BATON ROUGE, La. – Most commercial crawfish peeling operations in Louisiana are winding down, but a labor shortage they faced this season is likely to affect other seafood processors that aren’t in full swing yet.
Demand for migrant labor has risen to the point that a federally mandated cap was reached earlier than ever this year — in January. The cap usually is not met until May or June.
“It caught seafood processors off guard,” said LSU AgCenter and Sea Grant economist Rex Caffey. “Many of them didn’t even have their requests for H-2B workers in yet.”
Louisiana seafood processing facilities annually rely on more than 2,000 workers with H-2B visas to peel crawfish and shrimp, shuck oysters and filet fish. They typically hire workers for a few months of the year, and most work 60-hour weeks.
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