Feds say LA poultry company used child labor for risky jobs then hid its product

Cal Matters ^ | April 4, 2024 | Alejandra Reyes-Velarde

[artichokegrower]

Federal labor investigators are demanding an L.A.-area poultry company forfeit money they said it made by employing minors in dangerous jobs.

At least two minors had been working in “oppressive” conditions, deboning raw poultry with sharp knives at a poultry processing plant in Irwindale, the U.S. Department of Labor alleged in a lawsuit filed Saturday.

[artichokegrower]

The department also alleged the owner of the processing plant, Fu Qian Chen Lu

Could be a cultural thing

[xp38]

and if so....who are the Feds to judge eh?

[DAC21]

But did they get $20 an hour?

[alternatives?]

Wellllll, at least they weren’t forced to have sex.

[Pajamajan]

He told CalMatters in an email that the labor department had a worker younger than 18 hired at Moon Poultry using false identification in late January, as a part of the investigation.

“The (labor department) then directed this person to work in a hazardous area of the Moon Poultry facility in Irwindale,” Patterson wrote. “The (department) has cynically used the child labor allegation — which it manufactured — to strengthen its negotiating hand and attempt to force us into an early settlement of the overtime claims.”

He said the labor department “is likely to be a defendant before this is over.”

Would the Feds lie?

Another attack on a food processing facility?

🤔

[No name given]

You’re probably right.

[No name given]

I doubt it.

[ViLaLuz]

Do the chickens have large talons?

[Tell It Right]

If my father was still alive he’d tell you that he and his siblings worked in the family chicken house (cash crop) and out on the fields (mostly subsistence crops) from about the age they learned to walk. They called it growing up on a farm. They helped neighbor farms with their cash crops too, including picking cotton.

[higgmeister]

You made me smile just a little.   But "I don't understand a word you just said."

[bgill]

I sold 100 chickens to my school for the FFA bbq and my freshmen classmates killed them, cut them up and cooked them on the grill. They weren’t paid a dime.

[cymbeline]

“Wellllll, at least they weren’t forced to have sex.”

They sorted eggs - extra large, large, medium, small, peewee, cracks and undergrades.

[ViLaLuz]

No doubt the children were paid for their labor with change.