A Tennessee-based company employed at least two dozen children as young as 13 to work night shifts cleaning dangerous equipment at slaughterhouses, including a 14-year-old boy whose arm was shattered by a piece of machinery, the government said Wednesday. Work Department.
The department on Wednesday filed a request for a temporary restraining order and injunction in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa against the company Fayette Janitorial Service LLC. It provides cleaning services at slaughterhouses in several states, including Iowa and Virginia, where the department said an investigation had found that the company had hired children to clean plants.
The Labor Department opened its investigation after an article in The New York Times Magazine reported that Fayette had hired immigrant children to work the night cleaning shift at a Perdue Farms plant on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
Fayette did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson told The Times in September that the company was not aware of any minors on its staff and learned of the 14-year-old’s true age only after he was injured.
Meat processing is one of the most dangerous industries in the country, and federal law prohibits minors from working in slaughterhouses due to the high risk of injury. But that hasn’t stopped thousands of destitute immigrant children from coming to the United States from Mexico and Central America to work dangerous jobs, including in meatpacking plants.
The Department of Labor found that Fayette had hired at least 24 children between the ages of 13 and 17 to work the night shift cleaning dangerous electrical equipment at a Perdue plant in Accomack County, Virginia, and at a plant operated by Seaboard. Triumph Foods. in Sioux City, Iowa. Fifteen children worked at the Virginia plant and at least nine children were found working at the Iowa plant, the department said in its complaint seeking the injunction and restraining order.
Their duties included cleaning “sacrificial floor equipment” such as head cutters, jaw extractors, meat band saws and neck cutters, the Labor Department said.
The Times Magazine article focused on a boy, Marcos Cux, who was hired by Fayette at age 13 after arriving in Virginia from a village in Guatemala. Marcos was disinfecting a boning area at the Perdue plant in Accomack County in February 2022 when he thought he saw a torn piece of a rubber glove inside a conveyor belt and reached out to grab it. The machine suddenly began to move and split his forearm open to the bone. He was 14 years old at the time and in eighth grade.
According to the Department of Labor complaint, “someone in the Perdue facility sanitation office” called 9-1-1 to report the injury. When a dispatcher asked the worker’s age, the caller was silent and then responded with “Um” before the line went dead.
When the call was reconnected 30 seconds later, the dispatcher again asked the injured employee’s age and was told he was 19, according to the complaint.
Marcos missed a month of school and required three surgeries, including skin grafts from his thighs to his arm, and six months of physical therapy. Fayette covered his medical bills.
A Perdue spokeswoman said the company terminated its contract with Fayette before the Labor Department filed its complaint.
“Child labor has no place in our business or our industry,” spokeswoman Andrea Staub said in a statement. “Perdue has strong safeguards in place to ensure all associates are legally eligible to work in our facilities, and we expect the same from our suppliers.”
Department of Labor investigators received reports that some Fayette workers were wearing “bright pink and purple backpacks” and that younger ones were “noticeably hiding their faces,” while older employees entering the plant did not.
“Some of these children were too young to have any legal employment,” the Department of Labor said in the complaint.
The Labor Department confirmed the Fayette investigation in September, along with investigations of Perdue, Tyson Foods and QSI, a company that performed cleaning shifts for Tyson and is part of a conglomerate, the Vincit Group.
The injunction the department is seeking against Fayette would prohibit him from refusing to cooperate with the investigation and from telling workers not to talk to investigators, according to a Labor Department spokesman, Jake Andrejat.
Fayette is not the only cleaning company that has drawn scrutiny from federal regulators over allegations that it used child labor. Packers Sanitation Services Inc. paid a $1.5 million fine last year after a Labor Department investigation found children ages 13 to 17 working night shifts at 13 meat processing plants in eight states, mainly in the South and Midwest.
Hannah Dreyer contributed reports.
