Immigrant child laborers are being killed in US factories. Companies are walking away with fines
Duvan Thomas Pérez was just 16 when he was fatally injured while cleaning machinery at a Mississippi slaughterhouse.The penalty for the MarJac 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 statementlast month.
But itwas 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 issuingMar-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 morevulnerable 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 abilityto 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 changesproposedinclude 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.
men’s capacity for violence.
He says he is unfamiliar with the concept of the “Scorsese bro” – the type of male film fan who admires his macho, violent “drugs and guns” movies at the expense of his other works. Many of them – Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Wolf of Wall Street and especially Goodfellas – are regarded as masterpieces, but, I suggest to him, often these movies take the point of view of the (overwhelmingly male) perpetrators of the violence, rather than the victims. Killers of the Flower Moon is no exception, it must be said. These men usually get their comeuppance, but thanks to Scorsese’s frenetic, snappy, visceral film-making style, their lifestyles often look kind of cool. As Scorsese puts it himself: “Sin is fun.”
“That’s pretty much all I’ve been interested in, I think,” he admits, “in terms of the perpetrators.” He looks to the side and pauses for a long time. “It’s a very complicated issue because it goes back to my childhood,” he finally says. He’s thinking about his postwar upbringing in Little Italy, the area of lower New York City where his Sicilian grandparents settled, along with hundreds of other Italian immigrants. The guns and gangsters were not movie fiction there: they were part of everyday life, as were the poverty, violence, Catholicism – notions of morality, of sin and guilt. He studied to become a priest, before being opened up to the world of movies, literature and music. His hard-up parents were “trying to toe the line, morally”, he says, “just to be able to survive with some kind of dignity in a world which was really corrupted on many different levels”. As for the perpetrators, he says he’s fascinated by what makes people criminals. “Can we become perpetrators?”
He hints at the fact that he has made mistakes in his own life: “Am I a person who comes in and makes moral judgments on how other people live? No. I lived that way.” But my attempts to lead him further down this autobiographical road are gently deflected. Scorsese has been married five times. He left his first wife, Laraine Marie Brennan, in 1971, not long after she had given birth to their daughter, Catherine – by all accounts he chose career over family. There were three shortlived marriages – to Julia Cameron, Isabella Rossellini and Barbara De Fina – and relationships with actors including Liza Minnelli and Ileana Douglas. He has been married to his current wife, Helen Morris, since 1999. Scorsese also went through a period of cocaine addiction, which resulted in hospitalisation and, you could say, the box office failure of his 1977 musical New York, New York, starring De Niro and Minnelli. He would rather talk about such events through the prism of his films: “I can’t make things like that if I don’t feel those things.”
As for the Scorsese bros, “there is always going to be a group who will only see the brutality of the film, and what they think is thoughtless violence,” he says. With movies like Goodfellas, “the point I was trying to make was, let’s understand the attraction and the enjoyment of evil. And so you may say, ‘Now you’re having it both ways.’” He smiles. “Possibly.”
These issues are still pertinent today. Taxi Driver, especially, seemed to home in on a kind of lonely, alienated, disempowered, resentful male identity that has only grown since. De Niro’s character was the prototype “incel”, or potential mass shooter, or domestic terrorist; he’s a type we now all know. Taxi Driver also foresaw the media’s role in muddying the moral waters around such characters, as did The King of Comedy, with De Niro as a failed standup who resorts to kidnapping (the recent Joker movie, which struck such a nerve, was almost a mashup of these two movies, going so far as to cast De Niro as a talkshow host). Like any good auteur, Scorsese was following his instincts, rather than those of the industry, he suggests. “We just gravitated towards these characters and these stories. When I was making them, I felt I should be there, rather than being hired and finding yourself in a place where you don’t want to be.”
The violence spilled off the screen in the case of Taxi Driver: John Hinckley Jr – driven by his obsession with Jodie Foster, who starred in the movie, and emulating De Niro’s antihero – attempted to assassinate the US president, Ronald Reagan, in 1981. It’s an episode Scorsese has grappled with ever since. “Did I like what happened? No. Did we feel that we were right in making that film? Yes. Is violence ultimately the deciding factor in what makes a man a man? I don’t think so.”
There are outlets for male rage other than violence, Scorsese suggests. Rock’n’roll, for example. He has made many music films over his career, from his classic 1978 concert movie The Last Waltz to documentaries about Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, George Harrison, the history of the blues, even Michael Jackson’s extended Bad video (though Jackson’s attempts at male rage are pretty laughable, it must be said). Perhaps film-making is another outlet. Steven Spielberg reportedly remarked how Scorsese let De Niro’s character in Mean Streets “go over the top and lose control so that Marty can remain in control. I think [De Niro] is just wonderful as a sort of extension of what Marty might have been if he hadn’t been a film-maker,” Spielberg said.
Scorsese has also explored other themes in works: spirituality, for example, in Kundun (on the early life of the Dalai Lama), The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence (his next movie will be A Life of Jesus, set in the modern day and adapted from a story by Shūsaku Endō, who also wrote Silence – and it will be short, Scorsese has promised). He has made comedies, such as After Hours or his familyfriendly 1930s Parisian adventure Hugo.
And when Scorsese has put women to the fore, the results have usually been positive – from Pretend It’s a City, his recent Netflix series on the quintessential New Yorker Fran Lebowitz, right back to 1974’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, for which Ellen Burstyn won the best actress Oscar as a single mother yearning to become a singer. Burstyn hand-picked Scorsese to direct it on the strength of Mean Streets. I read Scorsese a quote from an interview where she talked about meeting him for the first time. Burstyn said to him: “This film is about a woman, and there was only one female role in your picture [Mean Streets], and I couldn’t tell from that if you know anything about women. Do you?” Scorsese replied: “No, but I’d like to learn.”
“I still like to learn!” he says. “I’m learning. I really am.” He has many female colleagues, he points out, including Thelma Schoonmaker, who has worked with him for nearly 60 years, and won three Oscars for editing his films. He has produced films by female film-makers including Joanna Hogg and Josephine Decker. And for the past 30 years, he has mainly read fiction by women, he says.
Which brings us to one of Scorsese’s least typical but, for my money, most accomplished pictures: The Age of Innocence, released in 1990 and based on the novel by Edith Wharton. It is set among the ultra-rich families of late 19th-century New York and rendered with a sumptuous, sweeping grandeur. There are no guns or drugs but this society is every bit as violent beneath the surface. Daniel Day-Lewis’s suave social climber is ultimately outsmarted by his two lovers, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder. In other words, it’s a movie about men failing to understand women.
Scorsese’s family life is now full of women. As well as Francesca, he has two older daughters (aged 58 and 47), and two young granddaughters. “It’s a very different thing, having children at a late age. It teaches you a lot,” he says. He’s not just talking about TikTok. “It teaches you a great deal about love.”
Ultimately it doesn’t matter about gender differences, he says. “I try to find who we are as a human being, as an organism, what our hearts are made of. That’s what I think I’m looking for. Let me put it this way: I’m still curious.”