When Deborah Rodarte arrives for her shift at the Swift Beef Co. plant outside Greeley, Colorado, owned by JBS USA, the first thing she does is gear up. Donning a hard hat and protective equipment, including a layer of metal mesh meant to keep knives from cutting through to the skin, she heads to the line and waits for the cattle to start coming down the chain.

Rodarte spends her shift trimming fat from cuts of beef as they move past her station. “It’s quick motion all day, every day,” she said. “One after another after another.” The job, she added, is hard on the body. “You’re trimming a piece of meat, taking all the fat, and when you’re done you throw it on top, and the next one is already there.”

Now Rodarte and roughly 3,800 of her coworkers — members of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7 — are on strike after months of negotiations over wages, health insurance costs, and working conditions. It’s the largest strike in the meatpacking industry in decades, and the first ever at the Greeley plant, which accounts for around 5 percent of the US beef-processing capacity. JBS is the world’s largest meatpacking company.