
The pandemic is an excuse for many things. If ever there was a time to supplement (or replace, unfortunately) workers in meatpacking plants in the US, this might be it. But whether the robots are smart enough is a question posed by at least one professor.
The coronavirus has set up the acceleration of a move to have robots do more work in meat cutting plants. In April and May, more than 17,300 meat and poultry processing workers in 29 states were infected and 91 died, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as quoted recently in The Wall Street Journal. US beef and pork production was reduced by more than a third in April as a result.
The work is dangerous for humans, using knives and saws to work on carcasses moving down production lines, for an average pay of $16 per hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The meatpackers have invested to make the workers safer, with protective equipment and workplace partitions, and many have boosted the pay to get the workers to stay.
A longer-term solution for the meatpackers is to bring in the robots. At a former truck maintenance shop near the Springdale, Ark. headquarters of Tyson Foods, company engineers and scientists are pushing into robotics.
The Tyson team is working on an automated deboning system to handle some of the 39 million chickens processed by Tyson each week. Tyson has approximately 122,000 employees to process 20% of the chicken, beef and pork produced in the US. The Tyson Manufacturing Automation Center opened in August 2019, as part of $500 million invested in technology and automation in the last three years. The pandemic will likely cause the pace to be accelerated, Tyson CEO Noel White has said.
The entire meatpacking industry is likely to accelerate automation. “Everybody’s thinking about it, and it’s going to increase,” stated Decker Walker, a managing director with Boston Consulting Group (BCG), who works with meatpackers.
The workers are close together. Workers per square 1,000 feet in meatpacking are three times the average of US manufacturing, according to BCG. This is due to the fact that the industry has not been able to better automate due to the complexity of the task. Humans are better able to cut animal carcasses that differ in size and shape. Finer cutting, such as trimming fat, remains in the hands of human workers and is critical to the bottom line.
A skilled loin boner, for example, can carve a cut of filet mignon without leaving too many scraps on the bone, which are turned into lower-valued products used in hamburger or dog food, stated Mark Lauritsen, an international VP for the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, which represents many meatpacking workers.