The death of a Mississippi teenager in a conveyor belt at a poultry plant has spotlighted America’s child labor crisis, with nearly 4,500 violations so far this year as shifty bosses hire poor, young migrants for gruelling jobs.
Duvan Perez, 16, a Guatemalan member of a sanitation crew, died at Mar-Jac Poultry plant this month after he became entangled in one of the machines, raising concerns about lax safety at meat-processing plants.
Two other teenagers have died in industrial accidents this summer, prompting labor officials to crack down on unscrupulous employers with more inspections and bigger fines for offenders.
Still, industry experts told DailyMail.com that federal labor investigators struggle against a massive problem, that fines are too small to deter dodgy bosses, and that lawmakers in some states are seeking to loosen child labor rules.
Fast food workers protest against child labor violations at a closed Popeyes Louisiana Chicken branch in Oakland, California
Labor investigators have uncovered more children working illegally this year, and fines are bigger
The death of Perez on July 14 garnered international media attention and posed tough questions about the Hattiesburg plant’s safety record and how the teenager was even hired in the first place.
According to records obtained by The Associated Press, Perez’s coworkers had tried to extract him from the equipment, which stretched to the plant’s ceiling.
He was dead before police reached the premises, in an out-of-town industrial area, reportedly due to traumatic asphyxia and blunt force trauma.
In a statement, Mar-Jac Poultry, which processes some 2 million birds each week, blamed an unnamed staffing company for hiring Perez to clean the plant and said the youth’s paperwork misrepresented his age.
‘We are devastated at the loss of life, and deeply regret that an underage individual was hired without our knowledge,’ the statement said.
‘The company is undertaking a thorough audit with the staffing companies to ensure that this kind of error never happens again.’
Perez is the third employee to be killed on the job these past three years at the Hattiesburg plant, which also saw an amputation. Federal labor investigators cited the firm in 2020 and 2021 for four safety violations in three separate incidents.
‘These conditions are widespread,’ Nadia Marin-Molina, a workers’ rights expert at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told AP.
‘You can’t understand or even investigate what happened here without understanding the level of fear that exists in the communities around these plants and among the workers who are there.’
Perez’s death followed those of Michael Schuls, 16, killed in a wood-stacking machine at Florence Hardwoods, a sawmill in northern Wisconsin where he worked. Will Hampton, 16, died in June, pinned between a semi-truck and its trailer at a landfill in Lee’s Summit, Missouri.
State and federal child labor laws prohibit minors from working in meat plants and other hazardous sites, but insiders say employers target poor young migrants who are desperate for work and don’t ask questions.
Duvan Perez, 16, a Guatemalan migrant, died while working on a sanitation crew at Mar-Jac Poultry
Michael Schuls, 16, was killed in a wood-stacking machine at Florence Hardwoods, a sawmill in northern Wisconsin where he worked
A Packers employee cleaning with limited visibility at the JBS plant in Worthington, Minnesota
A Packers employee working in the ground beef room of the JBS plant in Grand Island, Nebraska
Some 300,000 minors have come to the US since 2021, fueling a dramatic increase in youngsters who have a limited grasp of English and US employment rules and are easy for unscrupulous bosses to pressure.
The Labor Department’s Wage and Hours Division, which enforces child labor laws, is investigating the employers of the three child workers who died this summer. Officials have said that child labor violations have risen nearly 70 percent nationwide since 2018.
They say they are responding. Already this financial year, they’ve completed 765 child labor probes, uncovered 4,474 cases of minors working illegally, and slapped fines totaling $6.6 million on lumber mills, roofing contractors and other employers.
That’s already much more than the entire 2022 financial year, when 3,876 illegally employed minors were detected, and fines totaling $4.4 were imposed.
Labor officials and experts on child abuses said those figures are only a fraction of how many are truly working in violation of labor rules, which may number in the hundreds of thousands.
Most of those cases involved routine violations like teens working more hours than permitted, or operating trash compressors, rather than more dangerous environments like saw mills and abattoirs.
The department this week announced that it had fined McDonald’s franchises in Louisiana and Texas for working teens longer hours than allowed by law and letting youths under the age of 16 operate deep fryers and trash compactors, which is banned.
But perhaps America’s most egregious case of child labor violations was concluded in February, when Packers Sanitation Services, a contractor for cleaning meat packing plants across the US, agreed to pay $1.5 million and reform its hiring practices.
Investigators found 102 children working for Packers at 13 hazardous plants across eight states, some toiling through the night and getting chemical burns from cleaning products used on dangerous machines.
The minors performed ‘hazardous work cleaning industrial power-driven slaughtering and meat processing equipment on the kill floors of meatpacking and slaughtering facilities in the middle of the night,’ court papers showed.
They cleaned machines with such ominous names as the Heavy Duty Head Splitter, the Dehorner, and the Dominator Mixer/Grinder, described in court papers as a ‘125 horsepower behemoth that can grind 36,000 pounds of meat per hour’.
Several young workers, including a 13-year-old, suffered ‘serious chemical burns’ from using Packers’ powerful cleaning chemicals, often in conditions with poor visibility and with fat and meat strewn across the floors.
Still, Reid Maki, coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition at the National Consumers League, told DailyMail.com that the penalty imposed on Wisconsin-based Packers was too small to deter future abusers.
‘You have to put fear into the employers that there are repercussions for hiring children illegally,’ Maki said on Friday.
‘We have to send a powerful message to companies that employ children illegally in dangerous settings must stop, and the way to do that is with really significant fines that actually hurt the company’s bottom line.’
Lawmakers in several states have pushed in recent years to let children work in more risky jobs and for longer hours. The proposals from mostly Republican politicians are intended to address worker shortages.
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