Company accused of employing minors to clean ‘kill floors’ at Minnesota slaughterhouses

[Valin]

Alpha News

Investigators learned through interviews with the minors that they all spoke Spanish, the lawsuit explains. The minors were often required to work graveyard shifts and clean dangerous equipment with toxic chemicals, according to the complaint.
Anthony Gockowski -
November 14, 2022

The U.S. Department of Labor accused an industrial cleaning company of employing minors for work at three slaughterhouses across the Midwest, including two in Minnesota.

A lawsuit filed in federal court last week claims Packers Sanitation Services Inc. (PSSI) employed at least 31 children between the ages of 13 and 17 to fulfill sanitation contracts at JBS USA plants in Grand Island, Neb., and Worthington, Minn., and a Turkey Valley Farms facility in Marshall, Minn.

According to the lawsuit, these minors were often required to work graveyard shifts and clean dangerous equipment with toxic chemicals. A 13-year-old working at the Nebraska plant suffered “a serious chemical burn from PSSI’s chemical cleaners,” the lawsuit says.

Others worked on the “kill floor,” where the actual slaughtering takes place, as they cleaned “meat and bone cutting saws and a grinding machine,” the feds allege. Investigators with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division observed PSSI employees at one plant “working in standing water in a mixture of floating meat parts and soap.”

(Snip)

*A PSSI spokesperson told NBC it “has an absolute company-wide prohibition against the employment of anyone under the age of 18 and zero tolerance for any violation of that policy — period.”

The company uses the federal E-Verify system to vet new hires, according to the spokesperson.

“While rogue individuals could of course seek to engage in fraud or identity theft, we are confident in our company’s strict compliance policies and will defend ourselves vigorously against these claims,” he said.

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* Riiiiight

Anyone care to place a wager that neither they or their parents were born in America?