Heartland Workers Center

Sergio Sosa and a group of South Omaha organizers founded the Heartland Workers Center in 2009 as a worker center rooted in the Mexican and Central American meatpacking community that anchors ZIP codes 68107 and 68108. The Center runs workers’ rights clinics, civic-engagement canvasses, and leadership programs through a staff that speaks Spanish, Q’anjob’al, and English. The organizing base reaches across the JBS, Tyson, and Greater Omaha Packing plants that make South Omaha one of the densest meatpacking communities in the Great Plains.

South Omaha carries the burden of the regional industrial grid. Omaha Public Power District’s rate structure socializes transmission and generation costs across every residential and small-commercial customer in the district’s fourteen counties. When OPPD adds 320 megawatts of Meta load and 600 megawatts of Google load in Sarpy County, the ratepayer base that pays for the Cass-Sarpy 345 kilovolt transmission corridor and the $2 billion grid expansion runs through South Omaha Spanish-speaking households whom the utility has historically treated as the margin of its customer base.

The Heartland Workers Center is the civic infrastructure that gives those households a voice in the OPPD rate hearings. The Center’s civic-engagement program registers voters, places South Omaha residents on city advisory boards, and trains volunteer testifiers for Nebraska Public Service Commission dockets. The Center’s 2026 work partners with Bold Nebraska on LB 1261 and with the Nebraska Public Advocate on the rate-equity argument that the data-center buildout reopens.