Worker Shortages Cripple Maryland Crab Picking Houses
By Cheryl Costello
Several Eastern Shore crab processing companies rallied together this past week with a familiar battle cry: They need more foreign worker visas to operate this summer. The H-2B visas allow seasonal workers to pick and pack crabs, employees these local businesses say they can’t find elsewhere.
Bay Bulletin has learned that this year is looking so dire, one well-known packing house is selling their business and giving up.
Almost all the owners of crab picking plants on the Shore are steaming at the news that only 10 percent expect to have the foreign work force they’ll need to pick crabs for the season. The H-2B visa program is as common in packing houses as Old Bay and JO Spice are on crabs.
“My family started using the H-2B program when I was 2 years old,” says Colleen Ruark of Rippons Bros. Seafood on Hoopers Island. “Many of the ladies that have been coming have been coming since I was 2 years old. They’ve become family. And when we get years like this it’s completely heartbreaking.”
Since packing houses say the industry has not been of interest to locals for years, the watermen sell to crab picking houses staffed primarily with (legal) foreign seasonal workers.
“Last time we were in dire need. Now we are desperate,” says Maryland Watermen’s Association President Robert T. Brown.
Hiring seasonal workers is a lottery system through the federal government. About 66,000 visas are issued nationwide each year. This year, most of the packing houses in Maryland did not get the luck of the draw.
Aubrey Vincent of Lindy’s Seafood says it’s been long-suffering.
“Unfortunately in 2018, we had to wait until October to open due to visa limits.” That cost them most of the season.
Brice Phillipps of Phillips Seafood, which has been in business in Maryland since 1914, says he’s tired of the same solution: asking the feds to increase the number of visas allowed in the 11th hour each year.
“We just need different tactics. And we need some real support and love for these people.”
Congressman Andy Harris says he’s pushing other options, too. “I hope at some point in the future we will return to the returning worker exemption, which I worked with Barbara Mikulski on when she was a U.S. Senator, to get the returning worker into the exemption bills. That really goes about 75 or 80 percent toward solving the entire problem.”
Heather Mizeur, Harris’s political opponent running for Congress, says governors should be able to create a state of emergency. “When an industry is crippled to its knees and an entire way of life is threatened, in the same way that a governor can declare a state of emergency and get federal FEMA assistance, we should be able to go beyond any caps, any lottery system, to get the workers that we need here,” says Mizeur.
WT Ruark in Hoopers Island, a business that’s been open since 1948, is up for sale. The owners have had enough with operating a business on a lottery. “The last three or four years we’ve been in the bottom tier of the lottery and we just can’t do it anymore. It’s too much,” says Darlene Ruark.
And with the season beginning April 1, the packing houses hoping to line up worker arrivals are already behind. Even if more visas are given soon, they’re already behind by a month. “We’re going to lose at least a month to a month and a half,” says Jack Brooks from JM Clayton in Cambridge.
“Most of the nine places [relying on visa workers] will be lights out, won’t have anybody,” Brooks says grimly.
That means fresh Maryland-picked crabmeat may be much tougher to come by as the weather warms up.