That fine should directly be paid out to the kids in the form of a 529A college fund, or something similar.
EDIT ;
NEVER invest in a 529 college plan. They are money grabbing frauds.
I put $40,000 into a 529a plan in 2004.
In 2022 it was worth $89,000
--
They couldnt even provide a good return over 20 years.
They then berated me for complaining that they "only" doubled my money in !20 years.
The problem is that the banks that this was desposited in ~2004 -- they failed and were sold several times in the 2008-2012 banking grifting.
And they couldnt give me ANY data on the tranfer of accounts or companies when they befuddled the accounts together. They literally treated me as if I was berating THEM.
HN was a laughter of shitty advice.
So take mine with a ton of salt, because thats what you shall be tasting, marinated in rage, when you discover you invested in an institution that literally steals your money and marks it.
Cost of doing business now a days. Fines should certainly start with all profits from the infringing activity, and then add the fine on top. There should be no gains whatsoever from these kinds of activities. Companies keep getting away with these kinds of heinous activities because there is still gains in doing it.
The law doesn't seem to have much of a bite. I always assume something like illegally hiring minors or exploiting workers will be the end your business. Then it turns out to be a pretty manageable fine.
Same thing with selling alcohol to a minor, I figured getting caught doing that would mean humongous fines and revocation of your liquor license, but it is a $250 fine and 24 hours of community service.
Did the company make more than $1.5M in additional revenue due to employing those 100+ kids (plus the others that are likely to have never been identified)?
If you want to understand whether there are systemic forces at play which serve to reinforce an undesirable behavior, you should compare the fine to the expected profit not to the expected revenue.
The fines for doing this should not depend on company revenue or profit.
It should be that every single exec in charge of that company is never allowed to have any decision making power again in any industry. After a substantial jail time.
Every exec involved here should be personally liable too, and be forced to have their assets sold to cover a huge pay out to these kids. These kids should never have to work again a day in their lives. And if the assets aren't enough, then we should have tax payer money go and make things right for these kids.
The companies would execute them on the spot if it was legal and profitable. I'm happy with a company being required to do due diligence on age. If they can't prove they're old enough to work, they can't work.
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'?
Given the fine is a fixed amount per violation, it's not unreasonable to assume the company's management did the math and found child labor + fine is more profitable than adult labor.
> 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.
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).
Yes, it's the specific (hazardous) conditions involved. Teenagers can and are legally employed, but there's laws that control the allowed nature and scheduling of that employment. Young teens cleaning dangerous meat-processing equipment during nightshifts is several kinds of nope.
Yes, specific conditions. For example, here in Ontario, Canada you can employ children as young as 14 but their hours cannot conflict with school hours (including no overnight schedules). And certain jobs are simply 18+, such as working in factories. Abattoirs are one of the more dangerous and stressful (physically and mentally) jobs out there, and would likely fall in that category of hazardous work unsuited to children.
Still happens. It's easier now than it was when I was younger. At 14 I had to get a work permit. Now I would not, the employer just has to report stats to the state.
Our restrictions are also graduated. There's even a sub-14 category, though it's pretty limited. Then there is 14-15, which has the usual restrictions (no hazardous jobs, limited hours per day, no conflicts with school schedule). And then 16-17, which has no limits on hours per day or school scheduling conflicts.
I’ve read undocumented migrant children sometimes are placed in foster care BUT their families back home need the money, so the kids work to send money home, help the foster family or pay off the smuggling price
Tough to just be a kid in the US with other siblings in need back home
"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."
Wow, I knew that labor laws in the US were toothless but to have it spelled out like this is so depressing. A max penalty of ~15k per violation, just bravo team, bravo.
> 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.
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.
You're not wrong. I think I use the word `hate` because the status quo is to squeeze the average person out more and more. So since they "don't care", that lack of care ends up being the same as if they hated us.
It starts to invoke a bit of concept creep (e.g. how more people use trauma to describe an everyday bad experience) to describe it as hate.
I'm guessing the commenter (or the royal you) wouldn't be comfortable being labeled as someone who hates Chinese laborers who build Iphones, or the laborers in India who scrap toxic ships left to die, just because you own an Iphone, or bought something that was shipped from overseas and aren't taking much action.
I would also call out that it's a bit of a concept creep to call you insane by that commenter.
??? - $15k per violation is still quite a bit of money. This is an order of magnitude more expensive than the pennies they saved by looking the other way.
The point of the fines is not to force the company into insolvency - if anything, the DOL would rather incentivize companies into compliance with labor laws than squash them and spread bad practices into harder-to-monitor industries.
$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.
At the time of the suit they only found 31 child workers. After an audit going a few years back they found 103 total. No word on how how many hours worked but it's fair to say the average stint was for less than a few months.
They got off pretty light, but having seen how tight payroll can be in food manufacturing, I don't think anyone at the company is patting themselves on the back for paying a $1.5 million fine for a couple of lousy part time cleaners.
What _seems_ to be happening here isn't that the big companies (like Tyson) are flagrantly violating labor laws.
Instead, they hire contractors for some things, like cleaning. Those contractors start out by hiring illegals with false documentation - which, as I've said before, is defensible as "we didn't know".
Those contractors are small businesses themselves, and their labor practices loosen over time.
Maybe it starts out relatively understandably: someone brings their kid with them and the kid is doing some of the work assigned the parent. Once they've done that a while they (the kid) applies with false documents in hand, already know the job well, and live with other employees of the company so they're likely to be able to make it in.
That's still plausibly deniable by the company. Yeah, they know the kid isn't here legally, and they at least strongly suspect that they're a minor, but they don't really have legal proof of it.
Other families are seeing that one earning income, so they get their children false documents and have them apply. Because this is one of the few places where minors are employed - and both the minors and their parents are _wanting_ the minors to be employed - they have an influx of cheap(er) labor. Wages drop, the adults leave to work elsewhere, and now we have a company employing almost exclusively minors while doing work for a major company like Tyson.
If I had to guess, I'd say that the parents mostly end up working for Tyson while their minor children work for the various contractors employed there.
Finally, I'll point out that "minor" and "child" are basically synonymous from a legal perspective, but not from a social one. It's not at all uncommon for people where I live to work full-time over summers starting at ~14, and part-time during the school year at ~16. That's 100% legal here. In fact... my state offers "hardship endorsements" for driver's licenses that allow minors as young as 14 to drive on their own to and from school or work.
People's lived experiences differ hugely. My oldest daughter is 14, is homeschooled, and is literally begging me to let her work. There are very limited ways I can make that happen at her age, so we're focusing at the moment on entrepreneurship. When she turns 16, she'll have an (almost) unrestricted driver's license and be eligible to legally work lots of places with some limitations. She'll likely end up working in either food service or retail at that point.
I was hauling hay in the summer from 12-16, and that seems way more dangerous than cleaning a slaughterhouse - and yes, FWIW, I've also worked in a slaughterhouse, so that's not a completely uneducated assumption. Hauling hay is mostly a matter of walking/jogging alongside a truck or tractor pulling a trailer through a field, picking up ~50# hay bales, and throwing them up to 10' or so in the air to someone on the trailer to stack them. Once the trailer is full you get to go to the barn, unload them one by one, and stack them to the ceiling. All of this is happening in full sun and ~90-105ºF, and while wearing blue jeans and long sleeves (often flannel!) to protect yourself from the hay. You will absolutely experience heat-related health effects, up to and including passing out in the field if you don't actively stay hydrated.
Given that the above is the status quo for most families here, I would have no problem with my daughter choosing to hose down and clean a slaughterhouse floor at night instead.
So.. yeah. "Minor" doesn't mean "child" in common parlance, and where "child" ends and "young adult" begins varies significantly between region and culture.
> 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.
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...
Public schools have been instituting in "gig work" before that even became a term.
I remember in my elementary years (5-11 year olds) that the school would 'force' (peer pressure, competition, punishment of class for you not doing, etc) kids to get fliers of absolute utter garbage merchandise at exorbitant prices, and then go door-to-door selling these items. And the public school would get some unknown kickback for sales.
I remember when my parents said no to this, the teacher in class said "Since tarotuser won't sell anything, the class can never get a pizza party".
But... as a worse thought, that would indicate that Instacart et al should be able to target any age group, since gig-work is endorsed by the public school system and technically isn't "employment". But we all know better.
> § 780.1001 - General explanatory statement. Workers in rural areas sometimes engage, as a family unit, around the Christmas holidays, in gathering evergreens and making them into wreaths in their homes. Such workers, under well-settled interpretations by the Department of Labor and the courts, have been held to be employees of the firm which purchases the wreaths and furnishes the workers with wire used in making such wreaths.
I would guess that back in the day people made wreaths to raise funds for the family to pay for Christmas gifts and celebrations, or maybe for general purposes. This section seems to be from 1972, so yeah, I don't know what was happening in the 60s/70s to promote this exemption. Very much early gig economy though.
Yeah, child actors are often treated horrendously but we as a society still permit it for some reason. Many people have heard about how two children died because of unsafe conditions during the filming of The Twilight Zone movie. What often gets overlooked is that the two children, ages 6 and 7, were being forced to work through the night (the accident happened at 2:30 a.m.)[1]. If it hadn't been for the helicopter accident, no one would have known.
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.
There are millions of undocumented workers in the US using fake identities to get jobs.
Both major parties support this system. Some Republican interests enjoy the access to dirt-cheap labor. Some Democratic interests want immigrants to be able to find jobs despite it being illegal to employ them.
So we end up with a system where employers have no easy way to verify that an employee is who they say they are and has a legal right to work any specific job.
This is such an easy problem to solve, but entrenched interests would rather we all play dumb and occasionally slap a business on the wrist when they get too far out of bounds.
I’d be curious where these kids end up after this. My guess is they will not end up in schools but will rather end up doing undocumented farm work.
"This is such an easy problem to solve" How? If someone uses a fully faked/stolen identity, with a valid SSN / passport # / etc (which every single company is required to check), how do you propose we catch them?
I don't know about Wisconsin, but in my state RealID is entirely optional. When you get a driver's license (or state ID/"Non-driver's license") you have the option to have your fingerprints taken to receive a RealID compliant ID, or not, in which case your ID is valid for only state purposes.
I'm a natural-born US citizen, and I opted not to get a RealID-compliant state ID. I have no need for it. I use my driver's license for most things and my passport card when I fly domestic. A RealID-compliant state ID offers me no benefit.
Fingerprints aren't required for RealID. That's some nanny state BS your local government has added on. They aren't even needed for an Enhanced license for N.Am. border crossings.
The point is that a state-issued RealID provides me with no benefit, so any amount of effort beyond "yeah, sure, I'll check this box" isn't worth it for me.
Really? The last time I renewed my driver's license, I just got a RealID compliant license automatically, with no fingerprinting involved whatsoever. There wasn't any talk about making it "optional". That sounds like whatever state you're in completely perverted the goals of the RealID program (possibly to sabotage adoption?)
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.”
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.
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.
TFA is about hiring minors and your comment is about identity verification. My comment is perhaps a bit more specific than yours but as it’s directly related to the subject at hand, is relevant and on topic to your question.
My question was in response to Nostromo saying "It should be trivial to solve illegal immigrants working in our system and anybody who says it isn't is profiting directly from the problem". Not exactly sure what point you're making by jumping back to the original topic of the article instead
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.
Is it though? I'm absolutely an advocate for eliminating all visa/green card restrictions, but I would by no means say it's an easy problem to solve. There are a lot of downstream implications for unions, housing markets, education, Medicaid, etc. I think these are worthy problems to get to, but I absolutely understand why politicians would rather play dumb.
> There are millions of undocumented workers in the US using fake identities to get jobs.
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. Iowa has proposed bill to to legalize exactly this. This is happening because companies don’t want to pay fair wage.
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.
> Presumably the children in question lied about their age when they signed up.
That’s not true though. The company knew exactly what they were doing and still they went ahead and doubled down on it.
Excerpt from article:
“Our investigation found Packers Sanitation Services’ systems flagged some young workers as minors, but the company ignored the flags. When the Wage and Hour Division arrived with warrants, the adults – who had recruited, hired and supervised these children – tried to derail our efforts to investigate their employment practices,” said Wage and Hour Regional Administrator Michael Lazzeri in Chicago.
But if I ask "how old are you?" in an interview and reject anyone who says "17", then all the interviewees are going to say "18". Kids are pretty dumb but they can figure this stuff out. I'd be happy to claim 10 years of Kubernetes experience if I thought it would give me an advantage in the job market, no question. The children in question are already violating local labour laws; claiming to be 18 doesn't really hurt at that point.
Although I will note "tried to derail our efforts" is one of those things that could mean anything. People who are innocent might also have tried to derail efforts. Being investigated prompts some funny responses by businessmen.
The age of the kids was in their system. So the children did not lie about their age. It’s weird to defend the company that knowingly illegally employs kids in hazardous job and instead doubt the govt agency that brings this problem to light.
> The children in question are already violating local labour laws;
No they aren’t. Their age was in company’s system and company ignored it. Also they are “children”. You expect a 13 year old on ideal behavior while grown adults at the company were knowingly breaking the law?
> I'd be happy to claim 10 years of Kubernetes experience if I thought it would give me an advantage in the job market, no question
1. Software development is not a hazardous job, 2. You’re an adult.
Oh, I missed that. I thought they meant that the company had ignored the investigators flagging that there were minors employed. Yeah that is pretty bad.
Although I maintain there are going to be a lot more than 100 children illegally employed as cleaners in the US. Not everyone is going to be stupid enough to keep good records like that.
> Software development is not a hazardous job
Adults shouldn't be at risk of being injured on a worksite. The standard is supposed to be no lasting damage regardless of whether children are involved or not.
The article mentions 3 injuries, but frankly I don't care if they are injuring 18 year olds or 13 year olds; the problem is the injury not which end of teenager-hood a person falls. That is an issue, but it is an issue that is unrelated to employing underage workers.
> Although I maintain there are going to be a lot more than 100 children illegally employed as cleaners in the US
The point is the minors working at a meat packing company are victims, it’s ridiculous to blame them regardless of whether they lied or not and in this case they didn’t. The real entity to blame is the company which allowed this to happen and got away with meager $1.5 million fine.
> I don't care if they are injuring 18 year olds or 13 year olds..That is an issue, but it is an issue that is unrelated to employing underage workers.
It is related because meat packing is a hazardous job and there are more chances of injury for a minor than an adult, regardless of the training. That’s the whole reason the law specifically has an age limit for this type of jobs.
> The point is the minors working at a meat packing company are victims
Victims of what, a sudden rush of employment? Child labour laws are, at best, a statistical observation that the majority of children are better off being at school than going to work and it is safer just to insist than try and work out the edge cases.
It is appropriate that the company was fined in accordance with the law, they shouldn't have done this. But fact is that there are some kids where working at 13 will just lead to them having better outcomes than anything else. There are 3 victims here who were injured, beyond that there needs to be actual evidence before we start calling them victims. It isn't like at 17 they're victimised and then at 18 the scales fall from their eyes and everything is roses and sunshine. The line is a reasonable judgement call based on averages and estimated opportunity cost.
> It is related because meat packing is a hazardous job and there are more chances of injury for a minor than an adult, regardless of the training.
Depends on the injury I suppose, but my guess is that if they're stupid enough to have underage employees on payroll this company was probably not providing a safe workplace. I assume injuries are high across the board.
A kid probably is more likely to get injured in the workplace just by virtue of being pretty clueless and a lot more lightweight, I grant you that. But it is quite possible that these injuries say more about the workplace than the age of the injured.
> Kids are pretty dumb but they can figure this stuff out.
Children did not, under their own agency, seek out exploitative employment. We recognize that, as minors, their nominal consent is immaterial in the face of the overwhelming comparative sophistication of adults and adult institutions.
The kids did not figure this stuff out; the adults in the room did.
The agency had enough information to prosecute and fine the company. I would rather trust a govt agency than a for profit company whose only motivation is earn profit by any means necessary.
> 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.
It is not even close to true that most employers don’t know their employees are illegal immigrants. Your view on this is wildly out of touch with reality. Describing it even as “open secret” makes it sound more secretive than it is in practice.
> It is not even close to true that most employers don’t know their employees are illegal immigrants. Your view on this is wildly out of touch with reality.
Oh, I know they know.
My point is that Tyson (et al) doesn't "officially" know. Their employees are providing documents, Tyson is submitting those docs to the government, and that's that.
> Describing it even as “open secret” makes it sound more secretive than it is in practice.
Knowing something to be true and being able to prove that thing is true are two very different things.
Immigration is one of the areas that such blatant lying happens by partisans. We do have defacto open borders. A good segment of Dems politicians and activists try to cover this up. They also misrepresent temporary "humanitarian" visas as being temporary. They are never temporary and always get extended.
On the other side is the lack of enforcement on the employer side which a good segment of Rs ignore. Cut off incentives and fewer people will come.
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.
I'm literally currently existing in such an immigrant town. We do not have open borders. We have poorly and inconsistently enforced border patrols, which is completely different. I'm not saying there isn't a problem, I'm saying it's important to not exaggerate the problem.
I’m assuming you are aware that no country in the world has fences or patrols of their borders to any significant length, right?
The reason is both financial/logistical infeasibility, as well as bipartisan neglect. Without cheap labor both locally and abroad, the Western world would collapse overnight.
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'.
A few years ago in the South, coordinated ICE raids of a bunch of chicken "factories" owned by Tyson netted 800-900 arrests of undocumented employees.
Many of them testified that Tyson encouraged and coached them, even provided written instructions on how to deal with various employment/taxation things as someone undocumented.
Asked about this at a press conference, and whether there were "any plans to issue fines, or charges/arrests against the company or management at the company who were very much aware they were employing undocumented workers"?
DA / prosecutors: "We have not discussed and do not have plans to do so at this time."
And to no-one's surprise, no "plans to do so" showed up later, or at all, either.
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.
Of course Tyson knows. Cheaper labor directly translates to increased profits. If Tyson and other megacorporations don't encourage this practice, they are leaving money on the table and violating their fiduciary duty.
> The ease with which you justify child labor is extremely concerning.
I don't see anyone justifying anything here.
I'm probably coming the closest to that, and I'm very carefully only trying to share my understanding that's based on living nearby and having at least some interactions with this community. I'm absolutely not defending or justifying anything; I'm pointing out that there are multiple perspectives here and that it's not quite so clear cut.
> Not to mention that where one finds illegal workers one tends to find child sexual exploitation because illegals don’t tend to report the crimes they’re victims of.
Please consider not using the term "illegals" to refer to people. "Illegal aliens" or "illegal immigrants" is at least marginally better, as it at least acknowledges that these are people we're talking about.
I'm not on the same side of this as most of HN seems to be - I hate to even bring it up, but it's relevant here to provide some background on my own views. I'm opposed to illegal immigration, "amnesty", and want to significantly increase border security. I'd summarize my overall position as wanting "A big, beautiful wall with big, beautiful open doors." Anyone who wants to come here should be able to do so, but we absolutely must know who is coming in, why, and be able to prevent known dangerous people from entering the country and disappearing.
None of the above is a reason to marginalize individual people and families. I don't go so far as to insist that people use milquetoast terms like "undocumented people", but I recognize that language impacts how we view things. These are people. Policies are driven by public opinion, and public opinion is driven by the language we use.
As for the point you're making, I agree. Much of these communities are living under the threat of deportation, and the rest inherits that distrust of authority. Crimes go unreported. We should definitely consider that when addressing issues that impact them.
That sounds like a sentence one could utter at every crime committed. Mob boss before court. This.
Following orders at nuremberg. This.
Fiduciary duty beets all other duties i guess.
Well, yeah. If a CEO or lower level employee does not follow orders in the name of profit-reducing "ethics" they will be replaced with someone who does.
> they'd lose a big part of their experienced workforce and would incur significant additional labor costs as the market adjusted to the change
The second statement clearly disproves the first one.
Tyson could get Americans (TM) if they paid significantly more and moved them in to rural areas; but it’s much easier to employ cheap immigrants and act dumb.
Disclaimer: No judgement passed on immigrants, only on capitalism and stupid politicians.
> 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.
Another potential outcome is that with the price of illegal labor practices increased legal labor would become competitive against illegal labor again. Which would probably increase the price of chicken, but would also mean that those working for Tyson legally would have a living wage again.
they are the best paying in the area because they win over competition by using cheap illegal labour. nobody honest can compete with that, so they break/move.
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.
If your entire problem with that cycle is the mexicans who end up working those jobs it's not ridiculous to consider that racism plays a significant role lol.
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.
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.?
I-9 requires you to check the immigration status for work authorization. The debate is whether you should be required to try to do it a way where that actually means anything. Democratic process in most states resists doing it in a way that actually does anything.
To note, I am for completely open borders but even I can tell you that states not using e-verify and just requiring an I-9 is almost hilariously comical attempt at checking immigration status, as there's little authentication against fake info let alone stolen identity.
Back in 2005/2006, there were a number of raids focusing on meat packing plants in the midwest. The investigation started when a routine check of one Immigration employee turned out that she was working simultaneously (well, her name & SSN were) at more than 50 places (and the IRS wanted about $200k in unpaid income taxes). Much of identity theft is focused on the Hispanic names & SSN because those are the ones that companies hiring illegal immigrants need in order to get past the electronic verification systems.
If there were actual jail time for complicit managers, there would be no market for illegal immigrants.
This is one of the most blatant examples of how the "Uniparty" works.
The Uniparty doesn't even require collusion, although it's not exclusive of it. Both parties can effectively collaborate against the interests of their voters through confluence of different interests sharing the same technique. At the same time, there's no way either isn't completely aware of what the other is doing.
What perpetuates this particular issue is that both sides of the Uniparty, for all intents and purposes, represent the same class of citizen whose interests are so divorced from the voters that even the petite bourgeoise isn't in on it since they are the ones whose best interest is to comply with the system as opposed to subvert it. That is unless they want to risk having the fist of God slamming down on their business for a quick buck. The only way I can see the Uniparty destabilizing is if they represented different economic classes. At best, they pretend to, but fewer and fewer people are buying that story anymore.
And millions of Americans getting the identity stolen and dealing with the fallout. The IRS doesn't care that it was someone else working under your identity that didn't pay taxes, they want their money.
> So we end up with a system where employers have no easy way to verify that an employee is who they say they are and has a legal right to work any specific job.
On a related note Arkansas just rollback regulations to employ kids. If the past month is any indication of what happens when you rollback regulations there is no way this will end poorly for some of the kids.
I'd never let any of my kids work in a meat processing facility. The danger element alone with combined with unpredictable children sounds like The Jungle just waiting to happen again. Still 100 kids out of all the employees seems like a really small fraction, to the point where I wonder if these kids were all related to employees.
I've got little sympathy for the company here, but seeing how scarce certain items are at the grocery store, how prices have risen and how difficult it is to secure labor for those jobs I can understand why they would have broken the rules even knowing they'd pay for it eventually, just to keep the wheels moving.
> I'd never let any of my kids work in a meat processing facility.
I did, both as a child and as an adult.
It wasn't driven by financial need, though, which is obviously a huge difference. In my case it was because I wanted to contribute to my uncle's small business.
I did whatever was needed at the "meat shop" during summer vacation when I was a young teen. Sometimes that was working the front desk and selling summer sausage, sometimes it was slaughtering hogs, and sometimes it was cleaning the slaughter room at the end of the day.
In return, I stayed at my family's farm during the summer. I had access to all their land and knowledge, was provided room and board, and got a small wage. I was also able to hunt that land in the fall and invite friends to come stay there during hunting season to hunt with me.
> Still 100 kids out of all the employees seems like a really small fraction
These were contractors, weren't they? It could have been all of their employees
> to the point where I wonder if these kids were all related to employees
Based on my knowledge of that community, I'd say that's extremely likely. It was probably a mix of kids working in lieu of paying for child care when not in school and kids that weren't in school for whatever reasons (including lacking documentation to get in, not knowing enough English yet, and some dropping out early due to social or behavioral issues). Most or all of their parents likely worked in the same plant.
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.
this is why food is cheap people. I used to drive corn and pea combines in high school, and in the farming community it's not uncommon to have kids driving tractors as well (granted this is usually a family run farm). It's likely that the people working in the factories there knew the kids or families and made an exception to allow them to start early (still technically illegal I know). it's not child slave labor, its kids trying to make money.
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.
> They are almost certainly migrant children who need the money because they’ve been placed with guardians who themselves are barely getting by
s/migrant/poor, but otherwise I 100% agree.
Kids from poor families want to be able to help with money if they can. Their contributions do help, too, and I don't think that's a bad thing in most cases.
Growing up poor, realizing your parents' financial situation, working hard to contribute to it, and then busting your ass to build a live that's better than your parents... that's the American Dream that I knew growing up. It's also the story of the vast majority of successful local entrepreneurs that I know in my local area.
I don't want that to go away. I think it's an important part of our culture.
> or are exploiting the children by making them work off a debt
I'm very confident that this happens. I don't have a good feel for how often, but I doubt it's even close to the majority case. I'm sure it still happens, though, and that's something that I fully support aggressively stamping out.
> Growing up poor, realizing your parents' financial situation, working hard to contribute to it, and then busting your ass to build a live that's better than your parents..
The problem is, it perpetuates the cycle of poverty. Dropping out of school at age 16 or whatever to help your parents make rent by slaving away in a supermarket stocking shelves will stunt your intellectual and career growth for decades, because without an actual education (be it trades or academia) it will be really hard to access better-paying jobs.
> Dropping out of school at age 16 or whatever to help your parents make rent by slaving away in a supermarket stocking shelves will stunt your intellectual and career growth for decades, because without an actual education (be it trades or academia) it will be really hard to access better-paying jobs.
Compared to what we, the HN community, expects - yeah, I agree 100%.
Compared to what this community expects... it's not so clear.
We're making a lot of assumptions: that these children are dropping out of school, that the purpose of their working is to help feed their family, that they have better opportunities available to them, that the children and their parents want the same things as we do, etc.
The reality is that their parents likely never graduated high school either. There's no reason to think that these kids are choosing work over school, as opposed to doing both - which obviously would negatively impact their ability to succeed at school, but that's not the same thing as dropping out.
If these kids grow into adults who have graduated high school, they'll likely end up providing a more stable foundation for their children, so they can focus on school more than they were able to. They'll be more likely to push their kids to go to college, and to enter a field with higher qualification requirements like medicine, law, finance, or tech.
This is how immigrant communities have always worked, to the point that it's a stereotype. There's a reason second- and third-generation immigrants consistently outperform "native" groups in terms of both educational and professional attainment.
As someone who got hurt by it, no, we should not keep around a system that saddles 10 year olds with extreme money anxiety because their parents are poor. America is stupid rich, we can easily support those families and attempt to insulate literal children from such anxieties.
It's not an important part of our society for an underclass to suffer FFS
Helping out on the family farm is in its own category, in my opinion. For one thing, the parents are probably actually supervising. So they are probably taking some measures to ensure the child is not dismembered. Most parents do have a strong interest in making sure their children aren't wounded or killed. It becomes a different question when we're talking dozens of kids working in a corporate meat processing plant.
> this is why food is cheap people
True. Though as an outsider looking in, it looks disturbing like a class, or even a caste system. Children, illegal immigrants, and workers with little to no bargaining power -- confined mostly to specific rural regions of the country -- do backbreaking labour, often in illegal and unsafe conditions, in order to provide cheap food for the ruling middle class and elites. Said middle class and elites would rather perpetuate these conditions than face even a few % increase on the price of their food, which they'd be able to afford.
I know you didn't mean that, of course. This is just me taking general aim. It's my first reaction to "this is why American food is so cheap" -- well should it be? Or are Americans just externalizing the costs of that cheap food on to others?
> 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.
I mean I'll just throw in there that where my wife grew up they have a week off of school for "spud harvest" where the farmers scoop up all the kids in the surrounding area and pay them to pick, sort and drive potatoes. It's a good experience for a lot of people around here and helped my wife net about $3k in high school each year.
I'm sympathetic to this, but kids making money should not undermine adults trying to make a living. I'm fine with underaged kids working, but they should be documented and paid 2x/3x the rate, with everything above minimum wage held until they turn 18 to be used for education or living.
I saw a POV documentary on PBS about kids from undocumented families and some of them are US citizens since the kids were born here.
But there were many instances where these kids work nights, then try to go to school during the day. It's the life they have to live to try and help support their family.
It's a terrible situation, but almost always better than what they faced in their home country.
> KIELER, WI – One of the nation’s largest food safety sanitation services providers has paid $1.5 million in civil money penalties after the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division found the company employed at least 102 children – from 13 to 17 years of age – in hazardous occupations and had them working overnight shifts at 13 meat processing facilities in eight states.
> 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.
Child labor is one issue to deal with but I am getting pissed off at the non-enforcement/selective enforcement of laws we are seeing in society, it doesn't matter what laws we have if they aren't enforced and routinely ignored.
I used to do this sort of overnight cleaning but in medical. Based on my experience I would be very surprised if the overwhelming majority of these kids weren't a) immigrants and b) working the same shift least one of their parents. I wouldn't say it was typical to have teenagers around but when you saw one it almost always turned out that they carpool with a parent even if they didn't necessarily work in proximity to each other.
> I wouldn't say it was typical to have teenagers around but when you saw one it almost always turned out that they carpool with a parent even if they didn't necessarily work in proximity to each other.
Yep.
I'm not defending this at all, but there is context that may not be clear if you're not familiar with these communities.
At least with the teen working, the parent knows where they are and the family is gaining income. The alternative is likely the teen staying home unsupervised, which is neither providing opportunity for the child nor income for the family.
Remember folks fines are just written off as business expense. Unless people responsible are jailed long time this will just continue. What happens then ? Pay the fine and repeat cycle.
Man, I resent that corporations have similar rights as people but if they were actually treated as people, they wouldn’t just be fined, they would be thrown in corporate jail where all operations cease. I wonder how quickly corporate responsibility would improve if that were the case?
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NEVER invest in a 529 college plan. They are money grabbing frauds.
I put $40,000 into a 529a plan in 2004.
In 2022 it was worth $89,000
--
They couldnt even provide a good return over 20 years.
They then berated me for complaining that they "only" doubled my money in !20 years.
The problem is that the banks that this was desposited in ~2004 -- they failed and were sold several times in the 2008-2012 banking grifting.
And they couldnt give me ANY data on the tranfer of accounts or companies when they befuddled the accounts together. They literally treated me as if I was berating THEM.
HN was a laughter of shitty advice.
So take mine with a ton of salt, because thats what you shall be tasting, marinated in rage, when you discover you invested in an institution that literally steals your money and marks it.
Same thing with selling alcohol to a minor, I figured getting caught doing that would mean humongous fines and revocation of your liquor license, but it is a $250 fine and 24 hours of community service.
That's not even a slap on the wrist.
It should be that every single exec in charge of that company is never allowed to have any decision making power again in any industry. After a substantial jail time.
Every exec involved here should be personally liable too, and be forced to have their assets sold to cover a huge pay out to these kids. These kids should never have to work again a day in their lives. And if the assets aren't enough, then we should have tax payer money go and make things right for these kids.
Sounds like an update to federal law is in order, at the very least tying that number to inflation (or perhaps to corporate profits?).
Our restrictions are also graduated. There's even a sub-14 category, though it's pretty limited. Then there is 14-15, which has the usual restrictions (no hazardous jobs, limited hours per day, no conflicts with school schedule). And then 16-17, which has no limits on hours per day or school scheduling conflicts.
I’ve read undocumented migrant children sometimes are placed in foster care BUT their families back home need the money, so the kids work to send money home, help the foster family or pay off the smuggling price
Tough to just be a kid in the US with other siblings in need back home
$10 an hour is a fortune
Wow, I knew that labor laws in the US were toothless but to have it spelled out like this is so depressing. A max penalty of ~15k per violation, just bravo team, bravo.
> 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.
Here's more evidence.
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.
They don't care if they screw the average joe.
They care about winning political brownie points from various voting blocks.
The policies and actions that win those points just so happens to screw the average joe.
The only logical course of action given those constraints and absent of any morals is...
Who don't vote. Democracy incentives transferring resources from non voters to voters.
I'm guessing the commenter (or the royal you) wouldn't be comfortable being labeled as someone who hates Chinese laborers who build Iphones, or the laborers in India who scrap toxic ships left to die, just because you own an Iphone, or bought something that was shipped from overseas and aren't taking much action.
I would also call out that it's a bit of a concept creep to call you insane by that commenter.
The point of the fines is not to force the company into insolvency - if anything, the DOL would rather incentivize companies into compliance with labor laws than squash them and spread bad practices into harder-to-monitor industries.
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.
They got off pretty light, but having seen how tight payroll can be in food manufacturing, I don't think anyone at the company is patting themselves on the back for paying a $1.5 million fine for a couple of lousy part time cleaners.
Instead, they hire contractors for some things, like cleaning. Those contractors start out by hiring illegals with false documentation - which, as I've said before, is defensible as "we didn't know".
Those contractors are small businesses themselves, and their labor practices loosen over time.
Maybe it starts out relatively understandably: someone brings their kid with them and the kid is doing some of the work assigned the parent. Once they've done that a while they (the kid) applies with false documents in hand, already know the job well, and live with other employees of the company so they're likely to be able to make it in.
That's still plausibly deniable by the company. Yeah, they know the kid isn't here legally, and they at least strongly suspect that they're a minor, but they don't really have legal proof of it.
Other families are seeing that one earning income, so they get their children false documents and have them apply. Because this is one of the few places where minors are employed - and both the minors and their parents are _wanting_ the minors to be employed - they have an influx of cheap(er) labor. Wages drop, the adults leave to work elsewhere, and now we have a company employing almost exclusively minors while doing work for a major company like Tyson.
If I had to guess, I'd say that the parents mostly end up working for Tyson while their minor children work for the various contractors employed there.
Finally, I'll point out that "minor" and "child" are basically synonymous from a legal perspective, but not from a social one. It's not at all uncommon for people where I live to work full-time over summers starting at ~14, and part-time during the school year at ~16. That's 100% legal here. In fact... my state offers "hardship endorsements" for driver's licenses that allow minors as young as 14 to drive on their own to and from school or work.
People's lived experiences differ hugely. My oldest daughter is 14, is homeschooled, and is literally begging me to let her work. There are very limited ways I can make that happen at her age, so we're focusing at the moment on entrepreneurship. When she turns 16, she'll have an (almost) unrestricted driver's license and be eligible to legally work lots of places with some limitations. She'll likely end up working in either food service or retail at that point.
I was hauling hay in the summer from 12-16, and that seems way more dangerous than cleaning a slaughterhouse - and yes, FWIW, I've also worked in a slaughterhouse, so that's not a completely uneducated assumption. Hauling hay is mostly a matter of walking/jogging alongside a truck or tractor pulling a trailer through a field, picking up ~50# hay bales, and throwing them up to 10' or so in the air to someone on the trailer to stack them. Once the trailer is full you get to go to the barn, unload them one by one, and stack them to the ceiling. All of this is happening in full sun and ~90-105ºF, and while wearing blue jeans and long sleeves (often flannel!) to protect yourself from the hay. You will absolutely experience heat-related health effects, up to and including passing out in the field if you don't actively stay hydrated.
Given that the above is the status quo for most families here, I would have no problem with my daughter choosing to hose down and clean a slaughterhouse floor at night instead.
So.. yeah. "Minor" doesn't mean "child" in common parlance, and where "child" ends and "young adult" begins varies significantly between region and culture.
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.
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 remember in my elementary years (5-11 year olds) that the school would 'force' (peer pressure, competition, punishment of class for you not doing, etc) kids to get fliers of absolute utter garbage merchandise at exorbitant prices, and then go door-to-door selling these items. And the public school would get some unknown kickback for sales.
I remember when my parents said no to this, the teacher in class said "Since tarotuser won't sell anything, the class can never get a pizza party".
But... as a worse thought, that would indicate that Instacart et al should be able to target any age group, since gig-work is endorsed by the public school system and technically isn't "employment". But we all know better.
I would love to know the history of that incredibly specific exemption.
https://www.govregs.com/regulations/expand/title29_chapterV_...
> § 780.1001 - General explanatory statement. Workers in rural areas sometimes engage, as a family unit, around the Christmas holidays, in gathering evergreens and making them into wreaths in their homes. Such workers, under well-settled interpretations by the Department of Labor and the courts, have been held to be employees of the firm which purchases the wreaths and furnishes the workers with wire used in making such wreaths.
I would guess that back in the day people made wreaths to raise funds for the family to pay for Christmas gifts and celebrations, or maybe for general purposes. This section seems to be from 1972, so yeah, I don't know what was happening in the 60s/70s to promote this exemption. Very much early gig economy though.
[1] https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/how-twilight-zone-the-movie-dea...
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.
Both major parties support this system. Some Republican interests enjoy the access to dirt-cheap labor. Some Democratic interests want immigrants to be able to find jobs despite it being illegal to employ them.
So we end up with a system where employers have no easy way to verify that an employee is who they say they are and has a legal right to work any specific job.
This is such an easy problem to solve, but entrenched interests would rather we all play dumb and occasionally slap a business on the wrist when they get too far out of bounds.
I’d be curious where these kids end up after this. My guess is they will not end up in schools but will rather end up doing undocumented farm work.
This, of course, have many other problems.
I'm a natural-born US citizen, and I opted not to get a RealID-compliant state ID. I have no need for it. I use my driver's license for most things and my passport card when I fly domestic. A RealID-compliant state ID offers me no benefit.
The point is that a state-issued RealID provides me with no benefit, so any amount of effort beyond "yeah, sure, I'll check this box" isn't worth it for me.
Excerpt from story: “Our investigation found Packers Sanitation Services’ systems flagged some young workers as minors, but the company ignored the flags.”
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.
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.
[0]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a8INEYLFWwc
Is it though? I'm absolutely an advocate for eliminating all visa/green card restrictions, but I would by no means say it's an easy problem to solve. There are a lot of downstream implications for unions, housing markets, education, Medicaid, etc. I think these are worthy problems to get to, but I absolutely understand why politicians would rather play dumb.
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. Iowa has proposed bill to to legalize exactly this. This is happening because companies don’t want to pay fair wage.
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.
That’s not true though. The company knew exactly what they were doing and still they went ahead and doubled down on it.
Excerpt from article: “Our investigation found Packers Sanitation Services’ systems flagged some young workers as minors, but the company ignored the flags. When the Wage and Hour Division arrived with warrants, the adults – who had recruited, hired and supervised these children – tried to derail our efforts to investigate their employment practices,” said Wage and Hour Regional Administrator Michael Lazzeri in Chicago.
But if I ask "how old are you?" in an interview and reject anyone who says "17", then all the interviewees are going to say "18". Kids are pretty dumb but they can figure this stuff out. I'd be happy to claim 10 years of Kubernetes experience if I thought it would give me an advantage in the job market, no question. The children in question are already violating local labour laws; claiming to be 18 doesn't really hurt at that point.
Although I will note "tried to derail our efforts" is one of those things that could mean anything. People who are innocent might also have tried to derail efforts. Being investigated prompts some funny responses by businessmen.
> The children in question are already violating local labour laws;
No they aren’t. Their age was in company’s system and company ignored it. Also they are “children”. You expect a 13 year old on ideal behavior while grown adults at the company were knowingly breaking the law?
> I'd be happy to claim 10 years of Kubernetes experience if I thought it would give me an advantage in the job market, no question
1. Software development is not a hazardous job, 2. You’re an adult.
Oh, I missed that. I thought they meant that the company had ignored the investigators flagging that there were minors employed. Yeah that is pretty bad.
Although I maintain there are going to be a lot more than 100 children illegally employed as cleaners in the US. Not everyone is going to be stupid enough to keep good records like that.
> Software development is not a hazardous job
Adults shouldn't be at risk of being injured on a worksite. The standard is supposed to be no lasting damage regardless of whether children are involved or not.
The article mentions 3 injuries, but frankly I don't care if they are injuring 18 year olds or 13 year olds; the problem is the injury not which end of teenager-hood a person falls. That is an issue, but it is an issue that is unrelated to employing underage workers.
The point is the minors working at a meat packing company are victims, it’s ridiculous to blame them regardless of whether they lied or not and in this case they didn’t. The real entity to blame is the company which allowed this to happen and got away with meager $1.5 million fine.
> I don't care if they are injuring 18 year olds or 13 year olds..That is an issue, but it is an issue that is unrelated to employing underage workers.
It is related because meat packing is a hazardous job and there are more chances of injury for a minor than an adult, regardless of the training. That’s the whole reason the law specifically has an age limit for this type of jobs.
Victims of what, a sudden rush of employment? Child labour laws are, at best, a statistical observation that the majority of children are better off being at school than going to work and it is safer just to insist than try and work out the edge cases.
It is appropriate that the company was fined in accordance with the law, they shouldn't have done this. But fact is that there are some kids where working at 13 will just lead to them having better outcomes than anything else. There are 3 victims here who were injured, beyond that there needs to be actual evidence before we start calling them victims. It isn't like at 17 they're victimised and then at 18 the scales fall from their eyes and everything is roses and sunshine. The line is a reasonable judgement call based on averages and estimated opportunity cost.
> It is related because meat packing is a hazardous job and there are more chances of injury for a minor than an adult, regardless of the training.
Depends on the injury I suppose, but my guess is that if they're stupid enough to have underage employees on payroll this company was probably not providing a safe workplace. I assume injuries are high across the board.
A kid probably is more likely to get injured in the workplace just by virtue of being pretty clueless and a lot more lightweight, I grant you that. But it is quite possible that these injuries say more about the workplace than the age of the injured.
We don't know that. The DOL hasn't said what system "flagged" the kids as potentially underage.
The real question is why so much trust in a company which has clear motive to ignore these red flags for the sake of profit.
Children did not, under their own agency, seek out exploitative employment. We recognize that, as minors, their nominal consent is immaterial in the face of the overwhelming comparative sophistication of adults and adult institutions.
The kids did not figure this stuff out; the adults in the room did.
There's not enough information here to know either way.
What system flagged them, when, and based off of what information?
https://www.kcur.org/news/2023-02-17/child-labor-packers-san...
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.
Oh, I know they know.
My point is that Tyson (et al) doesn't "officially" know. Their employees are providing documents, Tyson is submitting those docs to the government, and that's that.
> Describing it even as “open secret” makes it sound more secretive than it is in practice.
Knowing something to be true and being able to prove that thing is true are two very different things.
On the other side is the lack of enforcement on the employer side which a good segment of Rs ignore. Cut off incentives and fewer people will come.
I’m assuming you are aware that no country in the world has fences or patrols of their borders to any significant length, right?
The reason is both financial/logistical infeasibility, as well as bipartisan neglect. Without cheap labor both locally and abroad, the Western world would collapse overnight.
[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/title-42-immigration-border-bid...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/us/politics/us-border-arr...
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
Many of them testified that Tyson encouraged and coached them, even provided written instructions on how to deal with various employment/taxation things as someone undocumented.
Asked about this at a press conference, and whether there were "any plans to issue fines, or charges/arrests against the company or management at the company who were very much aware they were employing undocumented workers"?
DA / prosecutors: "We have not discussed and do not have plans to do so at this time."
And to no-one's surprise, no "plans to do so" showed up later, or at all, either.
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.
I obviously do not condone the actions of Tyson here.
I don't see anyone justifying anything here.
I'm probably coming the closest to that, and I'm very carefully only trying to share my understanding that's based on living nearby and having at least some interactions with this community. I'm absolutely not defending or justifying anything; I'm pointing out that there are multiple perspectives here and that it's not quite so clear cut.
> Not to mention that where one finds illegal workers one tends to find child sexual exploitation because illegals don’t tend to report the crimes they’re victims of.
Please consider not using the term "illegals" to refer to people. "Illegal aliens" or "illegal immigrants" is at least marginally better, as it at least acknowledges that these are people we're talking about.
I'm not on the same side of this as most of HN seems to be - I hate to even bring it up, but it's relevant here to provide some background on my own views. I'm opposed to illegal immigration, "amnesty", and want to significantly increase border security. I'd summarize my overall position as wanting "A big, beautiful wall with big, beautiful open doors." Anyone who wants to come here should be able to do so, but we absolutely must know who is coming in, why, and be able to prevent known dangerous people from entering the country and disappearing.
None of the above is a reason to marginalize individual people and families. I don't go so far as to insist that people use milquetoast terms like "undocumented people", but I recognize that language impacts how we view things. These are people. Policies are driven by public opinion, and public opinion is driven by the language we use.
As for the point you're making, I agree. Much of these communities are living under the threat of deportation, and the rest inherits that distrust of authority. Crimes go unreported. We should definitely consider that when addressing issues that impact them.
Welcome to capitalism.
> they'd lose a big part of their experienced workforce and would incur significant additional labor costs as the market adjusted to the change
The second statement clearly disproves the first one.
Tyson could get Americans (TM) if they paid significantly more and moved them in to rural areas; but it’s much easier to employ cheap immigrants and act dumb.
Disclaimer: No judgement passed on immigrants, only on capitalism and stupid politicians.
Another potential outcome is that with the price of illegal labor practices increased legal labor would become competitive against illegal labor again. Which would probably increase the price of chicken, but would also mean that those working for Tyson legally would have a living wage again.
they are the best paying in the area because they win over competition by using cheap illegal labour. nobody honest can compete with that, so they break/move.
So naturally we talk about Americans being lazy and racist when they complain.
Can this also be more simply stated: Americans support this.
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.
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.
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
To note, I am for completely open borders but even I can tell you that states not using e-verify and just requiring an I-9 is almost hilariously comical attempt at checking immigration status, as there's little authentication against fake info let alone stolen identity.
Everyone gets a visa, no one is illegal anymore - vox populi
If there were actual jail time for complicit managers, there would be no market for illegal immigrants.
0 - https://cis.org/Report/2006-Swift-Raids
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_raids
The Denver Post used to have the articles online, but they've since been scrubbed.
Managers ?
Get for the CEO for wage theft / child endangerment
The Uniparty doesn't even require collusion, although it's not exclusive of it. Both parties can effectively collaborate against the interests of their voters through confluence of different interests sharing the same technique. At the same time, there's no way either isn't completely aware of what the other is doing.
What perpetuates this particular issue is that both sides of the Uniparty, for all intents and purposes, represent the same class of citizen whose interests are so divorced from the voters that even the petite bourgeoise isn't in on it since they are the ones whose best interest is to comply with the system as opposed to subvert it. That is unless they want to risk having the fist of God slamming down on their business for a quick buck. The only way I can see the Uniparty destabilizing is if they represented different economic classes. At best, they pretend to, but fewer and fewer people are buying that story anymore.
According to the article, the fined company was alerted they were employing minors in their hiring system, they just ignored it.
What? What evidence do you have for this assertion?
What about e-verify ?
> Teens under age 16 no longer need a work permit through the Arkansas Department of Labor and Licensing before they can start a job.
> Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed HB1410, dubbed the "Youth Hiring Act of 2023," into law last week.
https://www.axios.com/local/nw-arkansas/2023/03/13/arkansas-...
I've got little sympathy for the company here, but seeing how scarce certain items are at the grocery store, how prices have risen and how difficult it is to secure labor for those jobs I can understand why they would have broken the rules even knowing they'd pay for it eventually, just to keep the wheels moving.
I did, both as a child and as an adult.
It wasn't driven by financial need, though, which is obviously a huge difference. In my case it was because I wanted to contribute to my uncle's small business.
I did whatever was needed at the "meat shop" during summer vacation when I was a young teen. Sometimes that was working the front desk and selling summer sausage, sometimes it was slaughtering hogs, and sometimes it was cleaning the slaughter room at the end of the day.
In return, I stayed at my family's farm during the summer. I had access to all their land and knowledge, was provided room and board, and got a small wage. I was also able to hunt that land in the fall and invite friends to come stay there during hunting season to hunt with me.
> Still 100 kids out of all the employees seems like a really small fraction
These were contractors, weren't they? It could have been all of their employees
> to the point where I wonder if these kids were all related to employees
Based on my knowledge of that community, I'd say that's extremely likely. It was probably a mix of kids working in lieu of paying for child care when not in school and kids that weren't in school for whatever reasons (including lacking documentation to get in, not knowing enough English yet, and some dropping out early due to social or behavioral issues). Most or all of their parents likely worked in the same plant.
It's price dumping by abusing children who're happy to have a couple dollars to spend on Fortnite characters or whatever the rage is these days.
Pay your workers fairly.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/25/us/unaccompanied-migrant-...
> They are almost certainly migrant children who need the money because they’ve been placed with guardians who themselves are barely getting by
s/migrant/poor, but otherwise I 100% agree.
Kids from poor families want to be able to help with money if they can. Their contributions do help, too, and I don't think that's a bad thing in most cases.
Growing up poor, realizing your parents' financial situation, working hard to contribute to it, and then busting your ass to build a live that's better than your parents... that's the American Dream that I knew growing up. It's also the story of the vast majority of successful local entrepreneurs that I know in my local area.
I don't want that to go away. I think it's an important part of our culture.
> or are exploiting the children by making them work off a debt
I'm very confident that this happens. I don't have a good feel for how often, but I doubt it's even close to the majority case. I'm sure it still happens, though, and that's something that I fully support aggressively stamping out.
The problem is, it perpetuates the cycle of poverty. Dropping out of school at age 16 or whatever to help your parents make rent by slaving away in a supermarket stocking shelves will stunt your intellectual and career growth for decades, because without an actual education (be it trades or academia) it will be really hard to access better-paying jobs.
Compared to what we, the HN community, expects - yeah, I agree 100%.
Compared to what this community expects... it's not so clear.
We're making a lot of assumptions: that these children are dropping out of school, that the purpose of their working is to help feed their family, that they have better opportunities available to them, that the children and their parents want the same things as we do, etc.
The reality is that their parents likely never graduated high school either. There's no reason to think that these kids are choosing work over school, as opposed to doing both - which obviously would negatively impact their ability to succeed at school, but that's not the same thing as dropping out.
If these kids grow into adults who have graduated high school, they'll likely end up providing a more stable foundation for their children, so they can focus on school more than they were able to. They'll be more likely to push their kids to go to college, and to enter a field with higher qualification requirements like medicine, law, finance, or tech.
This is how immigrant communities have always worked, to the point that it's a stereotype. There's a reason second- and third-generation immigrants consistently outperform "native" groups in terms of both educational and professional attainment.
It's not an important part of our society for an underclass to suffer FFS
> this is why food is cheap people
True. Though as an outsider looking in, it looks disturbing like a class, or even a caste system. Children, illegal immigrants, and workers with little to no bargaining power -- confined mostly to specific rural regions of the country -- do backbreaking labour, often in illegal and unsafe conditions, in order to provide cheap food for the ruling middle class and elites. Said middle class and elites would rather perpetuate these conditions than face even a few % increase on the price of their food, which they'd be able to afford.
I know you didn't mean that, of course. This is just me taking general aim. It's my first reaction to "this is why American food is so cheap" -- well should it be? Or are Americans just externalizing the costs of that cheap food on to others?
Also in the DOL's opinion
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.
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.
I'm sympathetic to this, but kids making money should not undermine adults trying to make a living. I'm fine with underaged kids working, but they should be documented and paid 2x/3x the rate, with everything above minimum wage held until they turn 18 to be used for education or living.
But there were many instances where these kids work nights, then try to go to school during the day. It's the life they have to live to try and help support their family.
It's a terrible situation, but almost always better than what they faced in their home country.
> KIELER, WI – One of the nation’s largest food safety sanitation services providers has paid $1.5 million in civil money penalties after the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division found the company employed at least 102 children – from 13 to 17 years of age – in hazardous occupations and had them working overnight shifts at 13 meat processing facilities in eight states.
> 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.
Child labor is one issue to deal with but I am getting pissed off at the non-enforcement/selective enforcement of laws we are seeing in society, it doesn't matter what laws we have if they aren't enforced and routinely ignored.
Yep.
I'm not defending this at all, but there is context that may not be clear if you're not familiar with these communities.
At least with the teen working, the parent knows where they are and the family is gaining income. The alternative is likely the teen staying home unsupervised, which is neither providing opportunity for the child nor income for the family.
Who gets that money btw? I'm 99% sure - not the children.