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* The meat-processing industry is switching to lower skilled labor and increasingly relocating plants to rural areas.
* Hispanics are moving into the meat-processing labor force and helping to meet demand for low-skill workers.
* Hispanic inmigration mitigates rural population decline and stimulates local economies.
Over the past 40 years, the U. S. meat-processing industry has been transformed by changing consumer preferences for meat products, which helped trigger a consolidation within the industry and a geographic shift in the location of meat-processing plants to rural areas. Technological innovations have also enabled processing plants to make substantial gains in efficiency. Despite these and other changes, employment across the industry has risen during the period, bucking trends in the manufacturing sector. Increasingly, the demand for workers in rural meat-processing plants has been met by the Nation's growing Hispanic population.
Between 1980 and 2000, the Hispanic share of meat-processing workers increased from under 10 percent to almost 30 percent, while the Hispanic workforce itself became mostly foreign born. While the rapid population growth and geographic dispersion of Hispanics since the 1990s has helped meet the labor needs of rural-based meat-processing plants, Hispanic settlement has also had social and economic implications for rural communities.
Americans Change Their Eating Habits
Consumption trends have influenced labor demand in the meat-processing industry. Throughout the 1950s, Americans consumed about three times as much beef and twice as much pork, per capita, as poultry. Since then, technological innovations in poultry production, such as the integration of chicken breeding and slaughtering operations and increased use of specialized processing technology, have increased plant efficiency and enabled firms to reduce poultry prices. From 1960 to 1997, the retail price of whole chickens steadily declined in real dollars from $1.38 to $0.62, which bolstered demand. In contrast, the real price of beef increased from $2.70 in 1960 to $4.86 in 1982 before falling to $1.74 by 1997.
Poultry consumption received an additional boost from fast food marketing, growing consumer awareness of health considerations, and the popularity of low-fat diets. Consequently, between 1970 and 2000, per capita annual consumption of beef declined (from 80 to 65 pounds), while that of chicken almost doubled (from 28 to 53 pounds). After the mid-1980s, the beef sector implemented production strategies and technologies...