A federal court has ordered a meat processor in the City of Industry and a staffing agency in Downey to turn over $327,484 in illegal profits associated with child labor, and fined the companies an additional $62,516 in penalties.

The U.S. Department of Labor obtained the court order last week after it investigated A&J Meats and The Right Hire, which helps companies find employees. Investigators concluded that children as young as 15 were working in the processing plant, where they were required to use sharp knives as well as work inside freezers and coolers, in violation of federal child labor regulations.

The two companies also scheduled the children to work at times not permitted by law. Children worked at the facility more than three hours a day on school days, past 7 p.m. and more than 18 hours a week while school was in session, according to a news release from the Department of Labor.

Marc Pilotin, western regional solicitor at the Department of Labor, said the meat processor and staffing agency “knowingly endangered these children’s safety and put their companies’ profits before the well-being of these minors,” according to the news release.

“These employers egregiously violated federal law and now, both have learned about the serious consequences for those who so callously expose children to harm,” he said.

Federal law prevents companies from employing minors in dangerous occupations, including most jobs in meat and poultry slaughtering, processing, rendering and packing factories.

The judgment obtained in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California is part of a settlement the Labor Department reached with the companies. It also forbids A&J Meats, its owner Priscilla Helen Castillo and The Right Hire staffing agency from trying to trade goods connected to “oppressive child labor.”

As part of the settlement agreement, Castillo and the two companies will be required to provide annual training to employees on federal labor law for at least four years and submit to monitoring by an independent third party for three years.

Yesenia Dominguez, owner of The Right Hire, denied the claims made by the Department of Labor, saying her company did not hire any minors. She said her employees are trained to ask for documentation from workers’ home countries that lists their ages, since often they are migrants and might be undocumented.

“Those allegations aren’t true,” she said. “We do business by the book.”

Dominguez said she felt the government “gave us no choice but to settle.”

A&J Meats did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Labor Department has investigated other meat processing plants in California in the last year connected to Castillo’s father, Tony Elvis Bran.

In December, federal investigators found grueling working conditions at two poultry plants in City of Industry and La Puente operated by Exclusive Poultry Inc., as well as other “front companies” owned by Bran.

Children as young as 14 stood for long hours cutting and deboning poultry and operating heavy machinery, the labor department said. The workers came primarily from Indigenous communities in Guatemala.

The poultry processor, which supplies grocery stores including Ralphs and Aldi, was ordered to pay nearly $3.8 million in fines and back wages.

Hundreds of employees at two Smart & Final warehouses went on strike last week amid accusations the retail chain’s parent company retaliated against them for unionizing and is planning mass layoffs.

About 600 workers at the facilities in the City of Commerce and Riverside walked off the job Thursday.

The work stoppage comes after a year of increasing tensions between the workers and Grupo Chedraui, the Mexican company that owns Smart & Final.

At a meeting with employees in May last year, a Smart & Final executive announced that the company planned to close five Southern California distribution centers. The executive told employees at the warehouses they would be terminated and have to reapply for their jobs for lower pay when a new 1.4-million-square-foot facility in Rancho Cucamonga opened, according to several workers who attended the meeting.

The announcement came shortly after workers at the City of Commerce facility had voted to unionize and days before a union election was scheduled to be held at the Riverside distribution center, leading to claims by employees and union officials that the move was in retaliation for the unionization push.

Teamsters Local 630, which represents the workers, has filed more than 30 unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging the company is interfering with workers’ right to organize, among other claims.

Chedraui denies that its actions were retaliatory, saying the planned warehouse closures are part of a plan to integrate “five outdated and capacity-strained facilities that are spread across 2,000 square miles.”

“The Teamsters’ claims are simply not true,” the company said in an emailed statement. “Our new facility will employ nearly 1000 people, creating hundreds more American jobs than exist today. This will substantially reduce our carbon footprint and enable us to continue providing affordable food to communities in California that need it the most.”

Chedraui said the strike, which began Thursday, hasn’t caused any major disruptions in its operation of distribution centers.

Grupo Chedraui acquired Smart & Final in 2021 for $620 million through its American subsidiary, Chedraui USA. Along with Smart & Final it operates two other chains in the U.S., El Super and Fiesta Mart, making it the fourth-largest grocery retailer in California, according to company news releases. It also operates stores in Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and Nevada.

Many of the Smart & Final warehouse workers have been with the company for more than 20 or 30 years and make about $32 per hour, union organizers and workers said in interviews. At job fairs for prospective hires at the new distribution center, Chedraui is advertising pay at $20 an hour, the organizers and employees claim.

“Things are very uncertain for us,” said Daniel Delgado, who has worked for more than 19 years at Smart & Final’s distribution center in Riverside. With the strike, “we are trying to send the company a message — a message that we are tired of being looked at as a faceless number.”

“We know this company has made billions of dollars off our backs,” he said.

Chedraui USA had $7.5 billion in domestic sales in 2022, a 137% increase over its 2021 revenue, according to an analysis of the nation’s top 100 retailers by the National Retail Federation.

In April, state Assemblymember Chris Holden (D-Pasadena) wrote to Chedraui , warning that the company’s plan to force warehouse workers to reapply for jobs appeared to violate a law he authored last year. The measure, Assembly Bill 647, aims to protect jobs of grocery employees, including warehouse workers, in the event of mergers or reorganizations of companies.

And Daniel Yu, assistant chief of the California Labor Commissioner’s Office, sent a letter in May to Chedraui, urging the company to suspend its plans to relocate its facility and delay hiring in order for his office to collect evidence to determine whether the company’s actions violate labor law.

The decision to strike this month came after a three-week work stoppage last year and other protests by employees. Maurice Thomas was among hundreds of workers who rallied outside a Smart & Final in Burbank in August. He joined the company about three years ago, leaving his job at a Frito-Lay plant in Texas to take care of his parents in California.

“It’s been real, real tough,” Thomas said. “The company has no interest in bargaining with us, they are delaying until either we give up or they move to this new facility without us. But we are not going down without a fight,” he said.

There’s good news and bad news about a legal settlement that New York state just reached with the giant health insurer UnitedHealth over its denial of contraception coverage for a member, which violated state law.

The good news is that UnitedHealth got caught and has been ordered to reimburse the member — and all others in her situation — for the out-of-pocket costs they incurred.

The bad news is that in addition to the reimbursement order, New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James imposed a penalty of only $1 million on the company.

For UnitedHealth, that’s the equivalent of about one-hundredth of a penny based on its annual revenue. In other words, if someone dropped a packet worth of $1 million on the street in front of the company’s chairman, he might not even bend over to pick them up for fear of creasing his trousers.

A couple more bits of bad news: Not only is UnitedHealth a “repeat offender” in breaching contraception access laws (in the words of Gretchen Borchelt of the National Womens Law Center), but it’s also not the only health insurer engaging in sophistry and pretexts to deny members access to birth control in violation of state and federal laws.

The center has documented cases in which Blue Cross and Blue Shield affiliates, the pharmacy benefit manager CVS Caremark, and others have charged customers illegal out-of-pocket payments or imposed prior authorization rules before approving reimbursements for contraceptives.

Vermont regulators last year reported that they discovered 14,000 instances affecting 9,000 residents who were illegally charged for contraceptives that the law required to be dispensed without costs. The state’s three largest health insurers — Blue Cross Blue Shield, MVP Healthcare and Cigna — illicitly shifted $1.5 million in costs for contraceptives, tubal ligations and vasectomies to consumers over the prior two years. The health plans were ordered to reimburse their members.

In 2022, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform found widespread violations by health plans and pharmacy benefit managers of the Affordable Care Act’s mandates that the full range of FDA-approved birth control be offered to all customers. The committee cited the NWLC’s findings, and specifically queried five of the largest insurers (including UnitedHealth) and four of the largest PBMs to determine whether they were complying with the law.

But that was when the committee was under a Democratic Party majority. Since it came under GOP control last year, it’s been preoccupied with chasing the Hunter Biden case and harassing scientists and government officials as part of a fruitless effort to prove that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a Chinese lab. So women’s healthcare rights have fallen off its radar screen.

Protecting access to contraceptives is more important today than it has been since 1965, when the Supreme Court guaranteed married couples’ access to contraceptives on privacy grounds in Griswold vs. Connecticut; that decision was augmented in 1972 in Eisenstadt vs. Baird, which extended access rights to single women, and of course by Roe vs. Wade, which brought privacy protections to the right to abortion in 1973.

The Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade two years ago Monday, fomenting sheer chaos and pain and suffering for women in the states that have jumped in to quash abortion rights since that moment.

Politicians and judges in anti-abortion states have been talking about extending the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling to contraception. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in a concurring opinion to the Dobbs decision overturning Roe vs. Wade, listed Griswold among the precedents he thinks should be “reconsidered.”

A popular claim is that contraceptives fall into a ban on the mailing of those products enacted as part of the Comstock Act in 1873.

Past practice and legal tradition relegated the act, which Congress passed at the behest of Anthony Comstock, one of the outstanding bluenoses of American history, to the scrap heap long ago. Most rational legal experts, including those at the Department of Justice, interpret it today as banning the shipment of materials destined for illegal use; since contraceptives are legal nationwide and only 14 states have total abortion bans, it’s maybe hard to make the illegality claim stick.

Nevertheless, the Comstock Act was cited in the ruling by federal Judge Matthew Kacsmarykoutlawing mifepristone for medical abortions and by U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge James C. Ho in his partial dissent from an appellate decision placing some of Kacsmaryk’s ruling on hold; both judges are certified anti-abortion fanatics. The Supreme Court threw out their restrictions on the drug, protecting access nationwide for the present, on June 12.

As recently as June 5, Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic effort to install a right to contraception in federal law. The Democratic measure won 51 votes — a majority, but not enough to forestall a filibuster threat, which would have required 60 votes.

The UnitedHealth case illustrates how contraceptive rights can fall victim to the complexities of America’s fragmented healthcare system, though that’s not an excuse for the company’s legal violation.

In response to the settlement, UnitedHealth told me by email that it aims for all its members to have “timely access to a variety of high-value and affordable FDA-approved contraceptives when they need them.” It says it provides “access to more than 150 FDA-approved contraceptive options with $0 cost-share.”

Under New York law, that may not be enough. The state requires health plans to provide access to all contraceptive options approved by the Food and Drug Administration without cost-sharing. That goes further than the Affordable Care Act, which requires health plans to provide access to at least one treatment in each of several contraceptive categories “without copays, restrictions, or delays.” California’s Contraceptive Equity Act requires health plans to cover certain birth control methods without copays; voters enshrined rights to abortion and contraceptives in the state Constitution via Proposition 1 of 2022, which passed by a decisive 2-1 majority.

UnitedHealth ran afoul of New York’s law when it denied coverage to a member whose doctor had prescribed Slynd, a progestin-only oral contraceptive. The product is aimed at patients for whom the more conventional estrogen-based birth control is medically unsuitable. The patient filed a complaint with state regulators last year.

UnitedHealth refused to cover the product because of “safety concerns,” according to the state’s settlement. It insisted on prior authorization and step therapy (in which patients are required to try cheaper treatments first) before approving coverage, and continued to deny the patient coverage even after an appeal and queries by the state attorney general and other regulators. The insurer says it has dropped these requirements for Slynd.

The settlement requires UnitedHealth to identify and reimburse all members who were denied contraceptive coverage without copays or restrictions at any time since June 1, 2020, plus 12% annual interest.

How James and UnitedHealth came to the $1-million penalty isn’t clear — the contraceptive access law itself doesn’t carry a penalty clause, but other potentially relevant state laws do. The attorney general’s office noted that the penalty was imposed after only a single complaint, suggesting that it took the matter seriously.

What is clear, however, is that if the penalty is meant to be a disincentive to deliberately flouting the law or doing so through inaction or inattention, it’s laughable. UnitedHealth collected $371.6 billion in revenue last year — that’s more than $1 billion a day. Of that sum, nearly $291 billion came from insurance premiums. The firm reported more than $29 billion in pretax profits last year.

Imposing unnecessary, burdensome or illegal restrictions on contraceptive access is one way that health insurers or other healthcare providers make themselves complicit in the conservative project to narrow women’s reproductive health options.

It should be remembered, for example, that the drugstore chain Walgreens announced last year that it wouldn’t distribute or ship mifepristone in at least 21 red states, including at least four where abortions remain legal. The company was unnerved by a saber-rattling letter it received from the attorneys general of those states warning vaguely of “consequences” for shipping mifepristone, a drug used to induce abortions. The letter cited the Comstock Act.

Walgreens said in March that it would start distributing the product to physicians, but not directly to patients and not in states where abortion is banned.

“The ability to access birth control and the legal right to it are being threatened by extremists,” Borchelt says. “The threat goes against the will and the desires of the American public, which overwhelmingly supports birth control and overwhelmingly use it.”

Surveys by the NWLC — and patient complaints filed via its CoverHer hotline — document that restrictions on coverage for legal birth control have been endemic. Some plans have refused to cover products such as the vaginal contraceptive ring or contraceptive patch, arguing that other “hormonal” contraceptives were covered and therefore patients didn’t need access to the ring or patch, which are obviously discrete methods. That was an argument used by UnitedHealth.

Other health plans have covered only certain IUDs, or covered only generic contraceptives even when patients had difficulty tolerating any but brand name products. Women who underwent tubal ligations were told that their insurers would cover only the direct cost of the procedure, but not anesthesia, medications or facility charges. Some have been denied coverage for innovative but FDA-approved birth control methods, such as a hormone-free gel.

Patients denied coverage are often forced to undertake lengthy appeals and continue their efforts through repeated denials.

Whether because it is the nation’s largest health insurer or it has continued to place barriers in the way of members seeking coverage to which they’re entitled by law, UnitedHealth is “one of the insurance companies we hear about most often through our CoverHer hotline as being problematic,” Borchelt says. “They have been on notice that it has been violating the law in numerous ways; while the New York attorney general has done incredible work that will make a real difference for consumers not just in New York, but it shouldn’t have come to this.”