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Arkansas-based Tyson Foods, the second-largest U.S. poultry processor with 122,000 employees, will spend $1.3 billion through 2024 to automate labor-intensive tasks, including deboning, on its processing lines, The Wall Street Journal said.
The move ultimately will bring the company $450 million annually in benefits, including reduced labor costs and higher productivity, CEO Donnie King said in an investors call last week.
Tyson has budgeted $500 million for the change next year, after spending $70 million in 2021, according to the WSJ.
The move is a response to chronic labor shortages in the industry, made worse by the COVID crisis in which viral infections were rampant throughout U.S. meat processing plants.
Up to 20 percent of processing-line workers are absent on any given day, due to child care demands, fear of catching COVID, or other personal issues, King said.
The company’s aim “is to take away the more difficult, higher-turnover jobs,” King said, adding that displaced workers can be reassigned to other jobs in the company.
“We plan to use automation to reduce the number of hard-to-fill roles,” he noted.
Tyson is seeking cost savings as it opens up to 12 new U.S. processing plants by 2024, which will enable it to process an additional 1.3 billion pounds of poultry per year.
Tyson reported $12.8 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal quarter, up 12 percent. Earnings rose to $1.26 billion.
TREND FORECAST: As we noted in “Job Slashing: Going Digital and Going Robotic” (18 May 2021), line jobs in meat processing plants have always been hard to fill: workers stand for hours, making the same motions over and over in plants kept cold to keep meat fresher and where conveyors move at an often uncomfortably brisk pace.
Meat-cutting jobs, often filled by immigrants, also are among the most dangerous, according to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
With workers gaining power and demanding not only more pay but also better working conditions, automation will become more and more prevalent in industries where working conditions for humans are hardest to improve.