A 16-year-old employee who died after getting sucked into equipment at a Mississippi poultry plant got the job using the identity of a 32-year-old man, a new revelation that highlights the ease with which migrant children are finding work in a dangerous industry, and the challenges companies face in trying to evaluate their true ages.
Duvan Pérez, who was hired to clean up at Mar-Jac Poultry in Hattiesburg, which supplies chicken to companies like Chick-fil-A, died on July 14. Within hours of his death, questions about his true age were raised by a local Facebook news site, and he was soon determined to be 16.
It’s illegal for minors to work in slaughterhouses, which the Occupational Safety and Health Administration considers among the most perilous workplaces in the country.
The number of children working illegally has skyrocketed across all industries, according to the Labor Department, nearly doubling since 2019. More than 800 child labor investigations in 47 states are ongoing across industries, according to the agency.
Please don’t construe my comment here as a defense of the company; I’m only providing some context here regarding how he may have been hired.
If you’ve never worked near or in an industry like this, you may not be familiar with “cattle call” hiring. There’s basically a standing advert from the company for work at the plant: Show up Monday morning at 05:00 and you can be working the same day if they hire you in. Typically there’s a group of 10, 20, or maybe more lined up for a job. Everyone is told to bring a photo ID and a social security card.
The kid in the article looks slight, but at 16 he was probably close enough to adult proportions to look like he could do the work. He’d line up with everyone else in front of a table and eventually have his turn to talk to the manager / hiring officer. They’d take his ID and SS card and write down the info, and ask the required questions for the I9 form, likely filling it out for him and signing off as translator / preparer assistance. Then they hand back the credentials and he waits off to the side.
Once they have enough applicants to fill however many positions they need, they send the remainder home. Everyone is given a timeclock ID number. Anyone working the day shift is taken immediately to the plant, handed PPE and tools, and put to work. Second and third shifts are sent home and told to come back in the afternoon or at midnight.
And that’s it. That’s the extent of the contact during the hiring process. At the end of the week there’s a check waiting for you at the plant office. Next Monday the company repeats the process to fill positions for people that didn’t show or quit during the week.
The company has 3 days to submit the I9 form, and if it comes back invalid they must terminate employment. But with stolen identities they likely clear and that’s the end of any scrutiny. If you asked that hiring manager on Tuesday to pick out someone he hired Monday morning, he probably couldn’t do it.
That probably is what happened, and while that’d be understandable like 40 years ago, we have quite a bit of technology today that should be available to prevent that and it should be on the company to ensure they’re not hiring people using stolen identities.
I agree, it seems to me that there could be some simple improvements to at least flag suspicious requests. The comment from @[email protected] would seem to indicate that a simple address cross-reference when the I9 is submitted could help indicate bogus applications.