I'd take three fast-food jobs before going back to Cargill.
Pros
You WILL get 40+ hours almost every week. I averaged about 42. So, the only major good thing I can say about Cargill relative to other jobs I've had is that you can count on receiving a certain amount of money nearly every paycheck. Also, there are about eight paid holidays per year. I got paid for Memorial Day even as a temp.
Cons
Where do I start... First off, I was hired as temp-to-hire through a staffing company. Cargill was hiring for the exact same positions directly, but I didn't know this. They were hiring directly as well as going through several staffing companies, trying to fill their positions because they couldn't convince enough people to work there. About 50% of my coworkers were Marshallese with no other options. I was told I'd be hired on after 60 days and get a 50 cent raise. I worked there, HARD, for a little over three months and was never hired on. My supervisor said HR was dragging their feet on paperwork and didn't care because I was the only temp they had left. They also didn't pay me the 50 cent shift differential for 2nd shift that my coworkers were paid. The Springdale plant employs over 1,000 people, I believe they told me. So, there's actually some room for advancement if you stay there long enough. However, you can give up any hope of becoming a line lead unless you're bilingual Spanish or Marshallese. An English-only speaker isn't getting promoted from entry-level unless you have EHS, QA, or maintenance experience, in which case you might get transferred to one of those departments. Supervisor positions generally require college degrees or several years of experience at another company. I worked on the leg processor machine in the hindsaddle department, within the Whole Bird/BIB division. When I started, there were six people working the rotation around my machine. When I left, there was only me, one other person, and two new trainees who were barely any help yet. Everyone else had said "forget this" and quit. The work was already strenuous, and now we had three people doing the work of six. If the company paid enough to compensate for the strain on our bodies, maybe they could retain workers better. Even the Marshallese workers who spoke no English or Spanish (and hence had few other job options) stopped putting up with it and left. There were some easy, though repetitive, jobs at Cargill. There were people who packaged turkeys, mixed seasonings, poured a liquid into a machine and monitored it, etc. The hindsaddle department, however, was hell on your body from your fingertips to your shoulders. What finally convinced me to leave was getting trigger finger in four of my ten fingers. (Trigger finger is a condition called tenosynovitis where a finger gets stuck in a closed position and can only be opened after a painful effort.) I reported it to my lead. They sent me to check in with the nurse every couple of days. All the nurse did was give me ibuprofen pills and send me back to my job. The condition kept worsening and causing more problems for me. A couple hours after I put in my notice I lost grip on my knife and stabbed myself in the hand. This company preaches safety but only cares about you if you're bleeding (a food safety issue, of course). If you can get a job packaging, driving a pallet jack or forklift, or doing QA, EHS, or maintenance, Cargill probably isn't a bad place to work. If they offer you a job as one of the grunts cutting turkeys, stay far, far away if you possibly can.