E-MAIL THIS LINK
To: 

Mississippi teen's death in poultry plant conveyor belt prompts crackdown on child labor scourge, with a 44% rise to nearly 4,500 violations so far this year as crooked bosses target young migrants
[Daily Mail, where America gets its news]
  • Guatemalan teen migrant Duvan Perez was crushed in Hattiesburgs’ Mar-Jac Poultry plant conveyor belt

  • Labor chiefs are cracking down on dodgy bosses, but lack resources

  • READ MORE: Sanitation firm fined for making kids clean bone-crushers
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.'
Business as usual:
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.

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.
Posted by: Skidmark 2023-07-28
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=673921