Tyson Bets on Robots to
Tackle Meat Industry's Worker Shortage, by Lydia Mulvany, 8/8/19.
When you visit a meat
plant, humans are completing tasks like stacking pallets and packing chicken
drumsticks. But Tyson Foods Inc. thinks robots can do it all.
The U.S. meat giant is
betting that automation and robotics can alleviate a worker shortage that has
long hampered the industry. The company has built the 26,000-square-foot,
multi-million dollar Tyson Manufacturing Automation Center near its
headquarters in Springdale, Arkansas. At the facility, engineers will apply the
latest advances in machine learning to meat manufacturing, with the goal of
eventually eliminating jobs that can be physically demanding, highly repetitive
and at times dangerous.
As global demand for
meat rises, producers have had a hard time attracting enough workers to keep up
with rising consumption. Some in the industry have pointed to Donald Trump’s
tough stand on immigration as exacerbating the U.S. labor shortages. Producers
including Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. and Cargill Inc. have boosted pay in some
cases, and offered other benefits like new housing, health care and
transportation incentives.
“We’ve got to get out in
front of this,” said Marty Linn, the director of the new center who, before
coming to Tyson, spent 30 years at General Motors Co. “We’re not going to
outsource” these tasks, “we’re going to produce them here in this country, so
automation is a key strategy for us going forward,” he said.
At Tyson’s new facility,
a series of laboratories showcase different types of robots. Mechanical arms in
glass cases use smart cameras to sort colorful objects or stack items. In
another room, a larger machine called a palletizer performs stacking tasks. There’s
also a training space.
Many of the types of
robots that a meatpacking plant would need are not on the market currently, so
the company needs to innovate and collaborate with partners to create them,
said Doug Foreman, a director in engineering at Tyson. But the technology is
ready.
The processing
capabilities of cameras are “so advanced even from a few years ago,” Foreman
said. “Processing-speed-wise, it’s there now for us.”
A shortage of labor is one
of the biggest impediments to growth in the meat industry, said Will Sawyer, an
animal protein economist at the $138 billion rural lender CoBank ACB.
“If there was enough
available labor, we would see more protein on the market, especially on the
pork and poultry side,” he said.
While the U.S. labor supply as a whole is at
historically low levels, the problem is more acute in meat production. The
industry has struggled with a reputation of difficult working conditions since
the days of Upton Sinclair, the American author who wrote of abuses in his 1906
novel, “The Jungle.” Tyson just this month had a fatal accident involving pallets in its Amarillo plant. The industry often
relies on immigrant workers to fill jobs that middle-class Americans shun.
Tyson has worked to improve
working conditions, including by using more ergonomic equipment. More
automation can also mean improvements for employees.
Meanwhile, Trump’s extreme
rhetoric and policies on immigration -- including raids on meatpacking plants -- hasn’t helped as
some potential workers are now too fearful to fill openings.
U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement officials raided chicken facilities in Mississippi on Wednesday. The state is
the fifth-largest for chicken production, but Tyson Foods and Sanderson Farms
facilities in the state weren’t affected, according to report from a JPMorgan analyst
Ken Goldman.
“With labor so important to the industry and increasingly scarce
in today’s tight job market, any reductions in personnel supply would lead to
incrementally higher costs,” Goldman said.
Comments
I got to
automate the Schwan Foods pizza plant in the 1970s and it tripled productivity,
revenue and wages. We had a no layoff policy and trained our workers to
redeploy. I encourage all manufacturers
to automate wherever possible.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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