
Crab crisis: Maryland seafood industry loses 40% of workforce in visa lottery - petethomas
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crab-crisis-md-seafood-industry-loses-40-percent-of-workforce-in-visa-lottery/2018/05/03/bf397874-4ef0-11e8-af46-b1d6dc0d9bfe_story.html
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CoolAndComposed
Crabbing companies cannot reliably exploit cheap labor this year, whereas
other companies will be able to for the first time, in a lottery system (for
cheap labor). Seems ok to me.

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URSpider94
Crab picking is hard work, and requires a lot of skill to do quickly and
without getting bits of shell in the meat. Not just anyone off the street can
walk in and do the job. These businesses are built around a decades-long, 100%
legal, guest worker program that suddenly failed them. In addition, the lack
of pickers harms not just the picking businesses, but also all the watermen
who fish for crabs.

To compound the issue, these businesses are located in rural areas where there
just aren’t very many people around to do the work.

And, this is seasonal work - anyone local who takes the job will be laid off
in the Fall, and then won’t come back next year (because they will have found
another job, ideally), so their training is lost.

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godzillabrennus
Costs will go up for consumers to provide enough margin for employers to pay a
living wage to a local. The pain of the change will bankrupt small businesses
and get the gop some bad pr.

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EliRivers
So what happens? I would hypothesize that one possible result is that the
price of crabmeat goes up until it becomes economical to ship the crabs
overseas for picking, and then shipped back for selling (maybe it already is,
and there was just no reason to change the system until now). That's happened
in other cases and it's effectively a way to move a factory abroad, with a
larger chunk of the money involved also moving abroad. A worse outcome for the
local citizen.

Alternatively, I suppose the wages demanded by local citizens could go down
enough to be able to compete. I wonder how low that would be.

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gowld
That may adversely impact quality and desirability of the meat. The costs of
transportation will also pay transportation workers.

Also, it depends on the prior competitiveness of the crabmeat market -- was it
a sellers' market (prices are already at a maximum) or a buyers' market
(prices at a minimum)

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angmarsbane
Is there a process for the Division of Unemployment or for temp companies to
get matched to local companies that don't get the visas they're seeking?

