Duvan Thomas Pérez was just 16 when he was fatally injured while cleaning machinery at a Mississippi slaughterhouse. The penalty for the Mar-Jac Poultry processing plant was just $212,646 in federal fines and 17 safety citations, despite the incident being one in a series.
“Mar-Jac Poultry is aware of how dangerous the machinery they use can be when safety standards are not in place to prevent serious injury and death. The company’s inaction has directly led to this terrible tragedy, which has left so many to mourn this child’s preventable death,” the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) regional administrator, Kurt Petermeyer, said in a statement last month.
But it was not the first time the factory had had a workplace death or faced citations for safety procedure violations in recent years. Despite previous incidents, and as the Mississippi factory became notorious, Mar-Jac continued to receive only fines.
Now experts, outraged at the latest death, are demanding stronger consequences for companies that violate safety procedures – and use child labor. Experts are also arguing that Pérez’s death highlights how immigrant minors may be more vulnerable to dangerous working conditions.
“The fines imposed by Osha on this particular poultry plant are not sufficient to deter massive exploitation of child migrants, especially undocumented child migrants,” Elora Mukherjee, a professor of law at Columbia Law School in New York, said.
“The fine is more than $200,000, [but] the profits that this company and other [similar] companies make are far, far greater,” she said.
Pérez’s family is suing Mar-Jac, arguing that the company has long failed to follow health and safety regulations, as well as suing a staffing contractor and some individuals, WLOX reported. Now, in addition to the safety sanctions, Osha is investigating Mar-Jac Poultry for possible US child labor law violations.
Pérez, who had migrated to the US from Guatemala, suffered a “gruesome” death while cleaning meat-processing equipment, despite minors being prohibited by federal law from working in slaughterhouses as it is deemed too dangerous.
Mar-Jac did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
Pérez’s death was the third fatality at the Mississippi plant in under three years. In May 2021, a 48-year-old employee was fatally injured after his shirtsleeve became caught on a machine. Another employee, a 33-year-old man, was killed in December 2020 after a co-worker inserted an airhose into his rectum and released pressurized air, causing fatal injuries.
Other children besides Pérez have been fatally injured at workplaces across the US as child labor violations increase nationwide, according to the Department of Labor. Months after Pérez’s death, another 16-year-old boy, this time in Wisconsin, was killed after becoming trapped in machinery at the Florence Hardwoods sawmill. Osha fined Florence Hardwoods $1.4m after investigators discovered that minors had been operating equipment without adequate training or in line with safety requirements, CBS News reported.
Overall, immigrant children are more vulnerable to working in illegal and exploitative conditions.
Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said that minors who need to support themselves or family members but may not be able to work legally risk being led into exploitative work environments. Work authorization allows people who have entered the country legally, or who have been granted temporary status to stay in the US, the ability to legally work, but approval can be a lengthy, complicated process, often taking months.
“For those old enough, they should have access to safe and regulated employment opportunities via work authorization,” Padilla-Rodríguez said.
“Unless the US is going to offer the children cash assistance to alleviate their and their families’ financial precarity, some of the kids are still going to have to work,” she added.
Immigrant minors face the same challenges as other immigrants when it comes to navigating workplace safety, but with the added obstacle of being children, said Terri Gerstein, the director of New York University’s Wagner labor initiative.
“They don’t know [what] resources are available to help them. People may be afraid that if they report violations, they’ll be retaliated against and then they’ll lose their jobs,” Gerstein said.
Employers are also not being held accountable for poor working conditions amid a lack of workplace investigators to ensure enforcement and meaningful consequences for violations, Gerstein said.
Osha and other labor regulators, those in charge of tracking violations, are “very, very underfunded and under resourced”, she added.
Some states, like Florida, do not have a state labor department that monitors violations, meaning many labor violations, including those involving children, go unprosecuted, Gerstein added.
“Even if you have really high fines, if you don’t have enough enforcers to do the work, the fines are not going to be that salient to employers,” she said.
Gerstein and Mukherjee said that companies can also avoid consequences for illegally employing children by using subcontractors to staff plants, then saying they were unaware of illegal hiring.
“The parent company can say: ‘Oh, we didn’t know. We relied on and trusted a subcontractor,’” Mukherjee said.
“Those corporations at the top that really have the ability to stop and prevent the violations, distance themselves from the violations and avoid responsibility,” Gerstein added.
Pérez was hired to work at the Mar-Jac plant by the Alabama-based subcontractor Ōnin Staffing, and used the identity of a 32-year-old man to get the job, NBC News reported. Larry Stine, an attorney for Mar-Jac, told NBC that the company had been surprised to learn Pérez was actually 16 and blamed his hiring on the staffing agency.
Ōnin Staffing did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
For wealthier companies with sizable profits, like Mar-Jac, fines, which are calculated based on a federal statute, are not a sufficient deterrent given substantial profits, Mukherjee said.
Even when companies face violations, the parents of children discovered to be illegally working may face legal consequences, too. When investigators discovered the use of illegal child labor at Packers Sanitation, a Nebraska slaughterhouse, the parents of at least one child faced jail time and possible deportation, the Washington Post first reported.
Gerstein and Mukherjee argue that the government must pass several laws that would implement harsher punishments for employers who violate child labor laws, including bringing criminal sanctions against employers for severe violations, like workplace fatalities.
Other policy changes proposed include allowing injured children to pursue personal injury lawsuits against employers in more states, even when they were hired illegally, or increasing financial penalties for violations.
“Enforcement mechanisms that would work more effectively include much larger fines, more detailed and serious investigations, criminal sanctions and creating conditions so that child migrants wouldn’t be in positions of needing to work in such exploitative conditions,” Mukherjee said.