Tennessee company agrees to pay a fine for illegally hiring minors to clean meat processing plants

A Tennessee-based company agreed to pay a large fine after an investigation found that it hired dozens of minors for the dangerous task of cleaning meat processing plants in Iowa and Virginia, NBC News reported on Tuesday.

Concretely, Fayette Janitorial Service LLC will pay about $650,000 in civil penalties and abide by a court order to no longer employ minors. It will also hire a third-party consultant for at least three years to monitor it complies with the ruling and establish a hotline for people to report potential abuses.

The Labor Department alleged that the company had hired at least 24 workers across the two plants for jobs that entailed sanitizing equipment like head splitters, jaw pullers and meat bandsaws in dangerous conditions. In fact, a 14-year-old was severely injured while cleaning a drumstick packing line belt in Virginia, the investigation said.

Many Latino immigrants have ended up taking these jobs, many of which don't check people's migratory status or age. The dangers faced by this group when working in the industry jumped to the forefront of the national conversation last year when a 16-year-old Latino died while on the job at a poultry plant in Mississippi.

Duvan Robert Tomas Perez, a Guatemalan immigrant who had arrived in the country with his family six years prior, "became entangled" in one of the machines he was cleaning, suffering a fatal injury at Mar-Jar Poultry.

Mar-Jac acknowledged in its statement that the employee was under 18 and never should have been hired. "Mar-Jac MS would never knowingly put any employee, and certainly not a minor, in harm's way," the statement reads. "But it appears, at this point in the investigation, that this individual's age and identity were misrepresented on the paperwork."

It was the third death at the plant in less than three years, another one also being a Latino. Joel Velasco Toto died in December 2020 from "abdominal and pelvic trauma caused by a compressed air injury."