Over 100 kids illegally employed in hazardous jobs, contractor pays $1.5M fine

It's not an easy problem to solve. Anti-immigration advocates have to pretend it is. "Just verify people" is up there with "build a wall".

one way of doing that is government maintains a central registry of employment.

This, of course, have many other problems.

RealID was supposed to curtail this. They certainly made it hard enough for real citizens to get ID.

This story is not about fake identity. Company knew they were minors and ignored it.

Excerpt from story: “Our investigation found Packers Sanitation Services’ systems flagged some young workers as minors, but the company ignored the flags.”

>how do you propose we catch them?

Fine the companies that hire illegal workers. I don't know why so many in this thread have some delusion that the companies 1.) are acting in good faith or 2.) aren't intentionally using illegal immigrants for cheaper labor.

Fine the companies and the problem will solve itself. Another poster in this thread mentioned a case where Tyson coached an illegal immigrant. Illegals wont unionize, demand maternity or workers comp; and if they do, you call ICE and pretend you don't know how they showed up.

>how do you propose we catch them?

Incentives and chilling effects.

Automatic 30 days in jail for everyone who oversaw a minor get hired, per day worked. If more than five minors or across multiple managerial departments consider it systemic and send all overseeing managers and their managers to jail for 30 days per minor per shift worked. Strict liability and mandatory minimums are effective against white collar crimes unlike crimes of desperation.

Over ten kids and the company should be seized, all management imprisoned and all assets auctioned off. Give the legal employees enhanced unemployment to bridge the disruption to their employment.

I mean, Trump has knowingly employed undocumented workers for decades while making deportation of said workers part of his campaign. I think that can pointed out as hypocritical.

Kelly Osbourne, famed representative of Democrats the nation over.

Presumably the children in question lied about their age when they signed up. The most likely scenario is the meat plant offered them the best wage-earning opportunity in the area. If there aren't systems to verify who workers really are then the meat plant might not have had an easy way to find out. Seems plausible as theories go although obviously I only read this press release and moved on.

I mean; if the likely outcome was just losing their job these kids would probably have lied to the investigators too. The evidence here is they wanted to work since this isn't a slavery situation.

100 is such a small number in the grand scheme of things. There are much more than 100 children illegally employed in the US. I'd guarantee it. A lot of families need money.

> How is this related to the story? The story is about companies using children as workers in hazardous job. It’s illegal regardless of their documentation status.

I don't know about this particular case, but I don't know of any large business that's purposefully hiring children, or people not legally able to work in the US. They're hiring immigrants who are providing false documents.

If you're already using false documents and lying about your nationality, lying about your age isn't exactly a huge step. Why _not_ start working as soon as you can reasonably "pass" for the required age?

> Iowa has proposed bill to to legalize exactly this.

That seems like a different problem entirely.

Establishing a culture where counterfeit or stolen identities are commonplace makes it difficult or impossible to ensure the other labor rules are followed even if the company wants to do so. If the company doesn't want to do so, then it's even more difficult to prove intent.

"I had no idea that guy was 16. He said he was 19. Here's the driver's license have gave us! Here's his I-9! He said he was 19, how could we have known?"

The above could have been said by a company who was honestly unaware of the deception, by one that doesn't care, or by one that is actively marketing to and even "importing" underage immigrant workers.

> This is happening because companies don’t want to pay fair wage.

This seems like a third issue still.

In isolation, paying more would drive increased competition for the job; it would give people _more_ incentive to apply under false pretenses, not less.

It's also not clear to me that there is a native workforce in these areas for these jobs, at any rate of pay. Those jobs are difficult to fill because they're seen as low status, not because they don't pay enough. Even today, Tyson provides some of the best-paying jobs in the area where I live. I don't see how increasing that gap even further would change anything.

We do not have de-facto open borders, and this is a huge exaggeration. Immigrants are turned away all the time for all manner of arbitrary reasons. Just because there are large numbers of undocumented people in the country doesn't mean that there isn't border enforcement. Border enforcement is just a hard, expensive problem to solve with no clear vision or leadership.

Approximately 2.7 million arrests have been made at the border since Biden became president. Of those, roughly two thirds were immediately removed from the US under Remain in Mexico/Title 42.[1] Many of the remainder were immediately taken into immigration detention, faced removal proceedings, and were themselves eventually removed from the country (as are many who were not initially arrested at the border).[2] It is unclear to me how this constitutes 'de facto open borders'.

[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/title-42-immigration-border-bid...

[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/us/politics/us-border-arr...

> Cut off incentives and fewer people will come.

Why would we want fewer people to come ?

The article is about employing children - so it seems there aren’t enough adults to work there.

We should give out more visas to fill those jobs

I live in the area where Tyson has most of its poultry operations, and I know a few people who work for them fairly well - including a couple who are working there under false identities due to immigration status.

Tyson knows. They couldn't _not_ know. They seem to maintain an acceptable level of "plausible deniability" at least, and I've not seen any evidence that they're explicitly allowing it to happen, or even that it's their preference. It seems more like they _have_ to tolerate it. If they tried to aggressively stamp out their workers using false documentation, they'd lose a big part of their experienced workforce and would incur significant additional labor costs as the market adjusted to the change.

More to the point, those people aren't just going to shrug their shoulders and head back to their home countries. Many of them would just go through more complicated steps to get false documents that passed the increased scrutiny. Tyson would have to pay more to get workers. Much of that money would be spent by the very same employees obtaining and maintaining false identities, and the people they're getting them from aren't exactly upstanding citizens.

If anything, I'd expect a crackdown on illegal labor practices here to result in funneling more money to criminal organizations (i.e., "the cartels") and tying the immigrant community more deeply with them. It really looks like a lose/lose proposition from where I sit.

NOTE: None of the above is a comment on US immigration policy, or indicative of my personal position on how that should be handled.

The whole conversation about rural meat packing plants always drives me crazy. They moved them to rural locations, where by definition very few people live, and then suddenly a hundreds of dudes from rural Mexico showed up to work there.

So naturally we talk about Americans being lazy and racist when they complain.

Up north where I am from, all the racist conservatives own farms, and are constantly blaming things on "those illegals", but come harvest time you know exactly who are out in the fields doing the work. They purposely don't check anything, because they don't want no migrants, they want an underclass to exploit.

Big Poultry is too big to fail

Nah I love for undocumented kids to simply starve when their family hasn't enough money and no safety net since they are "illegal."

Put these kids out of work, I'm sure they'll be better off with no money for necessities!

In seriousness, the way to reduce child labor is to give all children better options. Outlawing child labor has the effect of cutting off support for those who apparently might have had little other choice.

I would disagree - American citizens have no control over what the Democrats or Republicans say or do. You only have two parties to choose from, and you only choose locally.

Indeed there are folks who support it like how they support Team Red or Team Blue, but if you go out on the street Billy The Kid style, I doubt many of them would want kids working in such terrible conditions.

No need to speculate, there's a lot of polling data on this. Broadly speaking, Americans want A) work visas for immigrants who're here now (75% agree), B) immigration status checks by employers (84% agree), and C) stopping illegal immigration immediately (77%+ agree).

A) Would you favor or oppose each of the following as part of legislation to address the issue of illegal immigration? How about -- Expanding the number of short-term work visas for immigrants whose job skills are needed in the U.S.?

Favor - 76%

Oppose - 23%

B) Would you favor or oppose each of the following as part of legislation to address the issue of illegal immigration? How about -- Requiring business owners to check the immigration status of workers they hire?

Favor - 84%

Oppose - 16%

C) How important is it to you that the government takes steps this year to... [control] U.S. borders to halt the flow of illegal immigrants into the U.S.?

Extremely important - 43%

Very important - 34%

Moderately important - 16%

Not that important - 7%

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx

> If there were actual jail time for complicit managers

Managers ?

Get for the CEO for wage theft / child endangerment

When you use e-verify now, your photo on your ID pops up. So some of these companies must be either doing it by paper or willfully allowing it.

In the article:

> Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the department assessed PSSI $15,138 for each minor-aged employee who was employed in violation of the law. The amount is the maximum civil money penalty allowed by federal law.

The max penalty is 15k per infraction * 100 kids = 1.5m

I think attributing any sort of emotion to them is out of place.

I'd argue that there's complete antipathy at the politician and elite level. And that turns "illegal child labor" into a cost of doing business. And from the looks of it, a quite lucrative form of doing business.

I think you're misjudging the emotions (I'd argue they have none). I don't think you're insane.

It seems hard to believe that employing an actual child would save you less than $1.5k over, say, 6 or 12 months.

$15k/yr is about $7.5/hr based on a 40-hr work week for 50 weeks. If each child on average only worked 15-hr weeks for two years, that's $10/hr. So it definitely doesn't seem like the fee would be "order of magnitude" more expensive than hiring adults. Assuming the kids got paid $7.25/hr... which seems high given that this is an already-illegal penny-pinching operation... that could easily be $10 cheaper than typical adult factory wages. (I know people working for around $18/hr in factories in Ohio a handful of years ago.)

Obviously the exact math is unknown, but I don't think your claim is fair at all. It seems very likely and even probable that the company still ultimately saved money compared to hiring adults at a competitive wage.

> This is an order of magnitude more expensive than the pennies they saved by looking the other way.

That depends on how long they expect to get away with it.

If you can pay a minor $25k/yr to do a job that would otherwise cost you $35k/yr, as long as you expect to get "caught" less frequently than every 18 months you're coming out ahead financially.

Realistically... I don't know what the actual cost savings are here, nor how frequently people get caught. Based on how often I see these reports in the press versus how often I'm personally aware of it happening, it seems like the chances of having to pay the fine at all are very, very low.

Two of the locations mentioned in the article are near enough to me that I know people who work at the facilities in question. They're rife with people working under false documentation. They get "raided" fairly often, but... well, these are small communities, and let's just say that it's amazing how often some people get sick and can't make it to work on the same day that law enforcement makes a "surprise" visit.

should be per violation by pay period at least

So if I rob a bank for $2MM, but spend $1.95MM on contractors to do the job, I should only be fined $50k?

Tons of teens would happily lie about their age if it meant they never had to work again. Heck, many parents would encourage that behavior.

Would there be any negative consequences to a law that said 'the CEO and chairman of the board of any company that violates child labour law should be imprisoned for 1 year'?

As someone who was forced to drop out of school and started illegally working 80 hour weeks at 15 it's all just predatory leverage from exploitive adults no matter how they dress it up as oppurtunity.

My parents used to justify it by bringing up historical farm kids, but ostensibly that work effort is then inherited as capital by those kids.

Working for your dads VC firm or your parents restaurant, on the family farm or mowing lawns in the summer. It's all still child exploitation to some extent but at least it's family time and in some sense you are holistically learning end to end business skills. It's questionable but has some educational return. I could see how it might be fine or beneficial, I get that in those situations there is nuance. Kids working in meatpacking plants aren't Michael Dell building PCs to sell in a garage, in fact such labor precludes them from personal autonomy & early, compounding investment in self development.

In our modern times turning an adolecent into a wage slave is evil, the negative impact continues to compound over the life of that child.

Don't get me started on "teen stars" forced to start music careers playing whatever they are told. Many teens in those situations who start out at malleable but willing children become instant victims of abuse the moment they begin to assert their own tastes.

These kids are not doing this to spend money on frivolous things like Fortnite. They are almost certainly migrant children who need the money because they’ve been placed with guardians who themselves are barely getting by or are exploiting the children by making them work off a debt. There was a massive nytimes expose on the issue which is driving the uptick in enforcement.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-...

> Helping out on the family farm is in its own category, in my opinion.

Also in the DOL's opinion

> It becomes a different question when we're talking dozens of kids working in a corporate meat processing plant.

Is it?

Would you feel differently if the kids' parents were working in the same plant, were nearby, and were comfortable with the situation?

To be clear - I don't know for certain that's the case here, but I do have enough knowledge of these plants to know that it's not at all unlikely that that is the case.

> Helping out on the family farm is in its own category ... the parents are probably actually supervising. ... It becomes a different question when we're talking dozens of kids working in a corporate meat processing plant.

The Norman Rockwell image in popular culture of an American small family farm with kids building character helping out next to their parents produces less than 20% of US agricultural output today. The vast majority of farms (by volume, not by population) are much larger corporate operations, making over $1M/year, with the labor not reporting to Mom and Dad but to some plant supervisor.

Side note, I dispute that the "middle class and elites" would genuinely rather perpetuate these conditions than face even a few % increase in the price of food if given that choice. The problem is that this proposition assumes perfectly rational, fully-informed consumers, and that's not reality. It's impossible to know at the supermarket if a package is colored green and has a picture of a happy cow on it because it's from an environmentally responsible small family farm that treats their dairy cows with kindness or if that's just the packaging that polled well with the focus group, allowing Cargill or whoever to make even more profit. I'd personally be happy to pay a few percent more for my food if it would reduce pesticide and herbicide pollution, reduce single-use plastics, improve work conditions. But the people making those decisions have no realistic way to communicate with me (aside from the plastics I can see in the store, though too often the brown cardboard packaging is just to win my purchase and actually hides a plastic coating that makes it the worst of both worlds). The only real signal that's accurately transmitted is the price, and it should be obvious that uninformed consumers will choose the cheaper option.

Yeah, I can 100% understand doing that as part of a family business; when your employer is your family it's pretty much assumed they have your best interest at heart (though I realize that isn't always true), and even if you're being paid very little there's a good chance you'll benefit from helping your family prosper.

It was definitely sarcasm, I didn't think the /s was required in this case.

Each? It looks like total. $15k each, not much of a fine

“the department assessed PSSI $15,138 for each minor-aged employee(102)”

The children yearn for the mines.

Sure it is. The Federal labor laws only apply to businesses engaged in interstate commerce (individual state laws apply locally). But even then exemptions are listed on page 5 of this non-copypastable PDF: https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/chil...

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/youthrules/young-workers

If you are under the age of 14, you are only allowed to do the following jobs:

- Deliver newspapers to customers

- Babysit on a casual basis

- Work as an actor or performer in movies, TV, radio, or theater

- Work as a homeworker gathering evergreens and making evergreen wreaths; and

- Work for a business owned entirely by your parents as long as you are not employed in mining, manufacturing, or any of the 17 hazardous occupations.

I was cutting grass for neighbors and a small business lot in the neighborhood at age 13 (and maybe a few weeks before my 13th birthday). I don't know if it was legal or not, but it seemed/seems appropriate to me.

Funny you say that: When I was 13, my first real job was at a trap shooting club and it was considered “farm work”.

For less than minimum wage, I sat in a tiny concrete building down range from 5 shooters and reloaded a mechanical arm with another clay pigeon every time the other kid (sitting behind the shooters) pressed the button.

You never knew when the mechanical arm would go off and sometimes the kid outside would accidentally hit it twice so it would go off when you were reloading it, basically grazing your fingertips.

You had to keep your legs straight out for hours because lifting your knees up would mean the mechanical arm would get it.

Every once in a while, you’d hear the shot hit the trap house, which only served to remind you to wave your little red flag before you exited the house. This was especially true during the beef and beer shoots.

They don't keep getting to employ these kids after being caught and made to pay the fine. So the risk is that they get fined before getting $15k worth of after-wage labor from the kids, and of course now they have to backfill the jobs posthaste or they violate their contract (with any potential fees from that).