Feds Say Company Hired Kids to Clean 'Kill Floor Equipment'

Federal law bans people under 18 from working in slaughterhouses because of the dangers involved, but a Tennessee-based company hired kids as young as 13 to clean plants in Virginia and Iowa, the Labor Department says. "Minors were used to clean dangerous kill floor equipment such as head splitters, jaw pullers, meat bandsaws, and neck clippers," the department said in a news release Wednesday, announcing that it is seeking a restraining order to stop Fayette Janitorial LLC from employing children while an investigation is underway. The department said Fayette also broke laws against employing minors for excessive hours and on night shifts.

The department said the company hired at least 15 minors to clean a Perdue Farms poultry plant in Virginia and nine to clean a Seaboard Triumph Foods pork plant in Iowa, NBC News reports. Fayette "employed oppressive child labor by suffering or permitting minors to work in the middle of the night, using hazardous chemicals to clean the power-driven slaughterhouse machines and otherwise working on the kill floor," the court filing states. In a statement, a Perdue spokesperson said the company terminated its contract with Fayette before the court filing. "Underage labor has no place in our business or our industry," the spokesperson said. The Labor Department said at least one 14-year-old was severely injured while working for Fayette at the Virginia plant.

A New York Times Magazine report on the injured 14-year-old, a Guatemalan boy named Marcos whose arm was nearly severed, was submitted as a supporting document with the court filing. The report found that it was an open secret in the rural Virginia community that children were working in local slaughterhouses. "Teachers were used to seeing middle schoolers sleeping outside the building first thing in the morning in cars they drove without licenses after coming directly from the overnight shift," wrote Hannah Dreier. The Labor Department estimates that the number of children employed illegally in the US has surged 88% since 2019, the AP reports. (Last year, another slaughterhouse cleaning company was fined $1.5 million for employing underage workers.)