After a federal investigation revealed that a Tennessee-based cleaning company had unlawfully employed at least two dozen minors to clean hazardous meat processing facilities in Virginia and Iowa, the company agreed to pay more than half a million dollars.
Fayette Janitorial Service LLC entered into a consent judgment, according to a U.S. Department of Labor announcement on Monday. As a result of the agreement, the company will pay approximately $650,000 in civil fines and comply with the court’s order to stop hiring minors. According to the February petition, as of December 12, federal investigators thought that at least four minors were still employed at one slaughterhouse in Iowa.
Because of the risks, U.S. law forbids employers from hiring anybody under the age of 18 to work in meat processing facilities.
According to the Labor Department, Fayette employed at least nine minors at Seaboard Triumph Foods in Sioux City, Iowa, and fifteen minors at a Perdue Farms facility in Accomac, Virginia. The labor involved cleaning potentially harmful tools such as meat bandsaws, jaw pullers, and head splitters in potentially dangerous settings where animals are killed and rendered.
The inquiry claimed that a 14-year-old worker at the Virginia plant sustained serious injuries while cleaning the drumstick packing line belt.
In February, Perdue Farms and Seaboard Triumph Foods announced that they were ending their agreements with Fayette.
According to the agreement, Fayette must engage a third-party consultant to oversee trainings and keep an eye on the business’s adherence to child labor regulations for a minimum of three years. Establishing a hotline for people to report concerns regarding abuses of underage labor is another need for the company.
In February, a Fayette representative told The Associated Press that the business had a “zero-tolerance policy for minor labor” and was assisting with the investigation.
The Labor Department has drawn attention to an increasing number of child labor violations nationwide, such as the mangling death of a 16-year-old at a poultry plant in Mississippi, the death of a 16-year-old following an accident at a sawmill in Wisconsin, and the revelation last year of over 100 children working illegally for Packers Sanitation Services Inc., or PSSI, in 13 different meatpacking plants. PSSI settled civil fines for more than $1.5 million.
According to the most recent data from the Labor Department, there have been 88% more youngsters working illegally in the United States in 2019 than there were in 2018.