Big Meat Braces For A Labor Shortage

Refugees help satisfy the need for low-skilled workers. “It remains a challenge to fully staff the plant”

- Lauren Etter

Word of President Trump’s executive order barring the entry of international refugees shocked Fort Morgan, a town of 11,000 on the snowy plains of Colorado, some 80 miles northeast of Denver. Many of the workers at a Cargill Meat Solutions plant that’s the town’s largest employer emigrated from Somalia and Myanmar and had been waiting months, if not years, for relatives to join them. Now they’re afraid that reunion might never happen. As a result, the plant in Fort Morgan and other meat packing plants in the U.S. that have dozens of openings may have to scramble to find a new labor pool.

“The refugees that have family members, they’re worried that they’re never going to be able to come here,” says Ryan Gray, program director in the Greeley, Colo., office of Lutheran Family Services Rocky Mountains, a faith-based group that helps refugees and asylees obtain jobs, housing, and other services. Of the almost 450 individuals Gray’s office helped resettle last year, about 40 percent got jobs at the Cargill plant in Fort Morgan or a rival JBS facility in Greeley.

Trump’s decision to sharply curtail the number of refugees admitted into the U.S. may lead Big Meat to recalibrate its recruitment practices. While a federal court has temporarily suspended the administration’s four-month ban on new arrivals, not affected is Trump’s plan to slash refugee admissions from 110,000 to 50,000 in the current fiscal year.