Company illegally hired minors to sanitize ‘kill floor’ equipment at Iowa meat processing plant, US Dept. of Labor finds

By Karina Tsui, CNN

(CNN) — Nearly a dozen children worked under strenuous and hazardous conditions at a pork processing plant in Iowa, the US Department of Labor announced following an investigation.

The 11 children hired by a third-party Oklahoma-based sanitation contractor, Qvest, were allegedly employed to use corrosive products to “clean head splitters, jaw pullers, bandsaws and neck clippers” at the Seaboard Triumph Foods facility in Sioux City from at least 2019 to 2023, the department said in a news release.

Federal law bans children under 18 from working in dangerous jobs, including cleaning dangerous equipment on the floors of the meatpacking and poultry slaughtering plants.

The department noted in its news release that these were children hired at the facility and did not list their ages.

CNN has reached out to Qvest LLC for comment.

Adam Greer, Qvest’s vice president of operations, told The New York Times that the company “has not only fully cooperated with the Department of Labor but is and has been committed to strengthening our onboarding process.”

In a statement to CNN, Seaboard Triumph Foods counsel Paul DeCamp said employers face issues with those obtaining jobs using fake identification documents. The company had not contracted with Qvest for more than a year, “did not employ any of the alleged individuals, and has no evidence that any underage individuals accessed the plant,” the statement said. Seaboard Triumph Foods was not a defendant in the enforcement action brought by the US Department of Labor.

This marks the second time this year that the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division has investigated a sanitation contractor at the Seaboard Triumph facility and found the contractor hired children for dangerous work.

In May, the Labor Department announced a consent and order judgment against Tennessee-based Fayette Janitorial Services, which said Fayette had hired nine children to work at the Seaboard Triumph facility after being contracted by the company in September 2023. The complaint also said the janitorial company employed 15 children at a Perdue Farms meat packing plant in Accomac, Virginia. The company hired children as young as 13 years old. Some of the children hired by Fayette were previously employed by Qvest, the department said.

“These findings illustrate Seaboard Triumph Foods’ history of children working illegally in their Sioux City facility since at least September 2019,” said Michael Lazzeri, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Midwest regional administrator. “Despite changing sanitation contractors, children continued to work in dangerous occupations at this facility.”

Qvest is required to pay $171,919 in civil money penalties for child labor violations, according to court documents.

The company must also hire a third-party “compliance specialist” to ensure that it adheres to child labor laws and has 60 days to implement all necessary measures to prevent the employment of children in prohibited functions at each location where it operates.

The Labor Department in May announced Fayette would be required to pay $649,304 in civil money penalties after investigators found the company hired children to “clean dangerous kill floor equipment.”

“The realization that the use of fraudulent identification documents had allowed individuals under the age of 18 to circumvent our policies and procedures required immediate action,” Fayette said in a statement sent to CNN in May, adding that “substantial investments in proprietary systems and technologies has closed the gap that allowed this situation to arise.”

The company added that it has cooperated with the DOL, and that “our goal remains to ensure a safe and compliant work environment for all of our employees.”

Within the fiscal year 2024, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour division concluded 736 investigations involving child labor violations that affected 4,030 children, according to the news release. The division fined employers more than $15.1 million in penalties – an 89% increase since 2023.

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