LEXINGTON — The pastor paced the stage as he broached his town’s biggest dilemma. Forty mostly white congregants listened from the pews of the First United Methodist Church of Lexington. Behind them, century-old stained glass depicts an American flag atop a hill. More recently, the congregation draped the national flags of Mexico, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba from their sanctuary’s balcony.
“It is our decision what to do,” Elmer Armijo, the church’s head minister, said during his Sunday morning sermon. “It is our decision of if we let it go and rise again, or we continue to hope that the biggest company in this town is going to change their mind.”
When he arrived in the western Nebraska town, the 60-year-old native of Honduras inherited a shrinking English-speaking congregation and a growing Spanish-speaking one — until the town’s Tyson Foods beef processing plant announced in November it would close its doors after more than 35 years in Lexington.
The closure — happening in a matter of days — will eliminate 3,212 jobs, about half Lexington’s labor force in the town of around 11,000. Tyson’s exit from the region is projected to cost 7,000 jobs statewide with an economic loss of $3.28 billion a year, according to University of Nebraska-Lincoln researchers.
The bulk of that fallout is expected to be concentrated in Dawson County. And the looming shutdown is already taking a toll on First United Methodist, where nearly half of the church’s Spanish-speaking congregation has already left town to find jobs elsewhere, Armijo said. The congregants who will remain in those pews face the specter of wounded businesses, emptying neighborhoods and a crippled town.
A wave of donations has poured into a local relief fund, but Armijo wonders if it will be enough to keep former Tyson employees in town — and for how long. His congregation is grappling with the same questions.
“I can feel the community’s fear,” Armijo said. “I share their fear, too. We receive people in our office all the time saying, ‘What are we going to do? How can you help me?’
“What we give to them is just a little hope. But that is not enough.”
‘We were in shock’
It was the Friday before Thanksgiving when members of Tyson’s corporate team arrived to deliver the news, blindsiding the plant’s 3,200 workers, many of whom were immigrants from Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Somalia and Sudan.
Kenia Sosa, 44, received one of the thousands of boilerplate letters Tyson handed out. The company was making the “difficult decision” to cease operations at the plant, the letter read. The closure would result in a mass layoff that Tyson anticipated “to be permanent in nature.”
“People were crying,” Sosa said through an interpreter. “We were in shock. It was something very hard because it took us by surprise. We didn’t know it was going to happen.”
For three years, she and her husband, Yadier Beritan, had both worked at the plant, where employees processed 5,000 head of cattle a day, accounting for nearly 5% of the nation’s total daily beef slaughter. Nearly every member of First United Methodist’s Spanish congregation worked at Tyson, too, or knew someone who did, church members said.
Within a month after Tyson’s announcement, Sosa and Beritan had moved to Grand Island with their two daughters. They found work at JBS Foods, seizing two of the increasingly scarce manufacturing jobs open in the state. In December, the Nebraska Department of Labor listed fewer than 1,500 manufacturing openings across the state — and only one in Dawson County.
“There are not enough of that industry in the area to employ everybody and keep them even semi-local,” said Josie Gatti Schafer, the director of the Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. “It’s a shock to that labor market.”
Flyers left at the town’s library advertise jobs at plants as close as North Platte and as far away as Pennsylvania. An electronic billboard across the street from the plant advertises work at the JBS facility in Grand Island. In thick, handwritten letters, a posterboard pinned to a nearby street sign lists the addresses of homes and apartments for rent there.
More than 300 workers have transferred to other Tyson plants in Nebraska and beyond, an employee said. Nineteen students left the town’s high school by early January, the superintendent told a state lawmaker.
And more than 200 Tyson workers have sought help navigating unemployment assistance or job hunting from Lutheran Family Services, said Handy Marin Diaz, a refugee and immigrant programming manager there. Some who seek work in cities like North Platte and Grand Island are willing to commute an hour or more both ways to stay in Lexington, she said. Most come with questions Diaz can’t answer.
Questions like: “‘Is Tyson going to sell? Is there going to be a new manufacturing plant that comes in to ease the situation?’” Diaz said. “And obviously, those are questions we don’t have the answers to. There have also been many people asking, ‘How am I going to feed my kids?’ or ‘How am I going to pay for my house?’”
“They are not sure exactly what direction to go at the moment,” she said.
‘We’ve got a long ways to go’
For more than 50 years, Gary White has kept his family’s Dawson County feedlot operating.
A member of First United Methodist since the fourth grade, the 78-year-old has watched his church’s English congregation dwindle but his community grow since Tyson and its predecessor, IBP, came to town in 1990.
Lexington’s population soared in the decade that followed, jumping from fewer than 7,000 residents to more than 10,000 as the beef plant that buoyed the town became the top market for White’s cattle.
UNL researchers estimate the plant sourced 85% of its beef from Nebraska feedlots like White’s, home to 2,500 head. With Tyson’s closure, he’s bracing for added freight costs to ship his cattle to beef processors elsewhere in Nebraska and Kansas instead of Lexington. But he’s more worried about what lies ahead for Dawson County, where local sales tax revenues are expected to fall by $2.7 million annually following the exodus of Tyson’s workforce.
“Hopefully, something will come in,” White said. “And maybe we’ll be better for it in the long run. But, boy, we sure can’t see that right now.”
The community’s fate hinges in part on the future of the physical Tyson plant. State officials have urged the company to repurpose the building into a smaller-scale operation – or sell. Gov. Jim Pillen said Wednesday he is “pushing at every meeting” with Tyson to “decide that sooner than later.”
“It can’t take months and months or years,” the governor said during a press conference. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair to Nebraska. It’s not fair to Lexington. It’s not fair to the people.”
A Tyson representative in January told State Sen. Teresa Ibach of Sumner the company will have a plan in place for what to do with the property by March 1, the senator said.
Ibach is pushing for the Nebraska Legislature to pass a bill that would provide grants to communities of fewer than 50,000 people impacted by “sudden and significant” private sector closures — a bill designed to direct state aid to Lexington.
Any aid from the bill, if it passes, is months from being dispersed. Lexington’s recovery won’t happen overnight, she said.
“We can’t fix it in even six months,” Ibach said. “But I’m kind of a three-, five- and 10-year girl. And so, in three years, what’s it look like? In five years, what’s it look like? And in 10 years, hopefully we have a thriving community again.”
In Lexington, community leaders — backed by donors from across Nebraska and some from out of state — established an immediate relief fund and raised $135,000 to help Tyson workers buy food, pay their utility bills, cover their rent and pay for health care.
Beth Roberts, the director of the Lexington Community Foundation, which established the relief fund, said at a community meeting earlier this month that the effort still has “a long ways to go.”
“I think the word” for what the money provides, Roberts said, “is hope.”
For Armijo, the Methodist pastor who attended the community meeting where Roberts outlined the plan for the relief fund, the word was disappointment.
In the days before the meeting, he had heard of three Latino businesses in town that were preparing to close their doors, he said. He had expected city and state, if not federal, leaders to outline a longer-term plan for life in Lexington after Tyson’s exit — something more like a cure and less like a bandage, he said.
“This is not what the people want to hear,” he said. “We need to put hope in the people. Why they need to stay here. Why we need to be together.”
‘We don’t know what’s going to happen’
Hours after Armijo finished his sermon Sunday morning, Pastor Javier Aguila paced the same stage and preached a similar message to a different audience in a different language at the church.
He told the 30 or so Latino congregants who attended Sunday afternoon to “make the decision to walk with God this year” in the face of Tyson’s exit.
“I think that all this that has happened lately with Tyson has stolen people’s sleep,” he said. “People can’t even sleep.”
Aguila had already watched 30 regulars leave the church in the months since the announcement. Sunday marked the last service for another 10. He and Armijo feared the Latino turnout could dip close to a dozen in another week — down from 65 strong in November.
“Is there anyone else leaving this week?” Aguila asked as Sunday’s service neared its end, inviting what was left of his congregation to form a circle in front of the century-old sanctuary’s pews. “Put your hand here.”
Some cried as the group huddled together, embracing each other as their pastor prayed over the latest congregants set to leave his church. He thanked God for their time together. He blessed their new jobs and their children’s new school.
“And though today we say goodbye, my God, we know that they are being sent to practice ministry, to practice your calling, to practice all that you’ve put in our lives,” he said.
Genesis Brito and her family are among those planning to leave. After more than a year working for Tyson in Lexington, Sunday marked the 35-year-old’s last service at First United Methodist. She and her husband, Edier, found work at a Cargill plant more than 200 miles west in Fort Morgan, Colorado.
They plan to move there with their 12-year-old daughter after Tyson closes. They had visited the city only once before, a few weeks prior to their move, Brito said.
She does not know what life has in store for her in Fort Morgan. But she thinks she knows what to expect for the community she was leaving behind.
“Tyson was what was holding Lexington together,” she said through an interpreter.
After service, tears welled in Aguila’s eyes as he recalled the fast growth and faster decline of the Spanish service that his family founded less than two years ago. He grappled with whether he could rebuild his church in Lexington, with what to do for the congregants he could not help, with what would come next.
“The wait is very hard,” he said through an interpreter. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. But we can only trust in God.”
Flatwater Free Press reporters Natalia Alamdari, Sara Gentzler and Jeremy Turley contributed to this report.
7 Comments
Votes have consequences. My first question before I give one single solitary ounce of empathy is who did they support in an election? Even those who were not eligible to vote who were they standing behind? I already know. Along with the rest of the country who has gotten screwed after trying to save you all I wish you, THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS!!!!
I could not agree more. Stop voting against your own interests and then being surprised when you get hurt.
why doesn’t the Hatch Act apply here? Companies who reduce workforces by more than X% of the population are required to assist in job search, retraining and severance.
The Hatch Act does not apply here because it has nothing to do with private employers like Tyson, private sector employees, closing plants, Lexington, pastors, or beef.
You could not be more off the mark with the Hatch Act!
The plant has been open for decades, did it need safety updates that Tyson “couldn’t afford”? In the current political climate Tyson chose to shed itself of more than one liability.
Tyson closed or slowed down production at a few other plants but I don’t hear anybody blaming them for the price of meat.
Thank you, Andrew and your Flatwater colleagues, for delving into important stories like this that help Nebraskans understand the ripple effects of one community’s realities.
I remember in a nearby town, when IBP workers, mostly men in their prime working years (20’s-40’s) back in the 1980s, tried to unionize to get health insurance and higher wages since many had families to support. So I overheard, as I was a kid in one of those families. IBP, later Tyson, found immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries to do the work instead. Former managers and other employees left for Omaha to find work. Maximizing profits trumped prioritizing the greater good of the community that gave them workers in the prime bodily fitness of their lives. Wishing the people of Lexington well. It’s unfortunate that people were initially pitted against each other when all were hard working. IBP and Tyson have certainly left Nebraska a changed state.