An Oklahoma-based cleaning company has been fined nearly $172,000 after federal investigators found that it had hired nearly a dozen children to work dangerous overnight shifts at an Iowa slaughterhouse.
The 11 children were hired by Qvest Sanitation of Guymon, Okla., to work at a pork processing plant in Sioux City, Iowa, operated by Seaboard Triumph Foods, the Labor Department said. The children used corrosive cleaners to wash equipment, including head splitters, jaw pullers, band saws and neck clippers, the department said last week.
Adam Greer, Qvest’s vice president of operations, said in a statement that the company had not been able to confirm the allegations because the Labor Department “has declined to provide us with any names or specific information related to the alleged violations.”
“In spite of this, Qvest has not only fully cooperated with the Department of Labor but is and has been committed to strengthening our onboarding process,” he said.
It was the second time this year that a company that had been hired to clean the Seaboard Triumph Foods plant in Sioux City had been the target of enforcement action by the Labor Department.
In May, a Tennessee-based company, Fayette Janitorial Service, was ordered to pay $649,000 in civil penalties after an investigation found that it had hired at least two dozen children as young as 13 to work overnight shifts cleaning equipment at Seaboard’s Sioux City plant and a Perdue Farms plant on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Nine of those children worked at the Seaboard plant, the Labor Department said.
When Fayette Janitorial Service took over the plant’s sanitation contract in September 2023, it “rehired some of the children previously employed by Qvest,” which had held the contract since September 2019, the Labor Department said in its statement.
“These findings illustrate Seaboard Triumph Foods’ history of children working illegally in their Sioux City facility since at least September 2019,” Michael Lazzeri, the Midwest regional administrator for the Labor Department’s wage and hour division, said in the department’s statement. “Despite changing sanitation contractors, children continued to work in dangerous occupations at this facility.”
In a statement, Seaboard said that it “did not employ any of the alleged individuals” and that it had no evidence that children ever “accessed the plant.” It added that Qvest had not been at the facility for over a year.
In July, after Fayette Janitorial Service was ordered to pay the civil penalty, Seaboard announced in a blog post that it had “made the strategic decision to establish our own in-house sanitation team.”
In addition to the civil penalty, Qvest was ordered to hire a third-party to adopt policies to prevent the hiring of children, and to establish a process for reporting concerns about the illegal employment of children.
Paul DeCamp, a former head of the Labor Department’s wage and hour division who is now a lawyer for Seaboard, said in a statement that the situation with Qvest “underscores the problems facing employers throughout the country: individuals, including minors, obtaining jobs through their use of fraudulent identification documents.”
Those documents, he said, are “sophisticated enough to fool even the federal government’s E-Verify system,” adding that “businesses are victimized by this fraud.”
Under federal law, minors are barred from working in dangerous jobs that are common in the meat processing industry, where there is a high risk of injury. But that has not stopped thousands of destitute migrant children from coming to the United States from Mexico and Central America to work hazardous jobs, including in meatpacking plants.
The Labor Department said that employers across the country were fined more than $15.1 million for child labor violations in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, an 89 percent increase from the previous year. Those penalties stemmed from 736 investigations that uncovered the violations affecting more than 4,000 children.
“Ultimately and fundamentally, our role and responsibility is to help make sure we’re keeping kids safe,” Jessica Looman, the administrator for the Labor Department’s wage and hour division, said in an interview.
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