Slaughterhouse cleaning firm fined .5M for 102 illegal child hires from Minnesota to Texas

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America’s top child labor campaigner has slammed as paltry the $1.5M fine against a slaughterhouse cleaning firm that illegally worked 102 minors at 13 hazardous plants from Minnesota to Texas.

Reid Maki, coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition at the National Consumers League, told DailyMail.com that the penalty imposed on Wisconsin-based Packers Sanitation Services was not big enough to deter future violations.

The sanitation company illegally worked youths aged 13-17 in abattoirs across the US. Some of them endured chemical burns from powerful detergents and had to clean dangerous carcass-cleaving machines in overnight shifts.

‘You have to put fear into the employers that there are repercussions for hiring children illegally,’ Maki said on Friday.

‘We have to send a powerful message to companies that employ children illegally in dangerous settings must stop, and the way to do that is with really significant fines that actually hurt the company’s bottom line.’

Slaughterhouse cleaning firm fined .5M for 102 illegal child hires from Minnesota to Texas

The Department of Labor’s court complaint features this image of a Packers employee working in the ground beef room of the JBS plant in Grand Island, Nebraska

A Packers employee using a hose to clean processing equipment at the JBS plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, from the Department of Labor's legal complaint

A Packers employee using a hose to clean processing equipment at the JBS plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, from the Department of Labor’s legal complaint

The $1.5 million fine amounted to less than half of a percent of Packers’ $460 million annual revenue — meaning it would take the cleaning subcontractors ‘just a little over a day to earn that money back,’ added Maki.

The Labor Department (DOL) on Friday said Packers had been fined at the end of an investigation that began last August. The fine amounts to $15,138 for each child hired illegally — the maximum civil penalty that could be imposed.

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‘The child labor violations in this case were systemic and reached across eight states, and clearly indicate a corporate-wide failure by Packers Sanitation Services at all levels,’ said DOL administrator Jessica Looman.

‘These children should never have been employed in meat-packing plants and this can only happen when employers do not take responsibility to prevent child labor violations from occurring in the first place,’ added Looman.

Investigators initially found 31 children working night shifts for Packers at Turkey Valley Farms in Marshall, Minnesota, and plants owned by multi-billion dollar food giant JBS in Grand Island, Nebraska, and Worthington, Minnesota.

The probe quickly expanded to other plants serviced by Packers, as investigators fanned out across Arizona, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Tennessee, and Texas.

At a Cargill’s plant in Dodge City, Kansas, they found 26 youngsters employed, in one of the largest recorded violations.

Packers spokeswoman Gina Swenson told DailyMail.com that the company had a ‘zero-tolerance policy’ for hiring minors and that none of those identified in the investigation worked for the firm today.

‘As soon as we became aware of the DOL’s allegations, we conducted multiple additional audits of our employee base, and hired a third-party law firm to review and help further strengthen our policies in this area,’ said Swenson.

‘We have also conducted multiple additional trainings for hiring managers, including on spotting identity theft.’

Packers has some 17,000 staff at more than 700 sites nationwide.

The Department of Labor's court complaint features this image of a Packers employee cleaning with limited visibility at the JBS plant in Worthington, Minnesota

The Department of Labor’s court complaint features this image of a Packers employee cleaning with limited visibility at the JBS plant in Worthington, Minnesota

A JBS plant in Worthington, Minnesota, where labor officials say children were illegally employed to clean equipment overnight

A JBS plant in Worthington, Minnesota, where labor officials say children were illegally employed to clean equipment overnight

Maki said the DOL was understaffed and struggled to investigate the scale of violations across the US. Officials need to go after the companies like JBS, Tyson Foods and Cargill that allowed underage cleaners on their plants.

‘We’d like to see bigger, more robust fines for situations like this where kids are put in danger,’ he said.

‘This will require congress to increase fines, and we are working with congressional offices to bring that about.’

Investigators focussed on Packers in August after receiving a tip-off that teens worked at the three slaughterhouses in Nebraska and Minnesota. They executed warrants to access the plants and the firm’s offices in Keiler.

They identified violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which prohibits children from working for more than three hours during school days, overnight, and from operating hazardous equipment, the department said.

The minors performed ‘hazardous work cleaning industrial power-driven slaughtering and meat processing equipment on the kill floors of meatpacking and slaughtering facilities in the middle of the night,’ court papers showed.

They cleaned machines with such ominous names as the Heavy Duty Head Splitter, the Dehorner, and the Dominator Mixer/Grinder, described in court papers as a ‘125 horsepower behemoth that can grind 36,000 pounds of meat per hour’.

Several young workers, including a 13-year-old, suffered ‘serious chemical burns’ from using Packers’ powerful cleaning chemicals, often in conditions with poor visibility and with fat and meat strewn across the floors.

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The subcontractor also intimidated its young employees into not cooperating with government inspectors and ‘allegedly deleted and manipulated employment files’, investigators said.

The department’s Chicago-based administrator Michael Lazzeri said officials ‘flagged some young workers as minors, but the company ignored the flags,’ and then they ‘tried to derail our efforts to investigate their employment practices.’

The DOL would not discuss the nationality or immigration status of the child workers. Court records of interviews with the youths indicate they spoke Spanish, not English. 

Industry experts say the Packers scandal is just the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of America’s child labor crisis.

Federal investigators recorded a massive 37 percent jump in the number of kids working illegally in America’s factories, eateries and other workplaces this past year, a DailyMail.com investigation revealed.

Federal investigators recorded a massive 37 percent jump in the number of kids working illegally in America’s factories, eateries and other workplaces last year, a DailyMail.com investigation revealed.

Department of Labor inspectors found 3,876 children working in breach of labor rules in the 2022 fiscal year. That includes a worrisome 688 who toiled in hazardous conditions, often involving dangerous equipment — a 26 percent rise on 2021.

Labor officials and experts on child abuses said those figures are only a fraction of how many are truly working in violation of labor rules, which may number in the hundreds of thousands.

Faced with low unemployment and a shortage of adult workers, bosses have turned to teens to fill the gap, experts said. Unscrupulous managers also benefit from the influx of desperate young migrants who need cash and don’t ask questions.

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