The recent death of a minor from injuries sustained while working at a poultry plant in Mississippi has elicited fresh outrage about the dangerous implications of the current assault on child labor protections across the United States.
Authorities confirmed Tuesday that Duvan Pérez, a 16-year-old boy from Guatemala, died last Friday at the Mar-Jac Poultry plant in Hattiesburg.
Pushing back against the framing of Pérez's death as an unexpected mishap, Terri Gerstein, director of the Project on State and Local Enforcement at the Harvard Law School Center for Labor and a Just Economy, stressed that it was predictable and a crime.
"It's not an unforeseeable accident," Gerstein wrote on social media. "Employers aren't allowed to hire kids in terribly dangerous workplaces for a reason."
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Pérez, a middle school student, appears to have been unlawfully employed as a sanitation worker at Mar-Jac Poultry.
The federal Fair Labor Standards Act, approved in 1938, prohibits employers from hiring anyone under the age of 18 to work in meat slaughtering, processing, and packing facilities—with limited exemptions for apprentices and student-learners who are at least 16 years old and enrolled in approved programs—due to the inherently hazardous nature of such jobs. All workers under 18 are barred from operating and cleaning power-driven meat processing machines.
CBS Newsreported Wednesday that Pérez died from injuries sustained while cleaning equipment.
A worker on duty at the time ...
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