"Meatpacking Companies to Pay $8 Million for U.S. Child Labor Violations,"

Perdue Farms and JBS, two of the country’s biggest meatpackers, will pay a combined $8 million after the Department of Labor found the companies relied for years on migrant children to work in their slaughterhouses.

The deals, announced this week, are part of a flurry of child labor settlements that have come in the last days of the Biden administration, which has been cracking down on the practice...

Federal investigators found that children had been working at a Perdue plant on Virginia’s Eastern Shore as far back as 2020. The children, who had been hired by a staffing firm, worked late hours and performed dangerous tasks with electric knives and hot sealing tools.

Perdue agreed to pay $4 million in restitution to the children and to organizations including Kids in Need of Defense, a national nonprofit organization that provides lawyers to young migrants who come to the country alone. Perdue, one of the country’s largest poultry processors, will also pay a $150,000 civil penalty.

In a statement, Perdue said it strongly disagreed that it should be held liable for the child labor violations but wanted to avoid a prolonged dispute with the Labor Department.

JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, agreed to pay $4 million after investigators found that children as young as 13 were working overnight cleaning shifts at its slaughterhouses in states including Colorado, Minnesota and Nebraska. Mostly from Central America, the children were hired through an outside sanitation company. They worked with potent chemicals — sometimes showing up to school with burns — and washed hazardous tools, including head splitters.

The company said the money would be administered by KIND and used to help children with scholarships, stipends, English classes and job training.

JBS said in a statement that it had stopped using staffing agencies to fill its sanitation shifts, and hoped the money would “provide valuable resources” to children in need.

On Thursday, the Labor Department said it had fined a sanitation company, QSI, $400,000 for employing children to clean slaughterhouses in eight states, including a Tyson Foods plant in Virginia. A separate child labor investigation into Tyson remains open. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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