[oramit]

"Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the department assessed PSSI $15,138 for each minor-aged employee who was employed in violation of the law. The amount is the maximum civil money penalty allowed by federal law."

Wow, I knew that labor laws in the US were toothless but to have it spelled out like this is so depressing. A max penalty of ~15k per violation, just bravo team, bravo.

[legitster]

??? - $15k per violation is still quite a bit of money. This is an order of magnitude more expensive than the pennies they saved by looking the other way.

The point of the fines is not to force the company into insolvency - if anything, the DOL would rather incentivize companies into compliance with labor laws than squash them and spread bad practices into harder-to-monitor industries.

[Ancapistani]

> This is an order of magnitude more expensive than the pennies they saved by looking the other way.

That depends on how long they expect to get away with it.

If you can pay a minor $25k/yr to do a job that would otherwise cost you $35k/yr, as long as you expect to get "caught" less frequently than every 18 months you're coming out ahead financially.

Realistically... I don't know what the actual cost savings are here, nor how frequently people get caught. Based on how often I see these reports in the press versus how often I'm personally aware of it happening, it seems like the chances of having to pay the fine at all are very, very low.

Two of the locations mentioned in the article are near enough to me that I know people who work at the facilities in question. They're rife with people working under false documentation. They get "raided" fairly often, but... well, these are small communities, and let's just say that it's amazing how often some people get sick and can't make it to work on the same day that law enforcement makes a "surprise" visit.

[noahtallen]

$15k/yr is about $7.5/hr based on a 40-hr work week for 50 weeks. If each child on average only worked 15-hr weeks for two years, that's $10/hr. So it definitely doesn't seem like the fee would be "order of magnitude" more expensive than hiring adults. Assuming the kids got paid $7.25/hr... which seems high given that this is an already-illegal penny-pinching operation... that could easily be $10 cheaper than typical adult factory wages. (I know people working for around $18/hr in factories in Ohio a handful of years ago.)

Obviously the exact math is unknown, but I don't think your claim is fair at all. It seems very likely and even probable that the company still ultimately saved money compared to hiring adults at a competitive wage.

[legitster]

At the time of the suit they only found 31 child workers. After an audit going a few years back they found 103 total. No word on how how many hours worked but it's fair to say the average stint was for less than a few months.

They got off pretty light, but having seen how tight payroll can be in food manufacturing, I don't think anyone at the company is patting themselves on the back for paying a $1.5 million fine for a couple of lousy part time cleaners.

[Ancapistani]

What _seems_ to be happening here isn't that the big companies (like Tyson) are flagrantly violating labor laws.

Instead, they hire contractors for some things, like cleaning. Those contractors start out by hiring illegals with false documentation - which, as I've said before, is defensible as "we didn't know".

Those contractors are small businesses themselves, and their labor practices loosen over time.

Maybe it starts out relatively understandably: someone brings their kid with them and the kid is doing some of the work assigned the parent. Once they've done that a while they (the kid) applies with false documents in hand, already know the job well, and live with other employees of the company so they're likely to be able to make it in.

That's still plausibly deniable by the company. Yeah, they know the kid isn't here legally, and they at least strongly suspect that they're a minor, but they don't really have legal proof of it.

Other families are seeing that one earning income, so they get their children false documents and have them apply. Because this is one of the few places where minors are employed - and both the minors and their parents are _wanting_ the minors to be employed - they have an influx of cheap(er) labor. Wages drop, the adults leave to work elsewhere, and now we have a company employing almost exclusively minors while doing work for a major company like Tyson.

If I had to guess, I'd say that the parents mostly end up working for Tyson while their minor children work for the various contractors employed there.

Finally, I'll point out that "minor" and "child" are basically synonymous from a legal perspective, but not from a social one. It's not at all uncommon for people where I live to work full-time over summers starting at ~14, and part-time during the school year at ~16. That's 100% legal here. In fact... my state offers "hardship endorsements" for driver's licenses that allow minors as young as 14 to drive on their own to and from school or work.

People's lived experiences differ hugely. My oldest daughter is 14, is homeschooled, and is literally begging me to let her work. There are very limited ways I can make that happen at her age, so we're focusing at the moment on entrepreneurship. When she turns 16, she'll have an (almost) unrestricted driver's license and be eligible to legally work lots of places with some limitations. She'll likely end up working in either food service or retail at that point.

I was hauling hay in the summer from 12-16, and that seems way more dangerous than cleaning a slaughterhouse - and yes, FWIW, I've also worked in a slaughterhouse, so that's not a completely uneducated assumption. Hauling hay is mostly a matter of walking/jogging alongside a truck or tractor pulling a trailer through a field, picking up ~50# hay bales, and throwing them up to 10' or so in the air to someone on the trailer to stack them. Once the trailer is full you get to go to the barn, unload them one by one, and stack them to the ceiling. All of this is happening in full sun and ~90-105ºF, and while wearing blue jeans and long sleeves (often flannel!) to protect yourself from the hay. You will absolutely experience heat-related health effects, up to and including passing out in the field if you don't actively stay hydrated.

Given that the above is the status quo for most families here, I would have no problem with my daughter choosing to hose down and clean a slaughterhouse floor at night instead.

So.. yeah. "Minor" doesn't mean "child" in common parlance, and where "child" ends and "young adult" begins varies significantly between region and culture.

[ethanbond]

It seems hard to believe that employing an actual child would save you less than $1.5k over, say, 6 or 12 months.

[kyawzazaw]

should be per violation by pay period at least

[gleenn]

Is it $15k because the total penalty doesn't depend on the number of people and it's just $1.5M/100 kids so it happens to be $15k?

[not_math]

In the article:

> Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the department assessed PSSI $15,138 for each minor-aged employee who was employed in violation of the law. The amount is the maximum civil money penalty allowed by federal law.

[lalopalota]

The max penalty is 15k per infraction * 100 kids = 1.5m

[aaomidi]

I got called insane for saying politicians don't care about people and outright hate people yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35125683

Here's more evidence.

[tarotuser]

I think attributing any sort of emotion to them is out of place.

I'd argue that there's complete antipathy at the politician and elite level. And that turns "illegal child labor" into a cost of doing business. And from the looks of it, a quite lucrative form of doing business.

I think you're misjudging the emotions (I'd argue they have none). I don't think you're insane.

[aaomidi]

You're not wrong. I think I use the word `hate` because the status quo is to squeeze the average person out more and more. So since they "don't care", that lack of care ends up being the same as if they hated us.

[kaitrain87]

It starts to invoke a bit of concept creep (e.g. how more people use trauma to describe an everyday bad experience) to describe it as hate.

I'm guessing the commenter (or the royal you) wouldn't be comfortable being labeled as someone who hates Chinese laborers who build Iphones, or the laborers in India who scrap toxic ships left to die, just because you own an Iphone, or bought something that was shipped from overseas and aren't taking much action.

I would also call out that it's a bit of a concept creep to call you insane by that commenter.

[dsfyu404ed]

Exactly.

They don't care if they screw the average joe.

They care about winning political brownie points from various voting blocks.

The policies and actions that win those points just so happens to screw the average joe.

The only logical course of action given those constraints and absent of any morals is...

[JumpCrisscross]

> don't care if they screw the average Joe

Who don't vote. Democracy incentives transferring resources from non voters to voters.