEIU Local 888 in Massachusetts, where one of the authors was on staff, several thousand members were below $15, and the Fight for 15 inspired many of them to demand more.

However, critics (including us) have pointed out that the campaign did not result in new members or a self-sustaining organization of fast food workers. While the slogan was “$15 and a union,” the union part often seemed secondary. The campaign focused almost entirely on directly pressuring employers and winning better legislation.

Our late friend Jane McAlevey argued that the campaign was too focused on mobilizing and advocacy, rather than deep organizing. It relied on finding a few worker representatives in each area to speak to the media and in front of legislators, instead of trying to organize majorities.

LESSONS FOR AMAZON

Amazon is a different type of target, more susceptible to disruptive worker action than the fast food industry. We have argued for a metro strategy, where unions work together in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, where there are sympathetic elected officials and huge markets to disrupt.

Amazon organizing is also starting in a different place than fast food organizing. There are dozens of serious, well-rooted organizing committees in its facilities across the country, and many have already taken collective action.

Nevertheless, the Fight for 15 gave a glimpse of what is possible when a union devotes significant resources and staff to a broad campaign.

For instance, labor needs to up its capacity to research Amazon’s chokepoints and vulnerabilities. It needs a coordinating hub that uses collaborative methods to distribute relevant data and reports to networks of university research and labor centers. It also needs a comprehensive digital capacity that spotlights worker actions and inspires broad support with sophisticated advertising and social media.

SEIU spent between $70 million and $180 million on the Fight for 15. The only other recent organizing campaign that came close to this scale was UFCW’s Our Walmart, which became a public relations irritant to the company, but never posed a strategic challenge to Walmart’s power or business model.

The size and scope of the Fight for 15 was impressive. It had:

• A strong field team, with 50 national organizers working in 30 states, supplemented by staff from the locals, with regular national and regional meetings
• Heavy engagement from leaders of SEIU local unions and state councils
• Significant staff research capacity
• A sophisticated approach to communications, using Twitter and a rapid-response website, and swamping reporters with strike news
• A multi-year budget commitment
• Deliberate engagement with community groups and elected officials as key allies

SEIU invited community coalitions to play meaningful roles—and in an unusual move for a national union, it did not brand the campaign with its signature purple. To fight Amazon, we will need a broad coalition of unions and other progressive forces at the national level, with metro labor tables to coordinate the campaign.

NEAR-TERM GOALS

The ultimate goal of collective bargaining remains far off for workers at Amazon Logistics, Whole Foods, and Amazon Web Services. The only collective bargaining that Amazon does in the U.S. is with the unions in Hollywood because of its purchase of MGM, an already unionized firm.

Labor needs to keep organizing at Amazon, figuring out how to disrupt its operations, and working toward winning unionization elections. A lesson we can draw from the Fight for 15 is the value of finding more ways to pressure the company at the same time—like local ordinances, state regulation, legislation, and boycotts.

It’s a fatal (and common) mistake to substitute these tactics for worker organizing. But it’s also a mistake to dismiss them as distractions. We need to hit this company from every angle.

An ordinance already under consideration in New York City would require Amazon to abandon the outsourced “Delivery Service Providers” model within the city and employ drivers directly. States could pass regulations targeting Amazon’s poor treatment of pregnant workers, or penalize it for its high level of reported injuries and workers comp.

Boycotts could target Amazon’s most vulnerable consumer sector: Whole Foods. Jobs with Justice could host Workers’ Rights Board hearings that “subpoena” CEO Andy Jassy and other executives to testify regarding Amazon’s corporate misconduct.

Within their own ranks, unions impacted by Amazon’s assault on labor standards must commit significant resources to educating members on the strategic importance of taking on Amazon.

And much like the Fight for 15 encouraged underpaid union members to demand $15, Amazon organizing can spotlight issues that union members may also be dealing with, like tech-driven speedup, and build momentum to raise standards in union workplaces that are actually behind Amazon in some way.

ON THE INSIDE

The Fight for 15 showed the impact of a broad, well-coordinated public campaign on the fast food companies. A similar effort is needed at Amazon—but it must be accompanied by building powerful workplace committees and identifying strategic pressure points.

During the recent national strike by Starbucks Workers United, union supporters blockaded a Starbucks warehouse in York, Pennsylvania. (Hopefully, their campaign will undertake organizing those strategic warehouse workers.) Similar experimentation is needed in the Amazon production system to determine where its greatest vulnerabilities are, and where organizing is advanced enough to effectively stop the flow of goods.

We will need an “outside in” strategy that engages the ethnic and religious connections of this diverse workforce. The best example so far is the Somali-based Awood Center in Shakopee, Minnesota, where community leaders have helped to legitimize the internal organization of Amazon workers.

Labor could establish Amazon Aid Centers in the metro areas where Amazon operates multiple facilities, as a point of entry for aggrieved Amazon workers and ethnic-based community organizations that want to assist the effort. The Missouri Workers Center is already trying something like this.

Supporting “salts” (workers who take a job with the intention of organizing) and pro-union cadre is another essential component of building workplace committees and carrying out shop floor actions. UNITE HERE and other unions have developed models for recruiting, training, and sustaining salts that should be replicated. A national salting program could include robust college campus recruitment, establishing affordable housing for salts, plus other indirect subsidies.

Worker protections under the Trump National Labor Relations Board are minimal. The situation may necessitate trying new tactics that use the law of the jungle to workers’ advantage—not illegal tactics, but venturing beyond the tactics that are legally protected, since those protections have become so minimal anyway. Could Amazon union supporters find ways around the legal restrictions on secondary picketing and sympathy strikes?

The present reality of our relative labor weakness and social media strength makes what some organizers call an “air war” compelling. It’s always the path of least resistance to quickly scale up a campaign. But if it’s not accompanied by significant resources for genuine worker organizing and leadership development, all the money in the world won’t produce enduring worker power.

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This article was originally published by Labor Notes; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.Email

Rand Wilson

Rand Wilson is a long-time union organizer and strategic adviser to the CHIPS Communities United coalition.

In 57 Languages, Meatpackers Strike for the First Time in 40 Years

By Caitlyn Clark, Lisa Xu 

March 23, 2026

Source: Labor Notes

Immigrant workers from around the world are on strike at one of the nation's largest beef plants. Photo: Essential Workers for Democracy

In less than a quarter-mile stretch of sidewalk, chatter in 57 languages overlaps with the sound of dancehall, bachata, Thai pop, Haitian kompa, and Micronesian hip-hop. At sunset, dozens gather for iftar, breaking their Ramadan fast; the music, pulsing from boomboxes and cell phones held up to megaphones, swells into one shared hum.

In this sliver of land across from the sprawling JBS beef processing plant—among the largest in the country—workers from around the world have united in the largest U.S. meatpacking strike in 40 years.

The 3,800 workers at the JBS beef processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, walked off the job on Monday, March 16, launching a two-week unfair labor practice strike.

This is the company’s flagship beef plant in the U.S. Its previous contract with Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 expired last July.

Strikers say JBS has been increasing the speed of the production line while cutting work hours from 40 a week to 35, squeezing out more work for less money. A thousand Haitian workers at the Greeley plant have filed a class action lawsuit against JBS for discriminatory practices that push them to work at dangerously fast line speeds.

Line speed is a major issue in the meatpacking industry. The UFCW International recently spoke out against a new proposal from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to remove federal limits on line speeds entirely.

“We’re demanding our rights, both in terms of wages and working conditions, because before the strike, they really took advantage of us,” said a worker in the brisket trim department, who spoke in Spanish and asked to remain anonymous. “They want the same output, but fewer hours and fewer people.”

After 18 years working at JBS, he said, “everything is so expensive. Everything has gone up, except our wages.”

‘ONE WRONG MOVE CAN TAKE YOUR LIFE’

Workers are also demanding that the company stop charging them out-of-pocket costs for personal protective equipment like mesh vests and arm guards—essential because they work with knives, saws, and other sharp, dangerous equipment.

JBS garnishes workers’ wages when equipment needs to be replaced due to daily wear and tear, damage, or theft. This gear can cost workers up to $1,100, taken directly from their paychecks without their consent.

“I have never experienced anything harder than this in my life,” said Teshale Dadi, who works on the chuck line. JBS was his first job after moving to the U.S. from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. “One wrong move can take your life away.”

The various jobs mentioned in this article are all similar: cow carcasses are moving along on a conveyor belt, and workers are very quickly cutting them into smaller pieces and trimming off fat with knives.

“Access to the equipment is essential for us,” said Brett Tanner, who moved here from Arkansas and has worked as a ribber at JBS since 2024. “Personally, I love my job. I really do. We feed America. But it’s stressful sometimes, the hours we work and the physical toll the job does take on your body.”

Meatpacking jobs are among the most dangerous in the country. Workers on the picket line showed cuts, deep callouses, and chemical burns on their hands from years at the plant. Repetitive motion injuries are also common. Slips, falls, and machinery crushes can even be fatal; in 2021, a worker at the Greeley plant died after falling into a vat of chemicals.

“Our hard work makes JBS a profitable company, the biggest [meatpacking] company [in the world],” Dadi said. “Doing this hard work, everyone deserves the highest respect. Our pay is generally good, relative to [the rest of] the country, but for this specific job, I don’t think it’s even close to what we deserve.”

“It feels empowering that we have so many people standing together to send a message that we want better pay, we want more access to equipment,” Tanner said.

FACING DOWN A CORPORATE GIANT

Organizing across many languages and cultures has been a historical constant in the meatpacking sector. Union drives in the 1930s brought together Black, Mexican, and Eastern European immigrant workers to build some of the earliest meatpacking unions in the U.S.

This is the first strike ever at the Greeley plant, and the first major U.S. meatpacking strike since the 1985-6 strike at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota. (There were wildcat walkouts at Smithfield Foods in Tarheel, North Carolina, in 2006 and 2007.) At Hormel, 1,500 members of UFCW Local P-9 struck for 13 months, refusing concessions that their international union was pressing them to accept. The Hormel strike galvanized grassroots support from around the country, though ultimately the workers were defeated by the powerful forces arrayed against them.

Over the last few years, UFCW Local 7 has built up a fighting reputation, with some of the largest strikes in the union. Last year 10,000 Kroger grocery workers in Local 7 went on strike for two weeks in February, followed by another 7,000 grocery workers at Safeway in June.

But meatpacking workers face a steep uphill battle as they fight for better conditions. Union density in the industry has fallen precipitously. Up to 90 percent of meatpacking workers belonged to unions in the postwar era, but only 15 percent did by 2019, as the industry consolidated and shuttered unionized plants, only to restart production in non-union plants.

The meatpacking industry is now so concentrated that the “Big Four” companies—JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef— control 85 percent of beef processing in the U.S. JBS acquired the Greeley plant when it bought Swift & Co. in 2007, one of many acquisitions and mergers on its road to becoming the world’s largest meatpacker.

Meatpacking companies have been reaping record profits since the Covid pandemic (notwithstanding fines for price fixing), even as communities suffer from plant closures and beef prices soar for consumers.

JBS, a multinational based in Brazil, is the U.S.’s largest beef processor, and also owns the second-largest chicken processor, Pilgrim’s Pride. It provides meat products for fast food chains like McDonald’s and Burger King, as well as wholesalers and grocers like Costco and Kroger.

Even in an industry known for greed and lawbreaking, JBS has a notorious reputation. The company paid a $4 million fine last year after the Department of Labor found that cleaning contractors at the Greeley plant were using child labor. It also paid $55 million in a $200 million meatpacking industry settlement over collusion to repress wages.

For a long time, the company’s effort to get listed on the New York Stock Exchange was held up by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission due to extensive corruption scandals and the company’s role in deforesting the Amazon rainforest.

In January 2025, Pilgrim’s Pride made the single largest donation to Trump’s inauguration committee, $5 million, leading to allegations of a quid pro quo. A few months later, the SEC approved the stock exchange listing.

NATIONAL NEGOTIATIONS

The Greeley plant is one of dozens of JBS plants represented by the UFCW. Fourteen of these plants, including 26,000 workers in 12 locals, are now covered by a national contract that was settled for the first time last May. Local 7, which opted out of national negotiations, is pushing beyond this agreement, citing higher costs of living in Colorado.

The national contract included wins on regulating line speeds, including steward training and provisions for walking stewards (who are empowered to move around the plant to proactively enforce the contract, and who are paid by the company rather than the union), and improvements to wages and sick leave.

A particular triumph was the establishment of a new Taft-Hartley pension plan. Pensions used to be standard within meatpacking; the UFCW touted this one as the first to be offered by a meatpacking employer since 1986. (At least one news report speculated that JBS agreed to a pension as an optics move to get its stock listing approved by the SEC.)

That said, the national JBS pension plan is relatively modest, starting at contributions of 10 cents per hour worked in the first year of the contract, and increasing by 10 cents per hour each additional year. Local 663 and Local 1846 negotiated separate language to give individual members the choice whether to continue with their previous 401k or opt into the pension.

Nearly a dozen UFCW locals have been showing up in solidarity at the picket lines in Local 7, including Local 663 from Minnesota and Local 431 from Iowa, which were part of national negotiations.

Local 7 announced at the outset that this would be a limited-duration, two-week strike. It could be shorter, the local has stated, if JBS agrees to come back to the bargaining table and negotiate in good faith.

“I hope that we get justice, and that other meat processing plants stand up and get justice too,” said the anonymous worker, who is originally from Mexico, “for the good of the Latino community, and for the workers above all.”

Caitlyn Clark is a national organizer at Essential Workers for Democracy, an organization dedicated to rank-and-file member education and empowerment for workers in grocery, meatpacking, and retail. Lisa Xu is a staff writer and organizer at Labor Notes.