Crawfish farmers and fans are running into a complicated menu of problems as Louisiana’s industry faces what one restaurateur calls “a helluva pickle” entering prime mudbug season.
Frank Randol, owner of Randol’s on Kaliste Saloom and an active participant in the state’s food and restaurant associations, tells The Advertiser the root of the problem is not natural catastrophe. Instead, he says, it’s the federal government.
“We’ve survived freezes and floods and the BP oil spill,” he says of the crawfish industry. “But this is a government-made disaster.”
Randol says the problems rest in the federal government’s handling of how H-2B employees—guest workers—enter the U.S. and are paid for seasonal work. Louisiana’s crawfish processing and hospitality industries depend upon toil from those workers, most from Mexico and some from Central America, who provide labor at seafood processing plants and at area restaurants and hotels. Such guest workers are necessary, he says, because local workers won’t take the jobs.
“I wouldn’t be doing this if I could hire enough people locally,” he says.
Before this year, Randol says, Louisiana restaurants could rely upon supplies of crawfish processed at some 10-12 larger processors and some small processing plants in state to fill the crawfish demand. Employers that included processing plants and restaurants would apply for permits for such workers as early as autumn in time to weather the long federal process of bringing employees to Louisiana by crawfish season in the spring.
But the rules changed in December, Randol says, when the U.S. Department of Labor said employers must change how they pay the visiting workers. Since the 1990s, employers have paid visiting workers a wage based on surveys done by the employers in the local labor market. The LSU AgCenter has also done private wage surveys to provide a more unbiased view of what comparable jobs were paying in the area.
Now, Randol says, the Labor Department wants workers to be paid according to more national—not regional or local—standards, and have added union job salaries into the mix. The result is the entry wage for the 3,000 guest workers in Louisiana seafood and hospitality would rise from about $7.35 an hour to about $12.35 an hour, according to Randol. That might drive the price of a meal beyond what consumers would be willing to pay.
“That reflects on about $3 a pound on crawfish tail meat,” Randol says. “That has to be borne by the paying public. Some restaurants may use imports. The public may stop buying.”
