She and the others work at Tyson Foods' beef plant and are among the 3,200 people who will lose their jobs when Lexington's biggest employer closes the plant next month after more than two decades of operation.
Hundreds of families may be forced to pack up and leave the town of 11,000, heading east to Omaha or Iowa, or south to the meatpacking towns of Kansas or beyond, causing spinoff layoffs in Lexington's restaurants, barbershops, grocers, convenience stores and taco trucks.
…
Near the plant, at the Dawson County Fairgrounds, Tyson workers recently filled a long hall as state agencies — responding with the urgency of a natural disaster — offered information on retraining, writing a resume, filing for unemployment and avoiding scammers when selling homes.
Attendees' faces were subdued, like listening to a doctor's prognosis. "Your financial health is going to change," they were told. "Don't ignore the bank, they will not go away."
Many of the older workers don't speak English, haven't graduated high school and aren't computer savvy. The last application some filled out was decades ago.
"We know only working in meat for Tyson, we don't have any other experience," said Adan, the Kenyan immigrant.
Tragic story about a Tyson plant closing in Nebraska. Who will they sell their homes to? (I'm curious if the anchor employer risk factored into the mortgage pricing.) What is Tyson's moral responsibility to its workers, and to the local economy its workers sustain?
This is a bit of a stretch, but this story makes me more sympathetic to the idea that some firms are too big to fail—not Tyson, but other firms in the American economy that are much more deeply integrated. Perhaps sometimes the government does have a moral imperative to step in and prevent closures, though in those cases shareholders and management should be wiped out. That logic doesn't apply here because the plant is no longer economically relevant (beef is declining), but it's a good reminder of how anchor business failures ripple outward.