A company that hired children for dangerous jobs in an Iowa slaughterhouse, including cleaning equipment on the "kill floor" corrosive chemicals, has been fined almost $172,000. The Department of Labor said that between 2019 and 2023, 11 underage workers were hired to clean "head splitters, jaw pullers, bandsaws, neck clippers, and other equipment" at the Seaboard Triumph Foods pork plant in Sioux City, Iowa, the Guardian reports. In addition to the child labor civil penalties, sanitation contractor Qvest has been ordered to hire an outside party to implement policies on preventing the employment of children, reports the Des Moines Register.
This is the second time this year a cleaning contractor has been fined for using child labor at the same pork processing plant, the New York Times reports. In May, Fayette Janitorial Service was fined almost $650,000. The Labor Department said the company hired children as young as 13 to work overnight shifts at the Sioux City plant and a Purdue Farms poultry plant in Virginia. Federal law prohibits people under 18 from working in slaughterhouses.
The Labor Department said Qvest held the Sioux City's plant cleaning contract from 2019 to 2023. The department said that after Fayette took over last year, it rehired some of the children previously employed by Qvest. "Despite changing sanitation contractors, children continued to work in dangerous occupations at this facility," said department official Michael Lazzeri. Seaboard said that it never employed any of the "alleged individuals" and that it has no evidence that children "accessed the plant." After Fayette was fined, the company said it had "made the strategic decision to establish our own in-house sanitation team." (More child labor stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
