Company illegally hired minors to sanitize ‘kill floor’ equipment at Iowa meat processing plant, US Dept. of Labor finds

Nearly a dozen children worked under strenuous and hazardous conditions at a pork processing plant in Iowa, the US Department of Labor announced following an investigation.

Nearly a dozen children worked under strenuous and hazardous conditions at a pork processing plant in Iowa, the US Department of Labor announced following an investigation. The 11 children hired by a third-party Oklahoma-based sanitation contractor, Qvest, were allegedly employed to use corrosive products to “clean head splitters, jaw pullers, bandsaws and neck clippers” at the Seaboard Triumph Foods facility in Sioux City from at least 2019 to 2023, the department said in a news release. Federal law bans children under 18 from working in dangerous jobs, including cleaning dangerous equipment on the floors of the meatpacking and poultry slaughtering plants. The department noted in its news release that these were children hired at the facility and did not list their ages. CNN has reached out to Qvest LLC and Seaboard Triumph Foods for comment. Adam Greer, Qvest’s vice president of operations, told The New York Times that the company “has not only fully cooperated with the Department of Labor but is and has been committed to strengthening our onboarding process.”