On any given Monday, America’s biggest supplier of ground beef has 1,000 jobs unfilled, pushing Cargill Inc. to aggressively sweeten the pot on benefits to retain existing workers and hire new ones.
The openings, largely at the meat-packer level, are the result of the Trump administration’s tough stand on immigration and a United States unemployment rate reaching decade lows. While the number represents less than 1 percent of Cargill’s work force, the shortage is slowing output and hindering production of new higher-margin products, executives say.
With global demand for meat rising in a robust economy, Cargill and other industry leaders say the need to expand gives them little choice but to boost worker benefits—with added pay in some cases, as well as new housing, health care and busing incentives.
Companies are adding plants, but “whether or not they can run those plants efficiently is kind of a jump ball,” Christine McCracken, New York-based analyst for Rabobank International, said by telephone. “What we’re seeing today doesn’t indicate that they’ll be able to fully ramp up production.”
“Recruiting and retaining qualified workers in the meat- and poultry-processing industries was always difficult,” she wrote in a note in July. “But it is now a perpetual grind.”
In its August earnings call, Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., the second-largest US chicken company, said it expects tight labor conditions “will govern the pace of industry capacity additions in the near to midterm.”
Meat processing is tough work, with frigid temperatures, sharp equipment, bloody meat, fast-moving conveyor belts and hours on your feet. In the past, the plants have offered go-to-jobs for new immigrants, but with immigration rules drastically tightened under President Donald J. Trump, that well is running dry. At the same time, the September unemployment rate was 3.7 percent, the lowest since 1969.
“Incredible number just out,” Trump tweeted on Tuesday, “7,036,000 job openings. Astonishing—it’s all working!”
While consumers haven’t yet been affected with a glut of meat still available, the unfilled jobs are preventing Cargill from producing higher-margin meat products, according to Brian Sikes, the agribusiness giant’s head of protein.
The unfilled jobs mean “we can’t do some value-added activities that we might get paid more for at the end of the line because we don’t have the staff,” Sikes said in an interview at his Wichita, Kansas, office.