Kill. Clean. Repeat.
Nathanael quickly learned the routine. Rip the legs off a crab. Clean them with giant spinning wire brushes. Toss them down a chute. Repeat.
“Sometimes when you kill a crab, the brain splatters,” he said. “When you remove the shell, everything splatters.”
Nathanael said he began working at The Atlantic Red Crab Co., in New Bedford, MA last fall, when he was 14. He said he worked alongside his cousin, Joel, who was then 16. Three workers told The Public’s Radio they witnessed the teens killing, cleaning, and weighing crabs at the plant.
The Guatemalan teenagers had recently arrived in the United States after swimming across the border from Mexico. A family member said the cousins applied to a staffing agency using fake IDs, and that the agency – Workforce Unlimited, Inc. – sent them to work at the plant. The teens said they routinely worked 12-hour days, sometimes seven days a week, making $16.50 an hour.
“Over time, doing it every day, the body can’t take it,” Joel said.
(Nadine Sebai/The Public’s Radio)
Nathanael and Joel’s experiences are not unique. The Public’s Radio interviewed more than two dozen migrant teens who described working long hours cutting heads off salmon, picking bones out of cod, and cleaning lobsters in New Bedford seafood processing plants. The smell of fish, they said, clung to their clothes and skin, even after they showered.
The teens described working in the industry as far back as 2016. Several said they worked overnight...
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