By Laura Strickler—
NBC News
Another industrial slaughterhouse cleaner has been charged by the U.S. Department of Labor with
illegally employing children as young as 13
to clean dangerous equipment on night shifts, according to a temporary restraining order filed in federal court Wednesday.
The Department of Labor said the Tennessee-based company Fayette Janitorial LLC illegally employed 15 children to clean a Perdue Farms poultry plant in Virginia and nine for a Seaboard Triumph Foods pork processor in Iowa. They cleaned equipment. such as head cutters and meat band saws.
Fayette has 600 employees in 30 states, according to the company website.
Image of a Fayette Janitorial worker collecting animal parts at a processing plant taken by the US Department of Labor US Department of Labor
Minors under 18 cannot work in slaughterhouses because the federal government considers it too dangerous.
Last summer, a 16-year-old migrant died in a Mississippi slaughterhouse after being sucked into a machine he was cleaning.
“Federal laws were established decades ago to prevent employers from profiting from employing children in hazardous jobs, but we continue to find those who exploit children,” said Jessica Looman, administrator of the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division. .
“As we have unfortunately seen in this case, violations of federal child labor laws by employers have real consequences on the lives of children.
Our actions to end these violations will help ensure that no more children are harmed in the future.”
Fayette did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
NBC News was the first to report that in October, FBI agents discovered dozens of children working at a Kidron, Ohio, chicken plant called Gerber's Poultry, which had contracted with Fayette for sanitation.
Most of the children are from Guatemala.
At the time, Gerber's Poultry said in a statement: “We were surprised to learn that our Kidron, Ohio, plant is the subject of an investigation by federal law enforcement regarding the composition of our employees and some contracted by third parties.
We are cooperating fully with that investigation.
While we are confident in our process to ensure we comply with all federal regulations for verifying employment eligibility, we are actively reviewing our policies to ensure compliance at all levels and will continue to review our relationships with third-party providers and their policies similarly.”
[The company that exploited more than 100 children to clean slaughterhouses twice employed a minor with different names]
Fayette has also come under scrutiny for serious safety violations by the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration, including an incident at Gerber's Poultry in July 2022,
when a worker became trapped in a conveyor belt.
OSHA cited Fayette Janitorial for failing to ensure its employees followed proper procedures by ensuring machines were turned off.
Fayette paid a fine of $13,052, according to OSHA's compliance page.
The agency lists the accident as an amputation incident on its website.
Fayette is the second major slaughterhouse cleaning company that the Department of Labor says has hired children.
In 2023, the Department of Labor found that national company Packers Sanitation Services Inc. had hired more than 100 children at 13 facilities.
The company paid a civil penalty of $1.5 million.
In response to the Department of Labor's investigation, PSSI explained in a statement that it had "an absolute zero tolerance policy against the employment of anyone under the age of 18 and is fully committed to ensuring this is enforced at all local plants."
Overall, the Department of Labor reported a 152% increase in children illegally employed by companies since 2018. Many of them are Central Americans who came to the United States as unaccompanied minors.
More than 300,000 children, most from Guatemala and Honduras
, have entered the US alone in the last three years, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.