Farm labor reform remains a hot topic for the ag industry. Many in the meat and poultry processing industry are also asking your lawmakers to be included as part of the next revision of the H-2A visa program.
“If we could improve H-2A—and we’ve long argued that we would like to be part of H-2A in the meat and poultry processing sector—that would help a lot in alleviating across the harvest part of meat and poultry production, what we could do to enhance our labor force,” says Julie Anna Potts, President and CEO of the Meat Institute.
The H-2A visa program, which allows temporary agricultural workers to enter the U.S., is not directly applicable to meat processors. While some argue for including meat processing in H-2A, the program is primarily designed for farmworkers and seasonal agricultural labor. Meat and poultry processors often use the H-2B visa program, which supports a broader range of industries, including food manufacturing. However, there are also limitations to the H-2B visa program.
The most critical difference between the H-2A and H-2B visa programs is that H-2B visas are capped annually. Only 66,000 H-2B petitions may be accepted in a fiscal year—to be split evenly between the first and second halves of the year—starting Oct. 1 and April 1, respectively.
It’s worth noting that a single petition toward the 66,000-petition cap may include up to 25 individual workers employed for the same services, location and time frame.
Another challenge to using the H-2B program is the slow speed at which the visa petitions are generally processed by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL). While more than 90% of H-2A applications are processed within 30 days, an application process is considered “timely” if the position is certified by DOL within 30 days — not including the additional time needed to move through the visa process with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the U.S. State Department.
Potts is asking lawmakers to include meat and poultry processors into the H-2A program instead, which is already designed for agricultural labor.
She says consumers only need to look back five years ago during the pandemic as an example of what happens when meat processing facilities are short of workers. She says that during the pandemic, productivity decreased by as much as 50 percent.
And while many new technologies have great potential for the poultry and meat processing sector, she says automation is not entirely the answer.
“But that takes capital, and, as you know, the market for beef and pork and a little bit in chicken has not been as strong as it was before and during the pandemic. So, I think you saw maybe a bit of a slowdown on some of those investments. They will continue, but it is not going to solve the problem comprehensively,” she says.
“We need immigration reform. We need a steady, stable, legal workforce, and no amount of automation is going to take that place. People working in our plants will be repurposed. They won’t lose their jobs because of automation.”
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