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mass layoffs
How to Stop Tyson Foods from Destroying 3,200 Jobs in a Nebraska Town of 10,000
Dan Osborn, the independent US Senate candidate in Nebraska, needs a plan. And it's a plan that could and should be embraced in states and communities nationwide.
Apr 15, 2026
Here are some things to know about large corporations:
- Corporations in America are free to shut down facilities, whether profitable or unprofitable, with devastating effects on workers, their families, and their communities.
- Corporations are also free to use their cash to repurchase their own stock shares, driving up their price without increasing the company’s value—a pure and simple case of stock manipulation that enriches top corporate executives and Wall Street investors.
- And corporations in the US enjoy the benefits that come from receiving taxpayer-funded government contracts, while retaining the right to destroy the jobs of taxpayers, if they see fit.
Dan Osborn, the Nebraska independent senatorial candidate, knows all this. It’s a good part of the reason he’s running for office, and he needs a plan. He knows this is a travesty, a disaster, a case of the rich and powerful trashing working people. As he puts it, “This isn’t left and right anymore, this is big versus little,” and he wants to do all he can to stop Tyson from killing 3,200 jobs in Lexington, Nebraska.
Osborn has called for the enforcement of the 1921 federal Packers and Stockyards Act, which was designed to promote competitiveness in the livestock, meat, and poultry industries and prohibit deception and fraud. He claims Tyson broke the law by closing its Lexington, Nebraska, plant instead of selling the facility to a competitor. The closure was “destroying 5 percent of America’s beef processing capacity,” Osborn argued, which will drive up prices instead of maintaining a competitive market.
In just the last quarter of 2025, Tyson conducted more than $200 million in stock repurchases which did nothing to improve production and nothing at all to protect the workers.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer joined the fight by demanding that Agricultural Secretary Brooke Rollings use the authority she has under the Act to block the Lexington closure. But, on January 21, 2026, the plant shut down anyway. In fact, no plant closing has ever been stopped by this act.
If the law is not enough to protect these devastated workers and communities, where can Osborn find leverage to help them?
It is really hard to stop a plant closing in the United States of America. Of the millions of mass layoffs over the past three decades, I’m having trouble finding any that have been reversed (although my friends at the Teamsters Union say they have been successful on occasion.) There have been at least a handful of worker buyouts of facilities scheduled for shutdowns that kept them open for a time, but all I know about soon went under.
There is one point of leverage, however, that has yet to be used—federal contracts.
Large corporations love to dine at the federal trough, gobbling up as much taxpayer money as they can through federal grants and contracts. Tyson is no exception. It’s got its hands all over our tax dollars. In 2025, it received 170 federal awards for a total of $234 million. It also received, from 2018 to 2020, $727 million from the Pentagon to supply beef to the military. And those contracts have been renewed through today.
Mass layoffs are a heartless tool that ignores how critical stable employment is to families and communities.
What if Osborn promised that as senator, he would fight for a new federal regulation like this:
All corporations of 500 or more employees that receive taxpayer-funded federal contracts shall not be permitted to conduct compulsory layoffs of taxpayers. All layoffs must be voluntary based on financial incentives.
Wouldn’t that be fair and just? After all, voluntary financial incentives to leave a job are commonplace for executives. And it’s not just severance. The idea is that no one should be forced to leave. The financial incentive would need to be high enough to attract voluntary departures.
Is this proposal too radical for Nebraska?
No doubt, corporations and their political handmaidens would vigorously attack the proposal. Isn’t the key to a free society the right of business owners, large and small, to manage their own enterprises as they see fit? When the government intervenes to control hiring and firing, isn’t it stepping towards socialism, which history has shown is both a failure economically and a path towards totalitarianism? Wouldn’t such a proposal harm jobs, our economy, and democracy?
Osborn’s response could be simple: Corporations would be totally free to hire and fire at will—but not if they are taking taxpayer money. If they want our money, then they can’t force us out against our will. No compulsory layoffs!
We tested this idea and the corporate attacks in our survey of 3,000 Midwestern voters across Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. About half of those voters supported the idea, with very low percentages opposed, even after being introduced to corporate attacks against the policy.
If they want our money, then they can’t force us out against our will. No compulsory layoffs!
Where would the money come from?
That’s where stock buybacks come in. In just the last quarter of 2025, Tyson conducted more than $200 million in stock repurchases which did nothing to improve production and nothing at all to protect the workers. They chose to pad the bonuses of Tyson executives and the portfolios of large Wall Street shareholders. It might have made instead a nice start on a worker buyout fund.
The proposal may sound radical, but nothing about this is pie in the sky. The Siemens Corporation in Germany agreed to a no-compulsory layoff proposal with its union, IG Metall, after it announced the layoff of 3,000 workers. As the result of negotiated settlement with the union, the workers could take voluntary financial buyout packages. But, none of the workers were forced to leave. And instead of the scheduled shutdown of five facilities, the company agreed to put in new products to keep the plants open.
Large corporations like Siemens and Tyson have enormous flexibility. They can rearrange production in countless ways. Unless pressured by the workers through their labor unions, they serve corporate needs first and subordinate those of workers. Mass layoffs are a heartless tool that ignores how critical stable employment is to families and communities. These companies have the financial power to fulfill the needs and interests of their employees, but they choose not to. But for Tyson, and so many companies today, all that matters is shoveling as much money as possible into the pockets of their wealthy executives and Wall Street investors. The workers be damned!
At this point, the Tyson workers and Dan Osborn know that the plant is not going to be reopened. But Osborn’s campaign could commemorate those workers by becoming the first politician in the nation to offer a realistic and potentially popular solution to this recurring nightmare:
No Compulsory Layoffs at Corporations That Receive Taxpayer Money!
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‘Disgusting’: Trump’s Top Economic Adviser Brags About Killing 300,000 ‘High-Paying’ American Jobs
"Everybody is hurt by what he's celebrating," one public employee union official told Common Dreams. "I guess it's just par for the course from this administration, but it's still a disgusting thing to hear."
Apr 10, 2026
President Donald Trump's top economic adviser boasted on Fox Business Thursday that the government had slashed more than 300,000 "high-paying" jobs from the federal payroll during the president's first year back in office.
Asked by anchor Maria Bartiromo about the administration's efforts to cut government spending, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said it had made "a huge amount of progress."
"I think the biggest thing that we can point to is that we've cut government employment by 300,000 workers," he said. "Those are jobs that are very high-paying that are gone forever."
He claimed the cuts reduced government spending by "an unthinkable amount of money," perhaps $1 trillion over the next ten years.
He also said that the administration "reduced the deficit last year by $600 billion" through a combination of higher-than-expected economic growth, tariff revenues, and "supply side effects" of Trump's massive tax cut, which mostly benefited the wealthiest Americans while gutting the social safety net.
Dean Baker, a longtime collaborator of Hassett’s despite their opposing political beliefs, wrote on social media that Trump’s economic adviser was dramatically exaggerating the deficit reduction that occurred during the administration's first year.
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the deficit was about $1.8 trillion for fiscal year 2025, just $41 billion less than the previous year and $56 billion lower than the $1.9 trillion deficit CBO projected in its most recent baseline.
"In the real world, the deficit fell... less than one-tenth of what Kevin claims," Baker said.
Trump has touted the layoffs of hundreds of thousands of government employees from their "boring federal jobs" as one of his crowning achievements.
Among the agencies hit by mass layoffs were the Department of Veterans Affairs, where more than 12,700 employees got the axe; the Department of Health and Human Services, which lost more than 14,400 workers; the Social Security Administration, whose staff shrank by more than 6,600; and the Environmental Protection Agency, which lost more than 4,000 employees.
Jacqueline Simon, policy director at the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the largest labor union representing federal workers, told Common Dreams that even if slashing jobs did reduce the deficit as Hassett claimed, the harm far outweighs any such benefit—not only for the fired employees, but for the millions of Americans who depend on services they provide.
"When you say 300,000 jobs, it is a nice round number, and you link it to deficit reduction, which he was lying about," Simon said. "The fact of the matter is, the disappearance of those 300,000 jobs means degraded healthcare for our veterans; slower or nonexistent service at the Social Security Administration for the elderly and disabled who rely on Social Security for their income; and the elimination of huge swaths of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that help ensure we have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink."
"You have federal prisons absolutely overwhelmed by too many inmates and too few corrections officers, endangering public safety," she continued. "Consumer product safety has been eviscerated. There are also serious public health concerns involving substance abuse, childhood nutrition, and vaccinations."
She decried Hassett's comments as "ignorant" in light of his false claims about deficit reduction, but also "just demonstrably pretty cruel and disdainful" given the impact these job losses have on individuals, families, communities, and society as a whole.
"It's cruel," Simon said, "not only on the people who held those jobs—about a 100,000 of whom are military veterans—but the impact of the disappearance of those jobs also falls on children, the elderly, anybody who consumes agricultural products, breathes air, or relies on clean water."
"Everybody is hurt by what he's celebrating," she added. "I guess it's just par for the course from this administration, but it's still a disgusting thing to hear."
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The Washington Post Cuts Signal an Industry Being Murdered by Its Billionaire Owners
The Post layoffs are not just about one newspaper—they are about whether journalism will continue to serve the public, or retreat further into a corporate shell.
Feb 05, 2026
On Wednesday, the Washington Post laid off roughly a third of its staff. For one of the most powerful and historically significant newspapers in the United States to make this decision is a warning to the entire journalism industry. At a moment of political instability, rising authoritarianism, and widespread distrust in institutions, corporate media is choosing contraction over responsibility.
Under the ownership of Jeff Bezos and his puppet publisher Will Lewis, the Post has joined a growing list of outlets responding to financial pressure by hollowing out their newsrooms. These layoffs arrive amid record-breaking, industry-wide cuts that have devastated local and national media alike. Across the country, journalists are losing jobs not because their work lacks value, but because truth telling has become inconvenient for corporate owners.
This erosion of journalism is not inevitable. It is the result of deliberate choices. Bezos, whose net worth hovers around $250 billion, has the resources to preserve jobs and protect institutional integrity. The decision not to do so makes clear that political influence matters more than the labor that sustains public accountability.
In 2019, Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul wrote, “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds, and in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.” Journalism, like poetry, cannot be separated from the conditions under which it is produced. Reporters cannot meaningfully tell stories of joy, culture, or community while working under constant threat of layoffs, censorship, and corporate interference. The warplanes are not silent.
The future of journalism depends on resisting this erosion. It requires sustained investment in independent and nonprofit outlets, stronger labor protections for journalists, and a collective refusal to accept mass layoffs as the cost of doing business.
As newsrooms shrink, reporters are expected to do the impossible: Cover every breaking story, every election, every conflict, every scandal. What disappears in the process are the beats deemed expendable. Coverage of racial justice, gender equity, LGBTQIA+ communities, labor organizing, and social movements is often the first to be cut. These stories are not eliminated because they lack importance, but because they challenge power and unsettle funders.
The result is a media landscape increasingly shaped by what is safest for advertisers and political elites. More coverage of markets and institutions, fewer stories about Black culture. More horse-race politics, less reporting on trans survival or grassroots organizing. Corporate media follows the wind while ignoring the warplanes overhead.
This narrowing of journalism’s mission weakens democracy itself. A press that cannot afford to tell uncomfortable truths cannot fulfill its role as a public good. When newsrooms prioritize access over accountability and profitability over people, the public loses both information and trust.
Still, journalism is not finished. Independent and nonprofit newsrooms continue to do the work that corporate outlets are abandoning, producing community-rooted reporting that centers justice, accountability, and lived experience. But these outlets operate under immense financial strain, even as corporate media continues to set the terms of what is considered legitimate or newsworthy.
The future of journalism depends on resisting this erosion. It requires sustained investment in independent and nonprofit outlets, stronger labor protections for journalists, and a collective refusal to accept mass layoffs as the cost of doing business. It also requires reporters—especially students, freelancers, and those pushed out of traditional newsrooms—to keep telling the stories that power would prefer remain untold.
The Washington Post layoffs are not just about one newspaper. They are about whether journalism will continue to serve the public, or retreat further into a corporate shell. The industry can cover tragedy while preserving joy. It can hold power accountable while documenting resistance, survival, and hope. We should not accept anything less.
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