Labor dilemma: A force to reckon with

Access to an adequate workforce is a decades-old challenge facing meat and poultry processors that has intensified with rising production costs. Forecasts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of the US Department of Labor don’t show an end to this negative trend.

There were 905 plants slaughtering under federal inspection on Jan. 1, 2022, compared with 858 in the same period of 2021, the National Agricultural Statistics Service of the US Department of Agriculture said in its “Livestock Slaughter 2021 Summary (April 2022).”

The US meat industry directly employs more than 500,000 people — not counting the additional 2 million jobs created along the value chain, according to the Meat Institute.

The latest available federal data showed that in 2021, meat and poultry plants employed nearly 31% of US food and beverage manufacturing workers, the Economic Research Service of the US Department of Agriculture said.

And in 2021, the meat and poultry industry produced 27.95 billion lbs of beef — a record volume; 27.67 billion lbs of pork; 53.2 million lbs of veal; 138.4 million lbs of lamb and mutton; and 50.4 billion lbs of poultry.