Tyson Turns to Robot Butchers, Spurred by Coronavirus Outbreaks

Deboning livestock and slicing up chickens has long been hands-on labor. Low-paid workers using knives and saws work on carcasses moving steadily down production lines. It is labor-intensive and dangerous work.
Those factory floors have been especially conducive to spreading coronavirus. In April and May, more than 17,300 meat and poultry processing workers in 29 states were infected and 91 died, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Plant shutdowns reduced U.S. beef and pork production by more than one-third in late April.
Meatpackers in response spent hundreds of millions of dollars on safety equipment such as personal protective gear, thermal scanners and workplace partitions, and they boosted workers’ pay to encourage them to stay on the job.
They also are searching for a longer-term solution. That quest is playing out in a former truck-maintenance shop near the Springdale, Ark., headquarters of meatpacking giant Tyson Foods Inc. TSN -4.06% There, company engineers and scientists are pushing into robotics, a development the industry has been slow to embrace and has struggled to adopt.
The team, including designers who once worked in the auto industry, are developing an automated deboning system destined to handle some of the roughly 39 million chickens slaughtered, plucked and sliced up each week in Tyson plants.
Tyson, the biggest U.S. meat company by sales, currently relies on about 122,000 employees to churn out about 1 in every 5 pounds of chicken, beef and pork produced in the country. The work at Tyson’s Manufacturing Automation Center, which opened in August 2019, is speeding the shift from human meat cutters to robotic butchers.
...Automation has transformed jobs such as car assembly, stock trading and farming. Meat processors, though, employ 3.2 workers per 1,000 square feet of manufacturing space, three times the national average for manufacturers, according to data compiled by BCG. While U.S. manufacturing worker density overall has held steady over the past five years, in meat plants it has increased, according to the firm.
Executives of Tyson and other meat giants, including JBS USA Holdings Inc. and Cargill Inc., say that is because robots can’t yet match humans’ ability to disassemble animal carcasses that subtly differ in size and shape. While some robots, such as automated “back saw” cutters that split hog carcasses along the spinal column, labor alongside humans in plants, the finer cutting, such as trimming fat, for now largely remains in the hands of human workers, many of them immigrants.
...Tyson said it has invested in ergonomics and other changes to make jobs less physically demanding, including automated carcass split saws and spare rib pullers at the Perry plant. It said the position Mr. Abdulrazzaq held has been eliminated after the company installed a less labor-intensive production process.
Roughly 585,000 people work in U.S. meatpacking plants. Plant workers cycle in and out of jobs rapidly, with annual turnover in meat plants ranging from 40% to 70%, according to Boston Consulting Group, versus an overall 31% average for manufacturers.
Problems keeping plants staffed predate the pandemic. Plants struggle to draw enough workers to small towns in the South and Midwest that house most of the industry’s plants. Refugees, who can legally work in the U.S., and immigrants, including those who can’t, make up a significant portion of the workforce.

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