This month, thousands of workers from around the world have flown to Alaska to work long hours in seafood processing jobs in over 150 land plants or on at-sea processing vessels.
It takes hard work and many hands to cut, handle and process the millions of salmon harvested in Bristol Bay, a fishery known for record volumes and a breakneck pace during a peak summer season. Many of those workers are international, from Mexico, to the Philippines to Ukraine, and are able to come to Alaska processing plants through a temporary work permit program.
Brian Gannon is with United Work and Travel, a company based outside of Washington, DC, which is contracted by seafood companies in Bristol Bay and around Alaska to recruit and coordinate visas for international workers for these tough but essential jobs.
“We send up anywhere from 5,000 - 7000 legal visa workers per year right now to help offset the labor needs of the seafood industry in Alaska,” he said. “And it's all fish, not just salmon, we help on the cod and pollock side as well.”
Workers come from across the globe, including Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and several countries of Central America. Gannon says these men and women endure long hours in Alaska’s processing facilities. They pursue these jobs to make U.S. wages and overtime pay, to experience some Alaskan and American culture, and to bring money home to their families.
This year, Alaska seafood companies raised wages for seafood processing workers to $18 dollars an hour, and $26 per hour for overtime pay. Gannon says that’s about double from six or seven years ago, and helping to recruit workers.
“Companies have been able to attract (workers) this year, better than they had in the last three or four years. And I think that's a function of the wage, but also emerging from COVID. And more people are willing to travel and work these types of jobs,” he said.
Gannon estimates that 25 to 35 percent of the Bristol Bay processor workforce is made up of international workers, or about 1,500 people this season.
“Our mantra for that is to ‘work, earn and return.’ Come in, work, and go home,” he said. “And our people enjoy that. You know, and we have a large group of people that want to come in, they want to work, and they want to return to their home countries.”
International workers are able to do so with a type of temporary work permit - the H2-B visa. Under the visa program, guest workers come to the United States for temporary jobs in nonagricultural labor or services, such as landscaping and construction. Or factories, like seafood processors.
This year, the Biden Administration increased the number of visas permitted to hire foreign workers by 85 percent — that’s from 66,000 workers last year to roughly 130,000.
“There is not an existing workforce in Bristol Bay, or even the 500 mile radius that could supply the labor needed that is required to be inputted into Bristol Bay each year, without disrupting, you know, other segments of Alaska. So it's a classic beautiful case of a program being available by the government that actually serves the American employer and helps the greater industry.”
Gannon says each Alaska seafood company has to apply for permits from the Department of Labor and the Department of Homeland Security each year. Companies start recruiting and host job fairs abroad throughout the winter. Workers go through a hiring process, a background check, and a visa interview. And then companies arrange their travel and airfare. But even with additional visas on the table, not all companies in Alaska’s seafood sector can get them.
“Even if a company had access to visas, not all companies could withstand the pressure of the bureaucratic delays at the Department of Labor,” Gannon said. “So it's not as easy as saying while you have access to visas, problem solved. There's a huge amount of jumping to do between access to visas, obtaining visas, and getting a workforce in place. And it's a really hard picture to paint. So it's not always winners and losers. It's very dynamic.”
Gannon says since last year, there’s been an ongoing effort to support Ukrainian workers - a group that have made up a significant portion of seafood workers in Alaska for the past several decades. In particular, Gannon says that during the uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, Ukrainian workers stepped up and were a reliable and energetic part of the workforce.
“There's up to 13 million Ukrainians in countries not called Ukraine right now. So still finding Ukrainian workers has been a priority for us to help provide economic opportunities for Ukrainians,” he said. “And I think we're succeeding this year. It's nice to see so many that we'll be able to earn and provide for their extended family in Ukraine and outside of Ukraine.”
Since Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine last year, men ages 18 to 64 are not allowed to leave the country. There are some exemptions to allow men to provide for their families, such as caring for family members with a disability. There are several work and refugee resettlement programs in the U.S. including temporary protected status (TPS) and the Uniting for Ukraine refugee resettlement program. Gannon’s organization, United Work & Travel, also runs a non-profit supporting Ukrainian refugees, the Ukraine America Initiative.
Workers from the Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador make up another important group of processors. Roughly 20,000 visas are available for people from those three countries, under a diplomatic agreement.
“So the US government is using a diplomatic approach to help with the issues at the southern border by requiring some H2-B using companies to source workers from Central America,” he said. “We've sourced close to 1,000 workers this year from El Salvador and Guatemala.”
Gannon says other large groups of workers are from Mexico, and from the Philippines. Both groups have a long history of working seasonally in Bristol Bay.
Under the H2-B visa program, 10,000 visas are made available to returning workers. He says seafood processing companies want to have workers come back each season. This helps with the continuity of operations— but that depends on peoples’ individual experience. And just like fishing, it also helps if people have friends or family already working these jobs in the plants.
“That certainly helps having people that had been inside the plant before returning each year to work.”
And, Gannon himself is intimately familiar with the work in seafood processing plants, sometimes called the “slime line” around Alaska. He worked in several plants starting in the 1990s in a plant in Chignik on the Alaskan Peninsula.
“It's demanding, it's inglorious, it's factory work at its harshest, and yet, you know, I did it for years and years, and people come back to it,” he said. “So it's not bad, but it is a unique industry, and certainly not for everybody.”
Seafood processing is unique, grueling and essential work to the entire commercial fishing industry. This season, Bristol Bay salmon will pass through the nets of fishermen, to hands of international processing workers, and on to markets, tables and mouths around the world.
Get in touch with the reporter at corinne@kdlg.org.
