A cleaning company has been fined $171,000 after federal agents discovered 11 children working a “dangerous” midnight shift at a meat processing plant in Iowa.
According to a statement from the US Labor Department, the minors were working for sanitation company Qvest LLC at the Seaboard Triumph Foods pork facility in Sioux City, Iowa.
Children were hired to “use corrosive cleaners to clean head splitters, jaw pullers, bandsaws, neck clippers, and other equipment at the Seaboard Triumph Foods facility from at least September 2019 through September 2023,” according to a statement.
Working in meat processing is forbidden in the United States for anybody under the age of 18. Qvest must pay the fee and refrain from engaging in “oppressive child labor,” according to a court filing in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Iowa.
Qvest, headquartered in Oklahoma, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a written reply to NBC News, Seaboard Triumph Foods stated that it had not been accused of any misconduct, did not tolerate any vendor’s employment of underage labor, and “had no evidence that underage individuals accessed the plant.” It stated that it had not used Qvest’s services in more than a year.
Qvest must also hire a third-party company to assess its underage employment policy within 90 days and set up a method for whistleblowers to report illicit child labor, including a toll-free hotline.
It is the second time a contractor has been detected hiring minors at the same location. In May, Fayette Janitorial Services LLC agreed to pay almost $650,000 for employing nearly two dozen youngsters at the Sioux City plant and a Perdue Farms site in Virginia.
Fayette announced in May that the company no longer hires minors, and both Seaboard and Perdue Farms canceled their contracts with Fayette following the May probe.
“These results highlight Seaboard Triumph Foods’ history of employing children illegally in their Sioux City location since at least September 2019. Despite shifting sanitation vendors, minors continued to labor in hazardous jobs at this facility,” stated Michael Lazzeri, wage and hour Midwest regional administrator.
According to the agency, in the fiscal year 2024, the Wage and Hour Division discovered labor violations involving over 4,000 children, which were discovered in 736 investigations and resulted in more than $15 million in fines, an 89% increase from the previous year.
Paul DeCamp, former chief of the Wage and Hour Division and now counsel for Seaboard Triumph, said in a statement that firms were being “victimized” by fraudulent workers who obtained jobs using falsified documents.
“This situation underscores the problems facing employers throughout the country: individuals, including minors, obtaining jobs through their use of fraudulent identification documents, which are sophisticated enough to fool even the federal government’s E-Verify system,” the governor added.
A year-long NBC News investigation into teenage workers in slaughterhouses revealed how juveniles were hired in slaughterhouses and meat processing plants. The series told the tragedy of 16-year-old Duvan Pérez, who died after becoming trapped in machinery after securing the job with the ID of a 32-year-old man.