JBS chief Brent Eastwood says billions of revenue lost due to labour crisis

Industry leaders warn Australia risks losing lucrative export markets if a critical labour shortage isn’t addressed urgently.

Australia is losing out on billions of dollars in revenue each year due to a lack of workers, according to the head of the nation’s largest meat and food processor JBS Foods Australia.

The company’s chief executive and president Brent Eastwood, speaking in Melbourne today at The Global Food Forum conference, said the focus of the meat processing industry was value-adding and this was being severely hampered by a shortage of people to do the work.

“The current problem with labour shortages is we’re not able to capture all the parts of the animal. The labour situation squeezes that very tightly. It’s not a job a lot of Australians want to do these days,” he said.

JBS Australiasian chief executive Brent Eastwood. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen/The Australian

While the company aimed to hire locally, Mr Eastwood said it was becoming harder and harder to attract local workers “because locals don’t want to do these jobs”.

“We need hundreds of thousands of people back in this country. Unskilled, skilled, we’ll teach and train them. It’s fitters and turners too, sparkies. Right now Australia is losing so many billions of dollars a year in revenue because of a lack of labour,” Mr Eastwood said.

He said Australia had done an outstanding job building a brand and creating opportunities around the world, but all this would be lost if a solution to the nation’s labour shortage wasn’t solved.

“We have a boom we can’t take advantage. If we don’t get this labour situation sorted soon all this hard work will be taken over by others in the world. They will get into those markets and get established and it will be very hard for us to turn around and get them back. There is nothing more citircal in this country than solving the labour problem,” he said.

Coles Group chief executive Steven Cain echoed Mr Eastwood’s concerns, labelling the problem a “crisis” which has been compounded by Covid and influenza.

“Labour is without doubt the single biggest issue we face,” Mr Cain said, however flow-on cost increases were yet to be felt and predicted they would materialise within the next 12 months.

Mondelez International’s president of the company’s Australia, New Zealand and Japan arm, Danny O’Brien, said the world’s largest snacking company was turning to robotics to fill the void.

“With an unemployment rate at 3.9 per cent, we do have to invest in advanced robotics. At one of our biscuit plants, we’re putting in $12-15m mechanised packing technology,” Mr O’Brien said.

Well known agribusiness corporate adviser David Williams said action on the issue from the federal government was overdue.

“The federal government has to get off their fat arse and do something about it. There are unskilled guys in Vietnam already trained up to be in abattoirs, but what’s happening is we’re running one shift instead of two or three, and in southern NSW and northern Victoria, there’s over 100,000 lambs that haven’t been killed,” Mr Williams said, referring to the former Coalition government’s Agriculture Visa, which the Labor Party has not committed to.