COVID-19 Employment Status Impacts on Food Sector Workers

Seung Jin Cho, Jun Yeong Lee and John Winters

ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

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.

Date: 2020-06-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstre ... 0b8a4d7ff7d9/content
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Working Paper: COVID-19 Employment Status Impacts on Food Sector Workers (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:isu:genstf:202006080700001107

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Curtis Balmer ().