Published Monday | September 3, 2007
Meat stakes future in Omaha
BY BILL HORD
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER



Meatpacking employment in the Omaha area is at its highest level in 40 years, according to labor statistics, but the comeback over the past two decades is well short of the packinghouse heyday of the 1950s.



The Union Stockyards helped the south Omaha meatpacking industry thrive for decades. At the Stockyards' peak, they took up more than 200 acres. But as slaughtering operations moved away from cities and closer to rural feedlots, meatpacking in the Omaha area dipped to a low of 2,171 jobs in 1985.At the peak of the city's meatpacking era — when Swift, Armour, Wilson and Cudahy operated around the clock, supplied by the world's largest stockyards — employment topped 10,000 workers. Furthermore, packing plant jobs represented a greater percentage of total jobs in the Omaha market than they do now.

By 2006, meatpacking jobs in the Omaha-Council Bluffs area numbered 7,045, according to Nebraska Workforce Development.

And the metro area's meatpacking jobs have continued to increase since the 2006 labor data were collected, said Creighton University economist Ernie Goss. The total was 7,200 in June.

Before 2006, the last time meatpacking jobs topped 7,000 was in 1967, when there were 7,100 positions.

At that time, Omaha still was the No. 1 livestock market in the country, but it was starting an extended decline. The low point for the industry was 2,171 jobs in 1985.

Meatpacking employment has grown 225 percent in the Omaha area since 1985. Statewide, it has grown 79 percent to 24,643 jobs in 2006.



As the metro-area meatpacking scene has changed in recent years, higher-paying processing jobs have largely replaced slaughtering jobs.Industry analysts say the growth can be attributed to:

• A good labor pool.

• Omaha's cultural appeal for Latinos.

• Niche markets in meat processing.

• State tax incentives.

• Normal industry growth.

"The city is thriving," said Janet Riley of the American Meat Institute in Washington, D.C., "so it is offering very good labor pools that are hard to duplicate in rural areas."

The new labor pool is made up mostly of Latino immigrants, unlike the days of the Omaha Union Stockyards, when south Omaha packing plants hired mostly European immigrants.

The development of Latino services and cultural centers in south Omaha provide stability for workers who are drawn to meatpacking jobs, Riley said.

"This is a highly immigrant work force," said Donna McDonald, president of Local 271 of the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

"We get visitors who see that one section of town is pretty much designed for their culture," McDonald said. "That says a lot for Omaha."

State tax incentives also have boosted the industry since their adoption in 1987. In the first year alone, Omaha companies — including Omaha Steaks International and Greater Omaha Packing Co. — received incentives by agreeing to invest a total of $23 million and to create nearly 250 jobs.

Over the past 20 years, meatpacking companies in Omaha have agreed to invest $186.4 million and to create 2,045 jobs.



Click to enlarge.McDonald and others said meatpacking jobs and the industry itself have changed since the last time it provided 7,000 jobs in Omaha.

"The majority of the jobs are in processing," McDonald said. "It's a marked difference, not only in wages (paying more) but in the safety of the worker. In slaughter, you are dealing with a live animal."

Tyson Foods, the nation's largest meatpacking company, no long slaughters animals in the Omaha area but employs a third of the workers here — more than any other company in the industry.

Tyson ships pork bellies from slaughtering plants to Omaha, where they are processed into bacon, and meat carcasses to two adjacent plants in Council Bluffs, where they are processed into retail-ready packaged meats and precooked meat products.

The three plants provide a total of 2,330 jobs: about 900 in the Omaha plant and 1,430 in the two Council Bluffs plants.

"Omaha-Council Bluffs is a great place for us to do business because it's in the middle of a major livestock and meat production region," said Tyson spokesman Gary Mickelson. "It gives us access to the Interstate and has the people available to work in our plants."

Omaha's leading slaughtering plants are Greater Omaha Packing Co., ranked the seventh-largest in the country by Cattle Buyers Weekly, and Nebraska Beef LLC, the eighth-largest. Greater Omaha Packing employs more than 800 workers; Nebraska Beef has nearly 800 employees.

Many other businesses process meat for niche markets.

David Brown, president of the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, said the steady increase in meatpacking employment in recent years is following the normal growth of an industry.

"In every community around the country, you are going to get somewhere around 7 to 10 percent growth in jobs every year," he said.

The employment picture of the Omaha-Council Bluffs area is much different today from what it was in the years following 1955, when the Omaha Union Stockyards first surpassed Chicago as the largest livestock market in the world.

In the early 1960s, meatpacking jobs made up 3.7 percent of the total Omaha area work force. That compares with about 1.5 percent last year.

The metro area in the 1960s was home to about 71 percent of all meatpacking jobs in Nebraska. In 2006, it had 28 percent.

In the intervening years, dramatic changes occurred in the meatpacking industry. Slaughtering operations moved away from cities and closer to feedlots in rural areas. The large stockyards closed, and the power of labor unions waned.




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