Illegally Employed Teen Who Lost Hand In Meat Grinder Awarded Whopping $1143
That ain't no freakin' monument to justice.
In 2019, a 17-year-old kid was working — illegally — at US Guys Deer Processing in Saranac, Michigan, a meat processing plant that specializes in processing deer and other game meat for hunters when he got his hand caught in a meat processor and, well, processed.
The boy, being that he was underage at the time, was not supposed to be working with that kind of dangerous equipment. His boss, Darin Wilbur, had not even gotten a permit for him to work there.
Now, you would assume that this kid would have a pretty big lawsuit on his one hand, but he somehow ended up in court this week with a pro-child labor judge who clearly didn’t see anything wrong with a 17-year-old operating a meat processor.
Via CBS:
Ionia County Judge Ray Voet said the accident was a "horrible tragedy" but didn't warrant jail or probation for Darin Wilbur, WOOD-TV reported. […]
"Two months later, we wouldn't even be here," the judge said, noting that the teen soon would have turned 18 years old.
"Ionia County is a farming county, and I know a lot of people in this county view children working, sometimes around dangerous machinery, as part of growing up," Voet said.
And yet, as much as people in Ionia County may enjoy the idea of children working around dangerous machinery, it’s still entirely illegal to allow a child to work around dangerous machinery. It’s not so much of a cultural thing as it is a “a kid could lose a hand that way” thing. That’s why we have laws about what minors can and cannot do — because lots of people have very bad and dangerous ideas about that and ought to be discouraged at all turns.
This could have been worse. A lot worse. Adults have been killed by meat processors. Last month, a 16-year-old kid in Mississippi* was killed while cleaning a machine at a meat processing plant. Can we not simply agree that kids under 18 should not be working jobs known to regularly lead to particularly gruesome deaths and maimings? That seems fair.
The judge ordered Wilbur to pay the boy $1,143 for the loss of his hand — which is not even close to enough to cover a bottom of the line bionic hand. All that will get him is an antique wooden hand, like Nicolas Cage had in Moonstruck.
Should Wilbur go to prison? That seems unnecessary! But given that the company charges $80 per processed deer (6th deer free!), he can probably afford to give the kid a hand.
*CORRECTION: Switched Massachusetts to Mississippi
My arms and legs are covered in burn scars from the nursing home kitchen job I held from the age of 14 to 18. I wasn't allowed to do anything other than pour juice and hand out trays from the ages of 14 to 16, but there was such high turnover and I was so reliable that I was actually the PM shift head cook before I turned 16. It was hard, hot, demanding work, but I was making over $11 an hour in the mid-90s and I had to save for school, so I never complained.
This isn't a good story. This isn't what we should be doing to kids damn near 30 years later. We're supposed to be better than this.
Abortion is murder, but the sacrifice of a minor child's hand in an industrial meat processor is simply an unfortunate lubricant of the cogs and wheels of capitalism.
[murmurs particularly heinous and objectionable epithets/kicks trash can across war room angrily/spits]