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 whose arm was hacked off by a piece of machinery, the Labor Department said Wednesday.
The department filed a request Wednesday for a temporary restraining order and injunction in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa against Fayette Janitorial Service LLC. It provides cleaning services to slaughterhouses in several states, including Iowa and Virginia, where the department said an investigation found 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 overnight cleaning shift at a Perdue Farms plant on Virginia’s Eastern Shore.
A Fayette spokeswoman said in a statement that the company was cooperating with the investigation and added that it has a “zero tolerance policy for underage workers.”
The statement continued: “Fayette has made significant procedural enhancements and improvements over the past two years to strengthen our hiring protocols, including: a biometric technology to assist with employee processes, the hiring of a new CEO and the addition of an additional legal third party representation to help control workers’.
Meat processing is one of the nation’s most dangerous industries, and minors are prohibited by federal law from working in slaughterhouses because of 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 hazardous motorized equipment at a Perdue plant in Accomack County, Va., and at a plant operated by Seaboard Triumph Foods in Sioux City, Iowa.
Seaboard said in a statement that after learning of the allegations, it terminated its contracts with Fayette.
Fifteen children worked at the Virginia plant and at least nine children were found to be working at the Iowa plant, the department said in its complaint seeking injunctive relief and a restraining order.
Their duties included cleaning “kill floor equipment” such as head splitters, jaw machines, band saws and throat cutters, the Labor Department said.
The Times magazine article focused on a child, Marcos Cux, who was recruited by Fayette at age 13 after arriving in Virginia from a village in Guatemala. Marcos was decontaminating a deboning area at Perdue’s Accomack County plant 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 tore his forearm to the bone. He was 14 at the time and in the eighth grade.
According to the Labor Department’s complaint, “someone in the sanitation office at the Perdue facility” called 9-1-1 to report the injury. When a dispatcher asked the worker’s age, the caller remained silent, then responded with an “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 Department of Labor 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 at our facilities – and we expect the same from our suppliers.”
Labor Department investigators received reports that some Fayette workers carried “pink and purple sparkly backpacks” and that younger workers “obscured their faces visibly” while older workers entering the plant did not.
“Some of these children were too young to be legally employed,” the Labor Department said in the complaint.
The Labor Department confirmed Fayette’s investigation in September, along with investigations by 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 her from refusing to cooperate with the investigation and telling employees 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 between the ages of 13 and 17 were working shifts at 13 meat processing plants in eight states, mostly in the South and Midwest.
Hannah Dryer contributed to the report.
