A Tennessee-based sanitation company has agreed to pay more than half a million dollars after a federal investigation found it illegally hired at least two dozen children to clean dangerous meat processing facilities in Iowa and Virginia. The U.S. Department of Labor announced Monday that Fayette Janitorial Service LLC entered into a consent judgment, in which the company agrees to nearly $650,000 in civil penalties and the court-ordered mandate that it no longer employs minors.
The Labor Department alleged that Fayette used 15 underage workers at a Perdue Farms plant in Accomac, Virginia, and at least nine at Seaboard Triumph Foods in Sioux City, Iowa. The work included sanitizing dangerous equipment like head splitters, jaw pullers and meat bandsaws in hazardous conditions where animals are killed and rendered. One 14-year-old was severely injured while cleaning the drumstick packing line belt at the plant in Virginia, the investigation alleged.
, across 13 meatpacking plants. paid over $1.5 million in civil penalties. The Labor Department’s latest statistics indicate the number of children being employed illegally in the U.S. has increased 88% since 2019.
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