IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/isu/genstf/202006080700001107.html

COVID-19 Employment Status Impacts on Food Sector Workers

Author

Listed:
  • Cho, Seung Jin
  • Lee, Jun Yeong
  • Winters, John V.

Abstract

Food production and distribution is essential for human well-being, but the food sector has experienced a number of difficulties maintaining worker health and productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine employment status changes of persons recently employed in the U.S. food sector with a focus on food manufacturing and grocery stores. We find that the pandemic significantly reduced the probability of continued active employment for previous workers in both food manufacturing and grocery stores. Individual-level analysis confirms that the COVID-19 infection rate in an individual’s local labor market is a strong and significant factor. The employment changes are not just due to unemployment during facility closures. Previous workers increasingly exit the labor force as the severity of the COVID-19 infection rate in their local area worsens. The considerable risk of infection drives many previous food sector workers to stop working altogether. Maintaining worker health and safety is essential for a stable food supply.

Suggested Citation

  • Cho, Seung Jin & Lee, Jun Yeong & Winters, John V., 2020. "COVID-19 Employment Status Impacts on Food Sector Workers," ISU General Staff Papers 202006080700001107, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:isu:genstf:202006080700001107
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/bb83ec4a-1bb2-40fb-8c19-0b8a4d7ff7d9/content
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. A. Ford Ramsey & Barry Goodwin & Mildred Haley, 2021. "Labor Dynamics and Supply Chain Disruption in Food Manufacturing," NBER Chapters, in: Risks in Agricultural Supply Chains, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Swanson, Katelin A. & Mandal, Bidisha, 2022. "The Impacts of COVID-19 on Employment in the Food Manufacturing Subsector," 2022 Annual Meeting, July 31-August 2, Anaheim, California 322107, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    3. Chen-Ti Chen & Tao Xiong & Wendong Zhang, 2020. "Large Hog Companies Gain from China's Ongoing African Swine Fever," Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications apr-spring-2020-5, Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University.
    4. Xi He & Wendong Zhang, 2020. "Implications of Hong Kong's Special Status Revocation for Agricultural Trade between the United States, Hong Kong, and Mainland China," Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications apr-spring-2020-2, Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University.
    5. Francesco Carbonero & Sergio Scicchitano, 2025. "Labour and technology at the time of COVID-19: can artificial intelligence mitigate the need for proximity?," Eurasian Business Review, Springer;Eurasia Business and Economics Society, vol. 15(4), pages 1167-1203, December.
    6. Festus Victor Bekun & Abdulkareem Alhassan & Ilhan Ozturk & Obadiah Jonathan Gimba, 2022. "Explosivity and Time-Varying Granger Causality: Evidence from the Bubble Contagion Effect of COVID-19-Induced Uncertainty on Manufacturing Job Postings in the United States," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 10(24), pages 1-17, December.
    7. Yulong Chen & Liyuan Ma & Peter F. Orazem, 2020. "Does Rural Broadband Expansion Encourage Firm Entry?," Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications apr-spring-2020-4, Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University.
    8. Ashraf Elsafty & Mohamed Osman, 2023. "The Impact of COVID-19 on the Efficiency of Packing Lines in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Sites in Egypt," International Journal of Business and Management, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 16(7), pages 1-57, February.
    9. Seung Jin Cho & Jun Yeong Lee & John V. Winters, 2020. "Rural Areas and Middle America See Smaller Employment Losses from COVID-19," Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications apr-spring-2020-1, Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University.
    10. Xiaobing Shuai & Christine Chmura & James Stinchcomb, 2021. "COVID-19, labor demand, and government responses: evidence from job posting data," Business Economics, Palgrave Macmillan;National Association for Business Economics, vol. 56(1), pages 29-42, January.
    11. Seung Jin Cho & Jun Yeong Lee & John V. Winters, 2021. "Employment impacts of the COVID‐19 pandemic across metropolitan status and size," Growth and Change, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 52(4), pages 1958-1996, December.
    12. Lee L. Schulz & Chad Hart, 2020. "Agriculture under the Specter of COVID-19," Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) Publications apr-spring-2020-3, Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J2 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor
    • Q1 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Agriculture

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:isu:genstf:202006080700001107. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Curtis Balmer (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/deiasus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.