On the heels of a 2017 spent trying to keep vital trade pacts from falling victim to shifts in politics, 2018 is starting out as the year the industry will try to keep access to its vital immigrant pool of employees.

Unless it doesn’t. Unless meat companies use this year to begin to wean themselves off of their dependence on inexpensive labor.

Just as the relatively low cost of food is woven into the fabric of the American economy, so too is relatively cheap labor an integral part of the meat industry’s profitability. Consider that, in aggregate, median wages in meat plants were about $13 an hour in 2016, about $11 an hour in 2006, and about $9 an hour 10 years before that. That represents a compound annual growth rate of 1.86 percent.

Just to keep up with the rate of inflation over the period, wages should have risen by 2.2 percent annually, and that $9 an hour should have been $14 an hour in 2016. Never mind the industry-wide structural changes that occurred between the 1950s and the 1970s that relocated most meat fabricating to rural areas and small towns, where unions weren’t as influential, and automated the process so that lesser-skilled employees could be paid less to achieve the same end result.

Over the decades the meat industry has become absolutely reliant on these relatively low-wage workers to keep their margins healthy. And the jobs requiring few to no skills, or English, have been a gateway for new immigrants and refugees. But the push for a higher minimum wage and the never-ending struggles to keep up with employee turnover are pushing costs higher as the cost of increasingly sophisticated automation is dropping. The trends are inching closer to intersection. After years of talking up robotics and automation, the cost of actually buying the equipment is within spitting distance of parity with human beings.

Recent breakthroughs in electronics in the unforgiving environment of a meat plant have turbo-charged evolution toward a fully integrated production line — The Industrial Internet of Things. And fully automated meat production plants do exist, in Europe, where labor costs made the cost of automation attractive years ago.

Even savvy tea leaf-readers in Washington are loathe to predict the outcome of key debates over macro-issues such as trade and immigration. Instead of lobbying lawmakers on these issues, I think meat companies would better invest their money and their time in labor-replacing technology.

No E-verify snafus, no ICE visits, no turnover — how much is that peace of mind worth to you?

I, Robot

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