May 30, 2017 — The Chesapeake Bay’s crab, oyster and bait industry has been losing its American workforce since the late 1980s, as the old hands retire and younger workers seek better paying jobs.
The packing houses turned to foreign, seasonal workers to fill the gaps, but the visa program Congress established for that, dubbed H2B, quickly reaches the 66,000 worker cap. And that’s forcing some seafood processing plants to shut down.
For example, the only sound you hear at Cowart Seafood Company’s bait fish packing facility in the Northern Neck of Virginia these days is the incessant buzz of overhead lights. Manager A. J. Erskine says normally the early morning hours are filled with the sounds of the chum grinder, bait filler, skid rollers, fork lifts and crews packing bait into boxes.
“We don’t have the seasonal labor to be able to operate this plant,” he says. “If we run out of product we lose our place in the market and another product will come in and replace us.”
Omega Protein, the Texas based seafood giant, operates a menhaden rendering plant, just down the road from Bevans with local American workers. But spokesman Ben Landry says their Gulf Coast plants compete with year-round oil company jobs, so there, they rely on H2B workers.
“We’ve taken a couple of boats out of service in the Gulf because of this,” he says. “We’ve gotten some employees from U.S. Territories like Puerto Rico. What do we do with the program in the future, I think, really depends on how this season goes because there is a lot of uncertainty with that program now.”