A major food safety sanitation company has paid $1.5 million in fines for employing more than 100 teenagers in hazardous jobs at meatpacking plants in eight states, the US Labor Department said Friday.
The department said Packers Sanitation Services Inc. employed at least 102 children between the ages of 13 and 17 to work overnight shifts and use dangerous meat processing tools such as brisket saws and “head splitters” used to slaughter animals. The use of hazardous chemicals to clean the equipment is permitted.
Packers contract with meatpacking companies to provide cleaning services at slaughterhouses.
Federal labor law prohibits children under 18 from working in meatpacking plants and prohibits minors from working after 9 p.m. in the summer and 7 p.m. during the school year.
The largest fines against the Packers stem from its contracts at JBS USA plants in Nebraska and Minnesota and a Cargill Inc. plant in Kansas. The Labor Department did not accuse JBS, Cargill and other meatpackers of wrongdoing.
The Wisconsin-based Packers said in a statement that it has a zero-tolerance policy for employing minors. The company said it audited its workforce and hired a law firm to review its hiring policies following an investigation by the Department of Labor.
The department sued the packers in November in Nebraska federal court for allegedly employing at least 31 children at three meatpacking plants. The Packers settled the lawsuit in December by agreeing not to hire minors and an outside expert to monitor compliance with labor laws.
The fine announced Friday stems from an extensive Labor Department investigation of the Packers.
The department said in the lawsuit that most of the child workers at the three plants were not fluent English speakers and had to be interviewed in Spanish, though it was unclear whether they were immigrants. A spokeswoman for the Labor Department said the agency has not verified the immigration status of the children.
Reuters has reported that the illegal use of child labor – particularly migrants – is widespread, including by contractors employing workers at chicken plants and Hyundai and Kia assembly plants in Alabama.
The automakers have said they do not condone labor law violations and are reviewing the hiring practices used by their suppliers. (Reporting by Daniel Wiesner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Josie Cao)
The text of this story is published from a wire agency feed without any modification.
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