Federal agents found more than two dozen minors illegally working inside a poultry plant in Kidron, Ohio, earlier this month, according to local immigration advocates who spoke to NBC News on the condition of anonymity.
The children, mainly from Guatemala, according to the advocates, were working in meat processing and sanitation in a plant run by Gerber’s Poultry, which produces Amish Farm Chicken, advertised with the slogan “Better feed, better taste.”
Child slave labor. Jesus. Prison time for the owners please.
No arrests were made at the time of the operation, according to multiple eyewitnesses.
Rob a 7-11 for a $200 - arrested immediately. Child labour for 25+ kids - requires more investigation.
Sounds like human trafficking to me.
yeah i mean how do we really know the kids were working there. maybe all 25 kids just happened to stumble into the factory and started playing with equipment right before the federal agents got there
Who hasn’t gone to a factory and played “factory worker”.
I haven’t, I was too busy playing “miner” in the mines.
What could be more wholesome than regarding children as property to be exploited for their economic value? Thank you conservatives, for fighting to bring back laws that lower the child labour age!
They won’t even get fined more than they profited.
The article gives hardly any information. Clearly what they did was wrong, but child slave labor isn’t what I would label this without further information. The only minor discussed in the article was a 16 year old from another event that gave them reason to ban people under 18 from working in meat packing plants saying they are more dangerous.
The local who did comment said that kids worked second shift so they could work around their school schedules. Implying the kids are going to school, which more than likely rules out the slave part.
The company should get hit HARD for breaking labor laws and putting minors at risk of injuries. Had those same minors been working down the street at the movie theater or such, it may have been completely legal.
The raid happened at 9pm, and labor laws for minors limit working hours till 11pm (in Ohio)
Anybody not being paid a living wage is functionally a slave and the reason this company was using immigrant children is because they could grossly underpay them and pocket the difference.
If it were an option for meat production, they would have just taken the Nestlé approach and used child slaves that were geographically distant enough to be swept under the rug.
But regardless, the company almost certainly won’t be “hit hard”. They’ll be given a slap on the wrist for getting caught and will continue doing deeply fucked things in a deeply fucked industry.
If by some miracle the people responsible are actually punished, there’s still a thousand other companies racing to the bottom because that’s how the system is rigged.
Any company paying suppliers and workers fairly will fold to any competition that doesn’t because few people are paid enough to be able to afford products from people who are paid enough.
It’s a problem far, far deeper than children working at a single factory and I’m not even slightly surprised that a company that feeds live animals into blenders is at the bottom of that hole, furiously digging.
But regardless, the company almost certainly won’t be “hit hard”. They’ll be given a slap on the wrist for getting caught and will continue doing deeply fucked things in a deeply fucked industry.
Fixed fines only exist to punish the poor. The factory just see fines as being a cost of business.
Even better, you can just enter them right into spreadsheets so you know exactly how profitable it will be to steal wages from children, even if you get caught.
Whenever you have people working in a foreign country in a way that potentially violates immigration or labor law, it’s safe to assume that there is some coercion going on. Then you throw in the fact that it’s children, and you’re guaranteed that coercion is happening. In my mind, that’s the question. What choice did the kids have? Not much of one.
Bear in mind that the company could have hired locals and it could have hired adults, which would have put it on the right side of the law and would have avoided language issues. But the company did what it did, and what you see in situations like this all around the world is that it’s almost always because they can save money by treating their employees worse, overworking them, underpaying them, ignoring labor law, and knowing that the employees won’t have any recourse when they’re abused.
You misunderstand. Child labor is legal in agriculture in America. The only problem here was that the children were aliens.
We’ve had the same issue of modern slavery in Germany for over 10 years since Romania has become part of the EU. People working 12 hour shifts 6 days a week while barely earning 200€ and being forced to live with multiple people in one bed(!) or even sleeping in tents near the factories. Most of these people are young men brought to Germany under the impression that they will have a better life but ending up in a vicious cycle and are unable to escape because their managers will take away their passports upon arrival
At 9 PM, when the kids should have been in bed, getting a good night’s sleep for school the next day.
No arrests, no fines. Mostly if not all Guatemalan children, probably undocumented, likely deported after a nice traumatizing ICE detention.
Here at Gerber. We maintain the highest standards on our factory lines. We don’t skimp - full PPE is provided for all of our child labor.
No rebreather, OSHA’s gonna raise hell.
I feel like any poultry farm you walk into is going to be breaking labor laws…
They’re usually in poor rural areas tho, where people need the work. So local sherrifs and any other elected officials aren’t going after them.
That’s the reason there’s a lot of states with carved out exemptions around child labor laws for anything remotely related to agriculture.
Of course it’s my town 🤦♂️
What, if anything, are you hearing?
I haven’t heard much about this in particular yet. The factory is about 7 miles away, everyone has known for years that they had illegal immigrants working there but nothing much was done about it. The surprising part about it to me is they seem to have only found Guatemalan children working in the factory but it’s Amish owned and they frequently have their own children working with the parents doing various jobs. It makes me wonder if there actually weren’t any Amish children working there, or if they just left them be and turned a blind eye to it, and unfortunately that happens a lot because the Amish bring in a lot of money to the area from tourism.
Crazy, thanks for giving a local’s perspective. I bet that this will be gossip fodder for weeks to come.
I work in RVs, most parts work here is done by minors. They pull them out of school once they pass 8th then throw them into a factory until they’re 18, and they only get to keep a small portion of the money they even earn. It’s gross and exploitative but it’s treated like it’s “good healthy character building” for the kids.
The Amish have a very seedy underbelly that they do a very good job of hiding from the public, but trust me when I say their shit doesn’t smell any sweeter than the rest.
RVs? As in recreational vehicles?
Yes
Huh, there’s a YouTube I follow from time to time who was raised in a conservative Amish community. He definitely has a perspective but I’ve learned a lot from his videos.
Now we have child labor and unsafe working conditions in meat packing plants.
This is truly the second Gilded Age.
I have to disagree partly to your overgeneralization of our current times; I still think there is some kind of economic growth but it is not to the people and more concentrated to a few individuals and companies. After the gilded age there was a Progressive Era where people sought to end corruption, monopoly, waste, and inefficiency. Which is what may be beginning right now, but technology is different and most people are not as active in this effort from all the distractions these devices and social websites offer. On top of that, during the Gilded Age, there was a time of rapid economic growth. Back then the American wages grew much higher than those in Europe. There was especially significant growth of wages for skilled workers, and industrialization demanded an ever-increasing unskilled labor force. While in this current period, skilled workers are seeing stagnant wages that do not match the inflationary economy that demands more than 100k a year salary to barely afford a house. Also, there is displacing of unskilled workers to outside country by a form of outsourcing that the internet and advances in computational power brings. There is not the same restrictions in labor and there is a stricter automated process run by computers that contrast the Gilded Period heavily.
for anyone who don’t know the Gilded Age is “a term coined by Mark Twain and used by some historians to refer roughly to the period between 1877 and 1900.” [1]
The sequel is always a bit different than the original, right?
The original Gilded Age is also created due to advancements in technologies as a culmination of the Second Industrial Revolution: new methods of transportation from railroad and airplanes, as well as in communication from the invention of the telephone, which of course, would be the device of “distraction” as you described during its time.
I still think there is some kind of economic growth but it is not to the people and more concentrated to a few individuals and companies.
Do you not think that the Bezos and Musks are as the Rockerfellers and Vanderbilts, the robber barons of our age?
Of course, the issue I care about in particular: the labor strikes and fight for equality was never as great now as it was since the Gilded Age. The similarity here is eerie.
Please don’t call manual laboring workers “unskilled” and disrespect their work: everyone has their role to play in the world, and if you sit in front of a computer all day for your job, then I doubt you would have the skills to do construction work.
I am not going to dive into the semantics of what a Gilded Age is. As far as we know there is a loss of world wide knowledge from the rampant misinformation. Something that does not have a real solution and can be mitigated at times.
Please don’t call manual laboring workers “unskilled” and disrespect their work: everyone has their role to play in the world, and if you sit in front of a computer all day for your job, then I doubt you would have the skills to do construction work.
oh not necessary to slam words into my mouth. The real unskilled labor are those that requires relatively little or no training or experience. Even then there are people out there who are not as highly trained as a true professional who are bluffing their skill level. There is plenty of memes about managers or executives being stupid jerks. It is not really hard to find someone who was hired because they were cheap to hire, hence the outsourcing and passing the risk to someone else.
“Better feed, better taste?” I don’t know. Doesn’t really pop… How about “for kids, by kids?”
Not the baby food company
The company where food is produced by babies.
Good call. It’s in the article but that’s an easy thing to mix up.
Of course, the horrific flip side to this is that the end result (hopefully with the companies actually getting in trouble) is still going to be to deport all these kids.
And if they can’t find their parents, I would expect they’d just stick them on a plane and kick them out of the airport on the other end in Guatemala.
Seems like they may be legal and documented, just not properly protected
HHS finds homes for unaccompanied minors, sending them to live with adult sponsors who may be relatives or family friends. In the report, submitted to HHS and Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin, D.-Ill., the Government Accountability Project said whistleblowers it represents allege the agency’s case management system may have failed to match all children with thoroughly vetted sponsors and did not track the children properly after they left government care.
I read “the chickens, mainly from Guatemala…”
It’s too early for me to read, apparently
Surprising literally no one.
You’re right, I wasn’t surprised.
This is one of those things that makes me proud of the FBI.
I know that labor rights are hard slanted toward capital in the United States for things like the most common theft in the US: wage theft isn’t even a crime. It must be resolved in civil not criminal court.
So the fallout will be a good way to judge how effective the US and the FBI are at dismantling that oppressive plantation.
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Do you have to be 18 to work there?
In the article:
Under U.S. labor law, it is illegal for anyone under the age of 18 to work in meatpacking facilities because of the increased risk of injury from dangerous machines and chemicals. A 16-year-old Guatemalan boy was recently killed working in a poultry plant in Mississippi.
Yes from what I read federal law says all employees should be 18.
Well, their goose is cooked
Or pidgeon, at least.
