Brent W. Johnson

Agri Stats, Inc. published its subscribers’ production figures with each chicken company’s name redacted and a numerical identifier in its place. The chicken buyers’ lawyers found a copy of an Agri Stats report from Pilgrim’s Pride on which the identifiers had been written over by hand with the producers’ actual names. When Judge Thomas M. Durkin of the Northern District of Illinois certified classes of chicken buyers in May 2022, he wrote that the copy indicated Pilgrim’s “was able to de-anonymize the otherwise proprietary and confidential information of its competitors.”

Brent W. Johnson has sued the country’s largest chicken companies on behalf of the people who bought their chicken and, separately, the people who processed it. In that Illinois case, he headed Cohen Milstein’s lawyers on the co-lead team for consumers who alleged that Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride, Perdue, Sanderson Farms and other producers coordinated cuts in chicken supply that raised prices. In the District of Maryland, he headed the firm’s lawyers on the co-lead team for plant workers who alleged that many of the same companies agreed to hold down their pay. Both classes also sued Agri Stats, a data company that, the workers alleged, gathered figures from more than 95 percent of U.S. poultry producers and circulated reports built from them to its subscribers.

Settlements in the consumer case total $203.35 million. In the workers’ case, which Cohen Milstein and its co-counsel built before any government investigation, they total $398.05 million, and the Justice Department’s own suit over the same wage-data exchanges came nearly three years after the workers filed theirs. In both cases the last settlement required Agri Stats to change the reports it circulates to the industry.

Johnson has said that he takes satisfaction in helping consumers and small businesses collect money after large corporations break the rules, and that representing workers in cases against their own employers has been the most satisfying opportunity of his career. “How much money people make and how they’re treated by their employers, and whether that’s done in a dignified fashion, really matters to folks,” he said in 2026. He co-chairs Cohen Milstein’s antitrust practice in Washington and leads its investigations of new cases.

Breeder Hens and the Supply Drops of 2008 and 2012

The consumers in In re Broiler Chicken Antitrust Litigation sued producers that together controlled nearly 90 percent of the broiler chicken market, worth $28.7 billion in 2015, along with Agri Stats. In certifying the classes, Judge Durkin laid out the plaintiffs’ evidence. Broiler supply, he noted, had increased steadily since at least 1960, then fell in 2008 and again in 2012 and grew more slowly from 2008 through 2019. The plaintiffs offered evidence of decisions to destroy breeder hens, of communications among producers about production plans, and of confidential production information shared through Agri Stats. They argued that because the producers controlled their own breeder flocks, hatcheries, feed mills and processing plants, a coordinated reduction was easy to carry out, while in a commodity market with consistent demand a single producer would have had difficulty cutting supply on its own. Beyond the Pilgrim’s copy with the names written in, the plaintiffs alleged that other supposedly anonymous data could be traced to particular producers by experienced people in the industry from the nature of the numbers themselves.

Identifying Chicken Buyers by Affidavit

The processors’ strongest objections to the end-user class went to who its members were and how they could be found. The end users had bought chicken from grocers and other sellers, so they sued under the laws of the states the court called the “Repealer Jurisdictions,” which allow indirect purchasers to recover. The processors argued that tracing an overcharge down the distribution chain to each shopper would require individual inquiries into every class member’s damages, and that the class was “so large and unmanageable that the Court will be unable to actually ‘ascertain’ the injured individuals who qualify under the class definition.”

Johnson had written about ascertainability for the ABA’s Antitrust magazine in the spring of 2016, and that November he raised the settlement side of the problem with the federal rulemakers. On November 3, 2016, at a public hearing of the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules in Washington, Judge John Bates called him to testify for the Committee to Support the Antitrust Laws, a group of law firms that represent individuals and businesses harmed by antitrust violations. Johnson said he had come with “a hopefully concrete and modest proposal for slightly different language” in one clause of the proposed amendments to Rule 23, which would have courts weighing a class settlement consider “the effectiveness of the proposed method of distributing relief to the class.” He told the committee that “some courts could mistakenly interpret the inclusion of such a factor and particularly the use of the word effectiveness to mean there are categorically ineffective methods of distributing relief to classes” and that courts “may use that factor to impose a heightened standard for identifying class members, processing claims, and distributing settlement proceeds that for certain groups of cases no method of distributing relief could meet.” He added: “Such a standard could lead to the rejection of settlements for the sole reason of not meeting it.”

The committee had put ascertainability itself on hold in November 2015, Johnson noted, and the question had produced what he called “a fairly stark circuit split.” He said his purpose was “to try to help the Committee ensure that it stays out of that fray in the current rulemaking process.” He proposed asking instead whether a distribution method was “the best method that is practicable under the circumstances.” That wording, he said, mirrored the notice standard in Rule 23(c)(2)(B), and it would require a claims process to do “everything it can to deter unjustified claims” while it “stops shy of having a standard that could be read to and could be used to preclude settlements entirely.” Judge Bates asked the committee for questions, and no one had any. “Clear as a bell for us I guess, Mr. Johnson,” he said.

In December 2021, five years after that testimony, Judge Durkin gave final approval to $181 million in consumer settlements with Tyson, Fieldale, Peco, George’s, Pilgrim’s and Mar-Jac and appointed Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro and Cohen Milstein co-lead counsel for the settlement class. Class counsel had spent more than 67,500 hours on the claims. “Over 1.2 million class members have already filed claims,” the judge wrote.

When he certified the end-user class on May 27, 2022, along with classes of direct purchasers and other indirect purchasers, Judge Durkin answered the ascertainability objection with that experience. The Seventh Circuit, he wrote, “has held that Rule 23 does not impose such a requirement,” and the prospect of identifying class members “by affidavits from the putative class members” was no reason to deny certification. “It is a process the Court has contemplated and approved with respect to class settlements that have already occurred in this case.” He reasoned that the methods already approved for dividing settlement money could also apportion any damages, and he accepted the plaintiffs’ economic reasoning that, because all broiler products are produced together, any cut in broiler supply would necessarily cut the supply of every product made from the defendants’ chickens.

Ten more producers—Claxton, Foster Farms, House of Raeford, Koch Foods, Mountaire, O.K. Foods, Perdue, Sanderson, Simmons and Wayne—settled with the consumers for $22.35 million, finally approved on June 30, 2025, bringing the end-user class’s settlements to $203.35 million.

Animation Workers and the Fear of Blacklisting

Johnson, a 2003 graduate of Stanford Law School, litigated antitrust cases for plaintiffs and defendants at a global law firm before joining Cohen Milstein. He came to worker cases through In re Animation Workers Antitrust Litigation in the Northern District of California, where he represented animation and visual-effects workers who alleged that Pixar, Lucasfilm, DreamWorks, Disney, Sony, Blue Sky and ImageMovers had agreed not to cold-call one another’s employees and had exchanged compensation information—an arrangement the workers traced to Steve Jobs at Pixar and George Lucas at Lucasfilm in the mid-1980s. A 2005 email from Pixar’s vice president of human resources said of rival studios, “we have a gentleman’s agreement not to directly solicit/poach from their employee pool.” Cohen Milstein was co-lead counsel for a certified class of more than 10,000 employees, from producers and directors to animators and software engineers. The studios’ four settlements came to nearly $170 million; the court granted final approval in June 2017, and the recovery averaged nearly $14,000 per class member. Johnson credits the case with sparking his interest in labor-side antitrust.

Retaliation was a major concern for those workers, who frequently change employers with each film. Johnson has said that corporations generally do not retaliate directly against someone while a lawsuit is pending, but that workers worry about being blacklisted when they look for their next job. “If you sue the handful of companies that do that work, you’d be quite worried about getting hired for the next one,” he said. “The concern is probably not as acute among beef, pork and poultry workers, but it’s still there.”

Deboners in Springdale, Decatur and Russellville

The poultry workers’ case was built from insiders’ accounts. The workers’ lawyers later described a nine-month investigation, and their complaints drew on confidential witnesses, among them a former Perdue employee, a former human resources manager who had worked for both Perdue and George’s, and a former Peco Foods employee. The workers sued on August 30, 2019, on behalf of three Arkansas plant workers whose job was removing the bones from chicken carcasses, and on October 8 the court appointed Cohen Milstein, Hagens Berman and Handley Farah & Anderson interim co-lead counsel. Johnson led the Cohen Milstein team.

Six workers put their names on the case. Judy Jien, Kieo Jibidi and Elaisa Clement were deboners at plants in Springdale and Decatur, Arkansas, run by George’s, Simmons and Tyson. Glenda Robinson worked in the day pack department at Tyson’s plant in Forest, Mississippi. Emily Earnest was a deboner at a Pilgrim’s Pride plant in Russellville, Alabama. Kevin West, added later, had worked as a supervisor on deboning, evisceration and receiving lines at Tyson, Koch, Pilgrim’s and Perdue plants in Georgia and Texas.

The jobs were low-paid, grueling and often dangerous, the workers said, and they alleged that the industry relies on entry-level employees from vulnerable populations, including migrant workers, refugees, asylum-seekers and prison laborers. They put the number of people working in poultry processing plants at about 220,000 a year. By Perdue’s own figure, the “fully loaded wage” for the lowest-paid plant worker at its Delmarva plants in 2016 was $17.12: a $12 hourly wage and benefits worth $5.12 an hour. Plant labor, the workers alleged, was the processors’ second-largest cost of producing poultry, about 16 percent of their total operating costs.

The workers’ complaint cited a 2015 evaluation by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health of 191 workers at a poultry plant in Maryland: 76 percent had abnormal results on a nerve conduction test, and 34 percent had evidence of carpal tunnel syndrome. In the complaint it filed in July 2022, the Justice Department described the line work: people standing on the processing line in low temperatures, among blood, viscera and loud machinery, repeating the same rapid motions with sharp cutting instruments, some of them handling “live, clawed birds.”

Off the Books at the Hilton Sandestin

The workers alleged that, beginning on or before 2009, the executives responsible for setting compensation at the processors’ plants met every year at the Hilton Sandestin Resort Hotel & Spa in Destin, Florida. The meetings often fell around the U.S. Poultry & Egg Association’s annual human resources seminar but appeared on no association’s published schedule, and a former senior Perdue executive said they were kept “off the books.” One of the three largest processors, Tyson and Pilgrim’s among them, paid for the survey and the meeting each year, and the three took turns. The compensation consultant Webber, Meng, Sahl and Company, known as WMS, collected detailed current wage data from the participants, assigned each company a random number, and at the meeting delivered a PowerPoint presentation of average and median pay for each plant position, with the companies anonymized. In the consumer case, a Pilgrim’s copy of an Agri Stats report had the names written back in by hand; here, a former Perdue employee said it was not difficult to tell which company had reported which numbers when “you’re sitting in a meeting and the person across from you [from a competing processor] is reporting on what they do.” A processor that missed the in-person meeting two years in a row was expelled, and the data could not be exchanged remotely.

At the meetings, the workers alleged, the executives discussed and agreed on salary raises and bonus budgets for the coming year and scolded any processor that had deviated from the wages fixed the year before. They alleged that in or around 2018 a senior Tyson executive remarked in a private conversation that the wage discussions at the Sandestin meetings were “so inappropriate and improper” that Tyson would no longer attend.

Between meetings, the workers alleged, the processors sent Agri Stats detailed compensation data every month, paid millions of dollars for its reports, and could match the reported figures to specific plants owned by specific competitors. Human resources managers called their closest competitors to trade pay rates, planned increases and benefits, and some processors toured one another’s plants and discussed wages along the way. The former Peco employee said, in the present tense, that “local plants talk.” The former human resources manager who had worked for Perdue and George’s described calls to rival plants run by Pilgrim’s, Cargill and Virginia Poultry Growers Cooperative asking for current hourly rates and planned increases: “We would collaborate. We would talk among each other to see what they were doing for pay.”

A “Smoking Gun” at the Pleading Stage

The processors moved to dismiss on five grounds. They argued that the workers had lumped parent companies and subsidiaries together, that the direct evidence lacked dates, participants and the terms of any agreement, that no parallel wage-setting had been pleaded, that a nationwide labor market was implausible for workers who do not relocate across state lines, and that older claims fell outside the Sherman Act’s four-year limitations period.

Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher ruled on September 16, 2020. The Tyson executive’s remark, she wrote, “is precisely the sort of ‘smoking gun’ that makes Plaintiffs’ per se antitrust claim plausible”—the claim that competitors agreed to fix wages, which the Sherman Act condemns without any inquiry into market effects. Of the former human resources manager’s account she wrote: “The word ‘collaborate’ is particularly damning, connoting a cozy relationship in which the ostensible competitors worked together to share wage levels at their respective plants, and to provide that information to corporate headquarters.”

The second claim, against the data exchanges, is judged by its effects. As the court noted, quoting the Supreme Court, “the dissemination of price information is not itself a per se violation of the Sherman Act,” so the workers had to allege an agreement to exchange information and anticompetitive effects in a defined market. Judge Gallagher held that the processors’ alleged control of more than 90 percent of poultry processing jobs was enough market power at the pleading stage, and that the secret meetings and Agri Stats’ circulation of current wage data across nearly the whole industry plausibly amounted to unlawful information sharing. That claim went forward against Agri Stats, although Agri Stats was not alleged to have known of the wage-fixing agreement or to have attended the meetings.

Where the consumers had to trace an overcharge down to shoppers, the workers had to define the market in which the processors bought their labor. On the geographic market, Judge Gallagher answered that the workers had taken on the harder case: “By alleging a broad geographic market spanning the entire country, Plaintiffs are making it harder to prove their case, because the level of market power necessary to control wages across the entire country is much greater.” The workers had alleged that the processors made compensation decisions centrally, using national wage data, and that every processor had a plant within 32 miles of a competitor’s plant. A former Tyson employee had described a company wage scale for every hourly position that was “very tightly structured” and fixed at headquarters “before” plant managers “even started talking about it.” For the product market, the court accepted at the pleading stage that poultry workers develop industry-specific skills—hanging live birds, carving bird meat, cleaning and repairing poultry equipment—and that limited education and language skills make it hard for many of them to move to other work.

Johnson has named the relevant market among the obstacles in cases like this one. “Representing lower-income workers and proving that we can have successful antitrust class actions on their behalf, despite some of the relevant market and other challenges is particularly gratifying,” he said.

On timeliness, Judge Gallagher held that the workers had pleaded fraudulent concealment of the wage-fixing claim with the required particularity—secret meetings, kept off the books, with in-person attendance required—and had been diligent. She wrote that the complaint’s contents suggested counsel had undertaken “an extensive investigation to uncover these meetings, which involved interviews with numerous confidential witnesses.” The workers filed a second amended complaint in November 2020 that specified which corporate entity was alleged to have engaged in which conduct, and on March 10, 2021, the court denied four motions to dismiss it, holding that hourly chicken-plant workers could represent salaried employees and turkey-plant workers because the complaint pleaded “a singular poultry labor market.”

Who Joined, and Whether Sanderson Left

In February 2022 the workers filed a third amended complaint that reached back to January 1, 2000, added seven defendants, and extended the class to hatchery and feed-mill workers, who incubate eggs and make feed. The processors argued that plant workers could not represent them. On July 19, 2022, Judge Gallagher held that the complaint adequately alleged that workers at all three kinds of facilities were employed by the same companies, which acted on them in the same ways and caused them the same injuries, and that the processors had required, as a condition of entry into the survey group, that a company manage processing plants, hatcheries and feed mills alike.

Foster Poultry Farms, a California company with most of its operations on the West Coast, argued that it could not be sued in Maryland at all. The court applied Maryland’s conspiracy theory of personal jurisdiction, under which a co-conspirator’s acts in the state in furtherance of the conspiracy are attributed to its partners. Foster was alleged to have attended every compensation meeting from 2001 through 2019 and to have served on the survey’s steering committee with Perdue, which is headquartered in Salisbury, Maryland. “Foster is alleged to have served among the small leadership group implementing the conspiracy alongside Maryland entities for the better part of two decades,” Judge Gallagher wrote, and a company in that position could reasonably have anticipated that its co-conspirators would act in Maryland. Foster later settled with the workers for $13.3 million.

Sanderson Farms pointed to an email. On February 14, 2012, Jennifer Buster, Sanderson’s manager of human resources, had written to the survey group: “On the advice of legal counsel, our Executives have decided that we can no longer participate in this type of survey.” Sanderson argued that the email took it out of the conspiracy as a matter of law. Withdrawal, the court explained, requires affirmative acts inconsistent with the conspiracy’s object, communicated in a way reasonably calculated to reach the co-conspirators; stopping one’s own participation is not enough. Whether Sanderson had gone on paying depressed wages after 2012, or benefiting from the arrangement, could not be decided from the complaint. “Whether and when a defendant withdrew from an alleged conspiracy are fact-intensive inquiries that may rarely be resolved on a motion to dismiss,” the judge wrote.

Large Binders, Then Laptops

On February 4, 2022, G. Jonathan Meng, the president of WMS, filed a sworn declaration in the workers’ case. In it he explained why, when some participants considered adding red meat processing plants to the survey in 2014, the poultry processors declined: “the poultry processing labor market is distinct from the red meat processing labor market.” Beef and pork plant workers would later allege that WMS ran a separate compensation survey for the red meat processors.

On July 25, 2022, nearly three years after the workers filed, the Justice Department sued WMS, Meng, and Cargill, Sanderson Farms and Wayne Farms, alleging a conspiracy to exchange wage and benefit information about poultry processing workers. Proposed consent decrees filed with the suit would bar WMS from providing surveys or services that facilitate the sharing of competitively sensitive information in any industry, bar the three processors from sharing competitively sensitive compensation information, place them under a court-appointed monitor for ten years, and require them to pay $84.8 million in restitution to plant workers. “Through a brazen scheme to exchange wage and benefit information, these poultry processors stifled competition and harmed a generation of plant workers who face demanding and sometimes dangerous conditions to earn a living,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Doha Mekki.

The government’s complaint quoted Meng’s account of the meetings: private roundtable sessions, which he did not attend, where the processors discussed the survey results, the figures individual companies had reported and their plans for future pay. “In earlier years, the attendees typically brought this data to the roundtable sessions in hard-copy form using large binders,” Meng explained. “In later years, the attendees brought their laptop computers, which contained all the compensation data in electronic form.” The complaint also quoted the survey group’s 2009 operating standards, which required each member to treat the shared data as confidential and warned: “Failure to meet these requirements will result in immediate removal from the survey group.” A 2009 message reminded members to bring their data manuals to the meeting and added: “We will also be sharing information in a round table discussion. These discussions are expected to be kept confidential.”

The $84.8 million equaled the combined class settlements of the same three companies: $15 million from Cargill, $38.3 million from Sanderson and $31.5 million from Wayne. The Justice Department told the court how that restitution would reach the workers: if Judge Gallagher gave final approval to the three class settlements, the distribution she approved would satisfy the companies’ restitution obligation, and as a fallback each company had to put 10 percent of its class settlement into an escrow account, and the full amount if its class settlement was not approved. In May 2023 the department added George’s, which agreed to pay $5.8 million in restitution and to accept a court-appointed monitor for seven years.

When she awarded attorneys’ fees in June 2025, Judge Gallagher set out the sequence: “Unlike many antitrust class actions, Plaintiffs’ Counsel identified and investigated the allegations in this case without the benefit of a prior government investigation. Instead, the Department of Justice brought its own follow-on lawsuits alleging the same conduct as that identified by Co-Lead Counsel, and ultimately settled those claims with the understanding that the settlements obtained by Plaintiffs’ Counsel provided sufficient restitution to the settlement class.”

Divided by What Each Worker Earned

The processors settled one at a time. Pilgrim’s Pride went first, for $29 million, preliminarily approved in July 2021. Perdue agreed to pay $60.65 million in 2023. The largest settlement, $115.5 million from Tyson Foods and Keystone Foods, came in 2024, the same year Koch Foods, Foster, Butterball and others settled. On December 23, 2024, the workers asked Judge Gallagher to preliminarily approve nine of those agreements, worth $180.8 million together, in a motion supported by Johnson’s declaration; the settling companies also committed to “material cooperation” in the litigation against the one remaining defendant. WMS agreed to cooperate with the workers. On June 5, 2025, Judge Gallagher granted final approval to settlements totaling $398.05 million.

She found the settlements fair, reasonable and adequate. They had been reached only after significant investigation, motion practice and substantial discovery, in extensive, contentious, arm’s-length negotiations, many of them facilitated by an experienced mediator. No class member objected, and 3,347 asked to be excluded. Under the approved plan, every payment goes directly to the worker, divided pro rata by each worker’s earnings during the class period. A second distribution goes only to workers who cashed their first checks, with a $5 minimum, and money left after that is combined with later settlements or escheats to the Maryland attorney general. Workers could file claims through June 30, 2026. After the claims period reopened on June 1, 2026, the claims administrator received more than 116,000 emails, calls and voicemails within weeks, and the workers’ lawyers asked the court to keep it open through August 31, 2026, so that people who had already reached out would not lose their chance to be paid.

Red Meat Plants and Warship Engineers

In November 2022 the same three firms filed Brown v. JBS USA Food Co. in the District of Colorado for beef and pork plant workers, with Johnson again heading Cohen Milstein’s co-lead team; Shana Scarlett of Hagens Berman and George Farah of Handley Farah & Anderson were among the workers’ lawyers from the other two firms. Those workers alleged that JBS, Tyson, Cargill, Hormel, Smithfield, National Beef, Seaboard, Triumph, American Foods and Perdue exchanged compensation data through a Red Meat Industry Compensation Survey administered by WMS, discussed wages at annual Red Meat Industry Compensation Meetings, shared monthly pork-plant wage reports through Agri Stats, and agreed not to poach one another’s employees. In September 2023 Judge Philip A. Brimmer rejected the processors’ joint motion to dismiss, finding that the workers had plausibly alleged violations of the Sherman Act and that “allegations of specific wage suppression provide sufficient support at the pleading stage for plaintiffs’ broader claims of industry-wide wage suppression.”

Settlements in that case total $202.8 million and have been preliminarily approved. Of that amount, $191.55 million from nine defendants is for anyone who worked at a defendant’s beef or pork plant between January 1, 2000, and February 27, 2024, and $11.25 million from two more is for those who worked there from 2014 on. Workers whose notices listed a compensation amount did not need to do anything to be paid, and the money is divided in proportion to how long each person worked at the plants and how much each earned. The final approval hearing is set for November 13, 2026, and workers may file claims until March 26, 2027.

The naval engineers’ case, filed in October 2023 in the Eastern District of Virginia, concerns a workforce of fewer than 10,000 naval architects and marine engineers. Susan Scharpf, a former naval engineer, and the other plaintiffs alleged that General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls Industries, the engineering firm Gibbs & Cox and others had kept an unwritten “gentlemen’s agreement,” since at least 2000 and likely since the 1980s, not to recruit one another’s engineers. The defendants relied on the statute of limitations. No named plaintiff had worked for any defendant since 2013, and the defendants argued that a secret agreement is not an affirmative act of concealment that can extend the Sherman Act’s four-year limitations period.

On May 9, 2025, the Fourth Circuit reinstated the claims. Johnson’s name heads the list of lawyers on the engineers’ brief; his Cohen Milstein colleague Robert W. Cobbs argued the appeal. Writing for the majority, Judge Wynn applied the intermediate affirmative-acts standard, under which a plaintiff’s proof “may include acts of concealment involved in the antitrust violation itself,” and the court held “that neither logic nor our precedent supports distinguishing between defendants who destroy evidence of their conspiracy and defendants who carefully avoid creating evidence in the first place.” The majority found it “hard to imagine that a decades-old multilateral agreement—with a clear and apparently anticompetitive rule (you shall not hire your co-conspirators’ employees) and a clear exception (unless the employee first applies to you)—would remain unwritten merely for the sake of convenience.” Chief Judge Diaz dissented, reasoning that the secrecy was part of the alleged conspiracy itself and that “plaintiffs alleging a conspiracy don’t get a free pass on time-barred claims.”

The Fourth Circuit denied the defendants’ petition for rehearing in June 2025, and in late 2025 the district court rejected their remaining arguments for dismissal. Faststream Recruitment settled in September 2025, and affiliates of Huntington Ingalls, Marinette Marine and Serco reached settlements in March 2026. Johnson also heads Cohen Milstein’s co-lead team in Dorrell v. Constellation Energy Corp., a wage-suppression case in the District of Maryland on behalf of nuclear engineers.

What Agri Stats Agreed to Change

Agri Stats was the last defendant in the workers’ case. Its settlement, filed October 10, 2025, paid no money. Agri Stats agreed to eliminate relevant plant-level data fields related to labor costs from the broiler chicken reports it circulates to subscribers, and the workers said they believed that “with the removal of these plant-level fields, recipients of future Agri Stats reports will be unable to reconstruct the labor fields that processor Defendants previously used to suppress their workers’ wages.” Judge Gallagher granted final approval to the settlement on March 10, 2026.

“For decades, tens of thousands of hard-working poultry plant workers have been exploited by their employers who schemed with competitors to depress their wages below fair market levels,” Johnson said that day. He added that the co-lead team was pleased Agri Stats had agreed “to aggregate relevant labor data in broiler chicken reports.”

In January 2026 the beef and pork workers asked the Colorado court to approve their own agreement with Agri Stats, the fourteenth settlement in that case. Agri Stats paid nothing into the settlement fund. It agreed that if it resumed reporting on the pork industry, its reports would leave out detailed labor information, and it agreed to produce its data from 2008 to June 2018, documents from five custodians and testimony from up to five employees, and to help authenticate documents for summary judgment and trial against Smithfield Foods, the one defendant still contesting the case. Judge Brimmer preliminarily approved the settlement on April 16, 2026.

On May 7, 2026, the Justice Department, which had sued Agri Stats in the District of Minnesota in September 2023, filed a proposed settlement of its own. Agri Stats would stop reporting production, cost and labor data at the level of an individual company or plant, report only aggregated figures that were at least 45 days old on average, offer its reports to restaurants, grocery chains and food distributors on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms, and answer to a court-appointed monitor for seven years. The proposal was subject to sixty days of public comment before the court could enter it.

The consumers’ claims against Agri Stats also ended in an agreement over the reports. In a settlement proposed alongside others in related pork and turkey price-fixing cases, Agri Stats agreed either to stop producing benchmarking reports for protein processors or to change them substantially. The Illinois court granted final approval to the chicken consumers’ settlement from the bench on September 1, 2026.