Tennessee firm illegally employed minors to clean meat saws, head splitters at slaughterhouses, Labor Dept. says

Another industrial slaughterhouse cleaner has been accused by the U.S. Labor Department of illegally employing children as young as 13 to clean dangerous equipment on overnight shifts, according to a temporary restraining order filed in federal court Wednesday.

The Labor Department said that Tennessee-based Fayette Janitorial LLC illegally employed 15 children to clean a Perdue Farms poultry plant in Virginia and nine to clean a Seaboard Triumph Foods pork processing plant in Iowa. They cleaned such equipment as head splitters and meat bandsaws.

Fayette has 600 employees in 30 states, according to the company’s website.

Children under the age of 18 are not allowed to work in slaughterhouses because the work is considered by the federal government to be too dangerous.

Last summer, a 16-year-old migrantwas killed at a Mississippi slaughterhouse when he was sucked into a machine that he was cleaning.

“Federal laws were established decades ago to prevent employers from profiting from the employment of children in dangerous jobs, yet we continue to find employers exploiting children.” said Jessica Looman, administrator of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. “As we’ve unfortunately seen in this case, employers’ violations of federal child labor laws have real consequences on children’s lives. Our actions to stop these violations will help ensure that more children are not hurt in the future.”

Fayette did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

NBC News was the first to report that in October, FBI agents discovered dozens of children working at a Kidron, Ohio, chicken plant called Gerber’s Poultry that had contracted with Fayette for sanitation. Most of the children are from Guatemala.

At the time,