Labor Department Goes Ham On Poultry Company Just For Killing A Child, Continuing To Employ More Kids Illegally
This seems a lot like a problem we shouldn't have anymore!
In 2023, 16-year-old Duvan Perez was killed while cleaning a poultry processing machine at a Mar-Jac poultry plant in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
He really shouldn’t have been doing that. Not just because it’s obviously dangerous, but because legally, workers under the age of 18 are not allowed to work in hazardous occupations like “meat and poultry packing or processing (including the use of power-driven meat slicing machines).”
You would think that after an incident like that one, after getting fined $212,646 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and sued by Perez’s mother, they might be a little more careful about not hiring any more children for jobs they are not legally allowed to do.
Alas, no!
Earlier this month, investigators from the Department of Labor found minors working on the kill floor of a Mar-Jac plant in Alabama, another thing that is definitely very illegal for them to do. The Department is now seeking a court order to force Mar-Jac to stop selling and shipping poultry until they get their “oppressive child labor” situation figured out.
The DOL announced last year that it would start using “hot goods” injunctions to keep companies found to be using child labor from operating until they get things sorted, and they’re keeping that promise.
“On May 1, 2024, investigators with the Wage and Hour Division, U.S. Department of Labor, discovered oppressive child labor at Defendant’s poultry processing facility, namely children working on the kill floor deboning poultry and cutting carcasses,” the court documents said. “The children had been working at the facility for months, and Defendant continually removed goods from the facility the entire time.”
Mar-Jac, which supplies chicken meat to Chick-Fil-A, said they did nothing wrong, that the teens gave them documentation showing that they were 18 that passed an e-verify check, and that they fired the workers as soon as they found out they were not. Should that be the case, it should actually be very easy to prove. It is, however, strange that the DOL investigators were able to so quickly determine that they were not 18. Perhaps they just were not that invested!
Mar-Jac also claims that the children working in the plant weren’t actually doing anything dangerous, just “hanging chickens and removing wings” in an area that was more kitchen than kill floor. But again, the DOL investigators literally went to the facility and saw the children working on the kill floor “deboning poultry and cutting carcasses,” so it’s probably going to be real tough to convince them otherwise.
The company says, however, that the injunction will hurt us all more than it helps.
“A 30-day ‘hot goods’ injunction would result in approximately 1,000 employees being laid off for 30 days,” the company said in court documents “require the destruction of millions of chickens placing them in landfills, the destruction of a million pounds of meat, interrupt the delivery of feed to growers and the delivery of birds for processing, result in all of the chicken house to miss a full cycle and the resulting economic disaster to the farmers, causing seismic economic consequences on the community.”
That is unfortunate, but they also should have thought of this before being so blasé about their workers’ ages. Hopefully, this will make it very clear to Mar-Jac that they really, definitely do not get to have workers under the age of 16 working in this capacity at their plant.
It’s fine for 16-year-olds to have certain jobs. I worked at Wet Seal in the mall when I was 16, and while it might have not been especially pleasant to untangle row after row of backless “going-out tops” every night, I wasn’t ever in any kind of actual danger. It is miles away from working in a poultry factory, which is why it’s legal for teenagers to work at the mall but not legal for those under 18 to work in occupations deemed hazardous by the Department of Labor.
PREVIOUSLY:
You can't even kill children through gross negligence anymore? Fucking communists...
I was 15 when I started a job at a local butcher shop cleaning and disinfecting the various saws, slicers, knives, mallets, and other instruments used in the dismemberment of the already dead beasts. I worked from 5pm to 8pm Mon-Fri. Minimum wage in 1977.
I would come home in the evening with blood stained clothes and smelled like raw meat and poultry so strong it wouldn't wash off. My lovely girlfriend finally had enough and told me it was either the job or her as she couldn't stand the stench of beastie covered up with Brut cologne (hey, it was 1977 and I was 15).
I quit the job to save my early romance.