Child Workers Found On Poultry Company’s Kill Floor AGAIN Despite Teen’s Death: DOL
Child workers were again found working for a poultry plant company that saw a 16-year-old worker die last year after being pulled into a meat processing machine, federal authorities have alleged.
A recent search of Mar-Jac Poultry’s facility in Alabama found several teenagers deboning poultry and cutting carcasses on its kill floor, in violation of federal labor laws, the Labor Department said in a court filing against the company on May 6.
The DOL’s Wage and Hour Division “found children younger than eighteen-years-old working on the killing floor hanging live chickens on hooks for slaughter and cutting meat from the carcasses, which is a prohibited hazardous occupation for minors,” the DOL said in a court order demanding a temporary 30-day restraining order against the poultry company.
The underage workers had been employed there for months. All products produced at the facility, up until May 31, are therefore “tainted by child labor” and are “hot goods” under federal labor law, it said in seeking the restraint.
The company, responding to the restraining order request in court filings, denied knowing that it had any employees less than 18 years of age, and said that the alleged underaged workers were immediately discharged from employment once the allegations were made.
The company’s attorneys further argued that none of the jobs performed by the workers involved power machinery or dangerous conditions ― though it acknowledged that one of the workers was tasked with cutting wings off of bird carcasses with a knife as they passed by on a conveyor.
It offered to pull all goods produced at the facility during the work shift that federal inspectors said they saw the minors working, but it argued that putting a freeze on all production at the plant would have “seismic economic consequences on the community.”
“Mar-Jac estimates that a 30-day shutdown could likely cause approximately $63,000,000 of economic damage not just to Mar-Jac, but to its employees ($3,500,000), contractors, breeders, hatcheries, and feed mills, to name but a few of the potential casualties,” it argued.
The DOL cited the company’s recent child labor law violations, including last year’s death of a 16-year-old sanitation worker at a Mar-Jac facility in Mississippi, as evidence that it was consistently and willfully not doing enough.
“Defendant has a lengthy history of very recent child labor violations in its poultry processing facilities,” the DOL said in a May 14 court filing. Its past “rampant employment of minor children” should have incentivized the company to screen prospective employees better, it accused.
The company last year had said that the child worker killed, Duvan Tomas Perez, “should not have been hired,” and that his age and identity were misrepresented on his hiring paperwork with an outside staffing company.
“The company is undertaking a thorough audit with the staffing companies to ensure that this kind of error never happens again,” it told HuffPost back in July.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration in January said that it would fine Mar-Jac Poultry nearly $213,000 following the teen’s death.
Representatives with Mar-Jac Poultry did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on Tuesday.
