Samuel Messidor and Helen Zivar
A sixteen-year-old boy, Duvan Robert Thomas Perez, died on July 14th while cleaning heavy equipment at Mar-Jac Poultry Plant in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. This is the third worker death at the plant in as many years. Perez was too young according to Federal labor laws to work cleaning heavy equipment, though Mar-Jac denies knowledge of his employment with their cleaning service.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is investigating the death of Perez, as well as one of the earlier deaths at the plant.
Poultry plants are notoriously dangerous facilities because of the heavy machinery, blades and grinders, and freezing equipment used in close quarters, manned by workers who are driven to a frenzy pace by management.
This is the third reported death of a minor on a worksite this summer, with a 16-year-old killed in a Wisconsin sawmill and another 16-year-old killed at a Missouri landfill. Together with Perez, all three were killed by heavy machinery, which is illegal for minors to operate or work with.
These deaths come in the wake of efforts by multiple state legislatures to weaken their state’s child labor laws and exploit gaps in the century-old Fair Labor Standards Act to increase the rate of exploitation of the working class. Children work for lower wages than adults and are more profitable to employ because they do not as often demand rights like safer working conditions. Senior Labor Department officials have said that child labor violations have increased nearly 70% nationwide since 2018.
Last year a Labor Department investigation into JBS Foods and Packers Sanitation Services Inc. revealed that over 100 minors at 13 different plants across eight states were working at night, cleaning dangerous equipment like skull splitters and bone saws in JBS slaughterhouses. Many of them suffered chemical burns while working overnight shifts. When the Labor Department’s investigator was asked if she believed her team was able to identify all the children working at JBS slaughterhouses, she responded “Not at all. I believe that the number is likely much higher.”
Photo: US Department of Agriculture
