By Bruce Cochrane
The manager of quality assurance and labour programs with Manitoba Pork says swine farms located closer to the larger urban centers tend to have less difficulty filling vacant positions than those located in more remote areas.
Accessing qualified labor has been identified by Manitoba's pork producers as an ongoing challenge.
Miles Beaudin, the manager of quality assurance and labour programs with Manitoba Pork, says in response Manitoba Pork has successfully lobbied the federal government to maintain access to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program and identified two recruiters qualified to recruit temporary foreign workers, hired a human resources specialist to evaluate labour needs and made changes to its web site to allow producers to advertise on farm jobs.
Miles Beaudin-Manitoba Pork:
We have a variety of positions starting at entry level and at that position we call them animal care technicians.
Then we have supervisor roles for breeding and farrowing, we have farm managers and we have some general management positions.
In total we have approximately 25 hundred on farm jobs involving the care of swine.
There's approximately 100 to 200 positions that come available every year.
Some producers are having no difficulty at all.
It appears to be dependant on location where the farms are.
Farms that are located closer to Steinbach or Winkler or Winnipeg are having less difficulty while others are having more difficulty and those are people again situated outside those type of ranges so it's a mixture of a combination of two factors.
Beaudin advises producers seeking workers to advertise through all available mediums, including the national job bank.
He notes, in the event they can not find people domestically, after several weeks they can request a labor market impact assessment and once approved will be able to recruit workers through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.
Source: Farmscape