Ugh.. anyone thinking of sending their kid to work in a meatpacking factory should read the Jungle by Upton Sinclair instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
And how do you need to be to want kids working in anything before they completed their education (minus a couple easy summer jobs). Some American legislators are scum.
Since the jungle was published, more recent research has been published to show that simply having a meatpacking or butcher factory in the community causes more violent crime, sexual assault, and drug addiction.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34231439/ - "The Psychological Impact of Slaughterhouse Employment: A Systematic Literature Review "
Why do you think rolling back any of those hard-won regulations is a good idea?
John Oliver covered this two years ago: https://youtu.be/IhO1FcjDMV4
https://www.propublica.org/search?qss=meatpacking
I'm not sure if ProPublica has a free, public dataset on meatpacking plants but they generally have datasets that you can purchase that pertain to particular areas of reporting: Medicare and Medicaid overbilling / fraud; repeated pollution violators who keep paying fines instead of stopping polluting; etc. If anyone knows of a dataset on meatpacking plants, health and/or safety violations, etc. please do share the link to the dataset.
The argument that more pay & benefits for these workers will make meat more expensive is also nothing but a scare tactic. There is already so much automation that the increased cost will hardly be noticeable when it is distributed among purchasing units at the consumer end.