Feds bust company using child labor to clean meatpacking plants

I want to show you a headline. Federal officials say more than 100 children worked in dangerous jobs for slaughterhouse cleaning firm. Now, that is not a headline that was from a 100-year-old newspaper. This is from today, which maybe you guessed because, yes, it has the Peacock logo and it looks like it's on the Internet. But regardless, the Labor Department today announced that one of the largest food sanitation companies in the country paid $1.5 million in fines for violating child labor laws, saying they used more than 100 children, some as young as 13, to work hazardous and high-risk cleaning jobs in overnight shifts in meatpacking plants across eight states in the South and Midwest. The children used caustic chemicals to clean razor-sharp saws, including a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old who sustained chemical burns on the job.

According to investigators, the 14-year-old worked the overnight shift, then went to school and fell asleep in classes or missed school entirely. The company says it has a zero-tolerance policy against employing anyone under the age of 18 and that it is fully committed to working with the Department of Labor to make additional improvements to enforce that policy. Regardless, now is probably not a good time for a new bill in Iowa, which was introduced by a Republican state lawmaker just a few weeks ago, to address worker shortages. The bill would reportedly expand working hours for teenagers during the school year and allow children as young as 14 to work in certain jobs in meatpacking plants, like industrial freezers and meat coolers, so long as they are separated from where the meat is prepared. Lawmakers who support this bill say the teens would be participating in a job training program. But opponents are harkening back to the early 1900s, before federal regulations prohibited children from working hazardous jobs, and they're saying there's a reason our society said that it is not appropriate for children to work in those conditions. And then there is this, the proposed bill would protect businesses from liability if a child worker is sickened or hurt or killed on the job.

Alex Wagner