Foreign-born workers are an essential part of the U.S. food supply chain, and if the nation wants to stabilize food prices, it’s going to need a lot more of them, according to new research released this week by the American Immigration Council. The group, which advocates for immigrants throughout the U.S., found that ag employers are struggling to retain enough workers amid a national labor crisis that is fueling higher prices at grocery stores.
The report focuses specifically on the meat and dairy industries, which have been coping with labor shortages — made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic — for at least two decades. To deal with the shortages, these industries depend on immigrants, who accounted for 20 percent of livestock and dairy workers and 45.4 percent of pre-pandemic meatpacking workers. Collectively, these industries employ more than 600,000 people.
The report says the meatpacking industry in particular has found it difficult to retain workers, noting that these workers “bore the brunt of Covid-19 outbreaks.” A House subcommittee investigation found that 269 workers at five big meatpacking companies were killed by Covid-19 between March 1, 2020, and Feb. 1, 2021. The council also attributes the labor shortages to lower labor participation rates across the nation since the pandemic began as well as to growing numbers of baby boomers retiring from the workforce.
As a result, many farmers and meat processing plants are increasingly relying on the nation’s H-2A program, which provides temporary work visas to hundreds of thousands of agricultural workers. But H-2A workers are seasonal, which the report notes makes them a poor fit for non-seasonal industries like dairy and meat production.
Meat and dairy producers are raising wages to attract more workers, and hourly pay in both industries is up 33 percent since 2019, to a median of $20 an hour. (The median hourly wage for American workers generally is $21.51.) The report also found that those pay raises are contributing to higher food prices.
The council argues that the way to fix this problem is to expand and reform temporary work visa programs — and to provide a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented farmworkers in the U.S. today. It released its report as the Senate is debating the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would allow agricultural employers to hire H-2A workers year-round and give longtime undocumented farmworkers a pathway to legally live and work in the U.S. Although the bill has passed the House twice with bipartisan support, it is making slow headway in the Senate.
The American Farm Bureau Federation — the largest farm group in the U.S. — is strongly opposed to a provision that would give H-2A workers the right to sue their employer if they believe they’ve violated labor laws, a right they don’t currently have.