Family of 16-year-old worker killed cleaning a machine at Mar-Jac Poultry plant in Hattiesburg files lawsuit.
The more you read the article the worse it gets.
- A 16 year old died while cleaning a machine.
- local laws prevent anyone under 18 from working with machinery
- This is the third person to die at this factory in 3 years.
- there have also been 3 amputations and a hospitalization from a severe fall in the same time period
- all of these violations have amounted to $212,000 in proposed fines from OSHA
I cannot comprehend how a company can have multiple deaths, amputations, and severe safety infractions in a few years and only face a small amount of proposed fines.
Well we’d hate to ruffle any feathers and upset some job creators, they might seek better tax deals elsewhere
It’s also hard to draw reasonable conclusions quickly without people of color to blame… give it time, give it time
This is more proof that laws aren’t enforced and that children in the workplace aren’t safe.
Not just children. Workers in general aren’t safe with those sort of track records
That second point isn’t exactly right.
Federal child labor laws prohibit anyone under the age of 18 from working in meat processing plants
See, I though I came to correct you that they cannot operate heavy machinery, but he was only cleaning it while it was supposed to be out of operation.
But if the article has it right, it was illegal for him to have been working in the building at all. That’s a whole other situation than I previously understood it to be.
The McNuggets must flow!
The more I read, the more fucked it got. I love that the meat plant is blaming the hiring contractor for hiring a 16 year old but the contractor is blaming the meat plant for not following safe cleaning instructions. Turns out they are both guilty as fuck and should be shut down.
Because of lobbyists working over decades.
3 deaths??? Jesus Fuck do they not have lock out tag out laws south of the Mason Dixon line?
Sure they have lockput/tagout. You sit through an hour long video, then sign a sheet where you promise to obey the safety rules. Then when you actually try to do things by the book, your supervisor asks you “what the fuck are you doing?” and says “we don’t have time for that”. One place I worked had a peg board with everyone’s lock and key for lockout/tagout; all of the locks had about a 1/4 inch (@ 6 mm to our European friends) of dust on them from lack of use.
Well put. Your comment hit shockingly close to home for me and describes really well exactly what you’ll find in tons of small to mid sized privately owned manufacturing facilities.
Super short story of my experience with this:
Worked at my family’s owned machine shop for years. Toward the end of my time there, unbeknownst to anyone outside of ownership, the company went through a series of LEAN manufacturing and general procedural changes. Hindsight being 20/20 its glaringly obvious they were prepping to sell to an investor group.
One of these changes was the addition of an actual maintenance department (tell tale sign I teach people now is that when places add a “department” and the department is a single dude or dudette they’re fluffing their tinder picks for more sellers to swipe right). So up to this point for the previous idk all the years I was alive up to that point, all maintenance on the Mazacs was done by whoever ran the machine until they couldnt at which point Mazac would be called to send out a rep.
So one day I come in to the machine I spent 1000x’s more time inside than the time spent inside all the females ive been inside of put together was padlocked for lock out tag out. Start times were staggered depending on department and maintence didnt come in for another hour. I read the maintenance report, saw it was a coolant line problem I’ve fixed dozens of times. Went to maintenance cage, grabbed the dude’s key, unlocked the lockout tag out, fixed the problem and had the machine running before maintenance punched in for the day.
Hot damn was that a mistake. Got a big write up, management calls a meeting with me making claims they were doing me a favor by not firing me. The issue wasnt the unauthorized unlocking of rhe machine because I was trained for lock out tag out procedures. The issue was that I unlocked a machine that was lockout tag out’ed by another person.
Whole fucking thing didnt sit well with me. By this time there was no secret if the sale, managment was transitioning, and the whole thing felt like a flex by management to make a show and used me as their public tar and feathering.
So stubborn as mule me reads the whole section of the osha manual for lock out tag out. Pulled the training records. Put everything together and went into the person’s office responsible for the whole shitshow that was the special meeting to demonstrate that I wouldnt get special treatment. Laid out for him how the company failed to follow mandated training schedule, never assigned trained lock out tag out personel with assigned tags, then once they started assigning tags they never assigned tags to the previously trained team members and lastly never provided adequate resources on the policy and procedural changes for employees to reference.
Half way through this very aggressive conversation the dudes office had the newly appointed GM with almost every other member of management from the meeting.
Despite the classic internet meme where everybody stood up and cheered, its honestly the closest i could imagine to having people cheer lol. Noone chimed in most just took it in but there were enough faces with shiteating grins thst in the moment I felt certain I successfully threw what he thought was the perfect opening move for his new promotion right the fuck back in his face.
The most satisfying part wasnt telling him somthing along the lines of, “The cognitive dissonance it takes to schedule a special meeting with attendance from every single department lead and fucking manager there just to fuckin tell me Im not getting special treatment shows how unfit you are at this role.” Naaaa the best part was shortly after the meeting I resigned, then about a year later I’m told, “Have you checked out your old production manager’s new youtube channel?” I respond wtf you talking about, “You didnt know [insert anonymous name] got fired and started his own youtube channel hes calling consulting videos but really its just him talking to a camera the same stupid ideas and methods that got him fired. But you gotta check it out cuz the last video he posted this week his wife walks uo behind him and just start shaking his titty! He even puts into the comment an apology that he couldnt rerecord it because of how great the 45 mins of recording was upto that point!”
To this day my heart melts with joy knowing someone I called dumb was proven by a jury of our peers to be undoubtedly as dumb as I said he was.
What the fuck…
If the hawks nest tunnel taught us anything is that it’s ok to knowingly kill hundreds of workers as long as you profit before any charges can be brought up
The solution should be to jail all the owners and executives, force a sale of the company and set an example for anyone else who thinks about doing the same thing.
Regulation is for those who cant afford good lawyers
You mean a 16 year-old working at a poultry plant?
Yes, that should never have to happen.
Nothing has changed, and the company continues to treat employee safety as an afterthought, putting its workers at risk
Just a normal day for capitalism
I feel like thats the case for most child deaths
There is a long rich tradition of underage children dying in meat processing plants. While this is absolutely tragic, anyone who has looked into this can tell you it’s absolutely nothing new.
But, people want meat. So they look away, try not to think about it and nothing changes. Something to consider over your next cheeseburger.
There’s always an outraged vegan to make a bad faith argument in comments of stories like this.
Hey kid, do you think children have never died farming vegetables?
https://www.live5news.com/2023/12/20/community-mourns-teen-who-died-farming-accident/?outputType=amp
https://www.abc27.com/local-news/child-dies-in-lancaster-county-farm-equipment-accident/amp/
https://globalnews.ca/news/9727616/toddler-dies-grain-mixer-quebec/amp/
Something to consider over your next salad.
Two of those articles you linked are a 2 and 4 year old that were on the farm, not really the same thing as the 27 amputation per month of actual workers. I mean step back and look at the what aboutism you are doing. Of course people are injured in produce, but that doesn’t change the fact that working in a meat packing plant is one of the most dangerous professions for humans.
Look, I’m not even here “as a vegan”, just as someone who has recently read The Jungle and is horrorifed to see the same problems from a century ago still present today. I’m not talking about animal rights, I’m talking about human worker rights in an industry where those people are constantly injured in staggering numbers.
ROFL.
The only reason you know I’m vegan is from my username, but why would that fact somehow disqualify me from caring about workers being injured?
Idk. Sorta seems like you just wanna insult me but not actually contribute anything meaningful.
I don’t read usernames and didn’t read yours until you mentioned it, and before that I knew you were vegan because you were using strawman in conjunction with a false dilemma and faulty generalization fallacies in order to push a ‘meat bad’ argument.
The most common argumentative fallacies used by vegans, peta, and trolls.
Underage workers dying is a… false dilemma? How is that possibly something not worth addressing?
I feel like some of you are having an emotional response from even the mildest of critism at the industry that you have to deny there is even a problem with dead children that shouldn’t have been hired in the first place. Which if you go reread my original comment, is what I originally pointed out. You are so defensive of the product that you are mad at me for even acknowledging this long standing issue.
As I said before, I’m fresh off reading The Jungle. My intent was to talk about worker rights instead of animal rights. So it seems right to leave this all with exactly that.
Jurgis recollected how, when he had first come to Packingtown, he had stood and watched the hog-killing, and thought how cruel and savage it was, and come away congratulating himself that he was not a hog; now his new acquaintance showed him that a hog was just what he had been-one of the packers’ hogs. What they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what they wanted from the workingman, and also that was what they wanted from the public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were not considered; and no more was it with labor, and no more with the purchaser of meat. That was true everywhere in the world, but it was especially true in Packingtown; there seemed to be something about the work of slaughtering that tended to ruthlessness and ferocity-it was literally the fact that in the methods of the packers a hundred human lives did not balance a penny of profit.
- Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
Published over a century ago and still relevant.
Blaming the meat industry for underage workers dying is a false equivalency and false dilemma. You are a fool* to equivocate these issues.
Meat isn’t the problem, incompetent politicians and garbage employers are the problem but you’re pretending the meat industry is the only industry engaging in child labour practices.
I bet you eat chocolate as well, and spoiler alert, child labour AND slave labour is involved in ALL chocolate acquisition, not to mention avocado and large scale vegetable farming uses child labour daily, but I don’t hear you bitching about that, I hear you blaming “meat” and attempting to guilt anyone who consumes meat into believing they inherently support child labour when they buy it.
Meanwhile you’re using an apple or android phone or a computer of any kind to communicate, meaning you have supported child and slave labour which acquired the raw materials to create the device you are using to bitch about this topic and misdirect people into believing your extremely perverted view of the world.
The sheer incompetence of your presentation here is dripping in irony and is denoting an unparalleled lack of education or an unbelievable level of intellectual dishonesty.
Edit: *removed an overly aggressive insult to prevent mods from being salty.
Oh trust me. I didn’t even see your username. I knew you were vegan because of your insufferable bad faith comment.
Well, I think comparing toddler accidents on a farm to century long systemic hiring of underage workers is bad faith but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. Still not entirely sure what I said that made you mad, concern for worker safety feels pretty universal. But it doesn’t seem you want to actually talk about the issue. So whatever. You have a good one.
There’s no point in conversing with these people, they accuse you of bad faith arguments from WORKING in the industry and rebute with arguments from VISITING the industry.
Smooth brains be smoothing
I honestly don’t care what you think.
There is a long rich tradition of underage children dying in meat processing plants.
Yeah, we need better child labor laws and meat processing plant regulations, and those keep being overturned.
While the easy concept of “what if no meat industry” is easy to imagine, and I am for it, it’s not realistic and would simply move the industry to a 3rd world country and transfer through there. Why don’t vegans ever consider a 90% approach: if you get people to consume something that is 90% not meat, that’s the equivalent getting 90% of the group vegetarian. Then it’s an easier sell for vegetarianism, and as we develop lab meats, less must replaced.
Also, jw, would you be willing to eat human meat if they consented before hand and were disease free. I have a 93% yes rate, and I usually ask friends of friends when I meet them.
Why don’t vegans ever consider a 90% approach
It would still require animals that have been genetically engineered to produce as much mass as quickly as possible to exist. Less suffering is good, but the real goal is to end this cruel and unnecessary system.
And it’s a noble goal, but it’s also one that many (not by any means all) think could easily happen overnight as if adopting a vegan lifestyle were as easy and unproblematic as it gets. Humanity has been eating meat as a significant portion of our diet since long before homo sapiens evolved. Getting people to suddenly stop en masse is just not going to happen. You’re fighting thousands of years of culture and genetics.
Weaning people off of meat is far more likely to work. Yes, it means more animal suffering in the mean time. But the fewer people you can convince to eat less meat, the more animals will be slaughtered.
How far along are you? I wish you the best on your journey.
I don’t eat meat, but I do have dairy and eggs and shellfish. It’s as good as I can do for now.
Personally im pretty far. I eat far less meat than i used to growing up. I no longer eat veal, nor is meat the staple of my each and every meal. There are many many dishes i now make that do not feature meat at all. My meat intake is probably less than 50% of what it once was. For my SO, the change is less dramatic, but also noticeable.
For me, i noticed that simply the conscious effort to decrease how much meat i consume was an easy effort to expend, and it soon turned into a game id be playing with myself, trying to see where i can limit or cut out animal byproducts.
It is not about the meat, it is about the safety regulations that should have been in place.
Capitalism will exploit unless there are reasons not do so. If the monetary risk is high enough, such as a % of total revenue in fines which should be more than the profit made, there is less of an inclination to perform such practices. Or death for the whole directive board, you know.
Conservatives’ secret wet dream exposed.
third to die in a 3 year period. Jesus christ it’s a poultry plant, it’s not supposed to be a dangerous job, why is this place still allowed to be open.
