The company, Tuff Torq, was fined nearly $300,000 for hiring 10 children. It must also set aside $1.5 million to help the immigrant minors who were illegally employed.
Immigrant children as young as 14 were found working illegally amid dangerous heavy equipment at a Tennessee firm that makes parts for lawn mowers sold by John Deere and other companies, according to Labor Department officials.
The company, Tuff Torq, was fined nearly $300,000 for hiring 10 children. As part of a consent agreement with the federal government, the company is also required to set aside $1.5 million to help the children who were illegally employed. Ryan Pott, general counsel for Tuff Torq’s majority owner, the Japanese firm Yanmar, acknowledged the violations to NBC News.
Saw the headline, said, “I bet they’re immigrant children.”
Surprise, surprise.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173697113/immigrant-child-labor-crisis
Yup. Republicans claim they want to close the border, but have no problem exploiting the labor supply.
What a shit hole country
Oh but c’mon, it’s a country where undiagnosed schizophrenics have the freedom to buy semi-automatic firearms, proudly rapist lying bankrupt fraudsters can become the president and guns are the leading cause of death for children!
What’s not to like?
Just wait until conservatism gets back in charge. K-6 can look forward to the coal mines.
“The Labor Department has prioritized child labor enforcement since last spring amid a 152% increase in children found to be illegally employed since 2018, according to department figures.”
Mostly immigrants I’d bet
Tennessee: old enough to make assembly line lawn mower parts
Florida: not old enough for social media.
but children crave the mines
“Pott, the general counsel for Tuff Torq’s majority owner, said the child workers were temporary and were not hired directly by Tuff Torq. He said they used fake names and false credentials to obtain jobs through a temporary staffing agency, and said Tuff Torq is ‘transitioning’ away from doing business with the staffing company.” They’re just passing the blame now that they got caught; otherwise, I’m sure they’d continue to turn a blind eye.
Yeah, they didn’t stop and go… “The staffing agency says you’re 18, I don’t buy it. Where’s your ID?”
John Deere really continuing to speedrun the Most Hated Company in America challenge I see
Well, they are 2 positions removed here… Staffing company illegally supplied the kids to a 3rd party supplier of John Deere.
It would be like, I dunno, someone hiring illegal employees for a glass company selling bottles to Coca Cola.
It’s still their responsibility to audit their suppliers. At the very least to have them pledge to not use child labour with contract penalties. I have a friend who travels at random to China to do drop-in unannounced checks for apparel companies to make sure they’re meeting labour standards and actually doing the work in-house and not sub-subcontracing.
It’s super common for low bidders to have nice show factories that give a good tour, but then just pawn the work off elsewhere when companies don’t actively check or care. I can’t imagine Deere gave a shit to allow this from their supplier, especially with no statement from them even saying they were hoodwinked or anything.
Place I was at just had multiple people working on the same name. X was the official employee and X officially works 80 hours a week. X is two people one of which doesn’t have papers.
Let’s see what happens when Reps close the border… LMAO…
Just think of all the valuable work experience these children are missing out on due to the nanny state! /s (the actual thought of rightwing ghouls).
The reason businesses and right wingers are so pro border enforcement is so they can abuse children like this. Threaten deportation and you don’t have to follow labor laws.
Yup, nothing new. Working in factories at 14 1/2 when I was a child back in the 80’s.
Not a damn thing new at all.
Are you from Tennessee? 'Cause you’re the only ten-year-old I see working on this assembly line.
So I was a teenager in the early 2000s and many, many of my teenage classmates including myself had jobs. Some full time some part time.
Personally I worked at a paper mill from the age of 15 until I moved out of state.
But the minimum age was 14 to be able to work at that time.
I’ve just been seeing a lot of posts like this indicating young teenage children working and I don’t see why this is all of the sudden an issue?
You ever seen a kid get killed in heavy machinery? Have you ever seen a kid get permanently maimed on heavy machinery? That shit changes you. As a society we’re all supposed to learn from those horrors but instead we stay real myopic and say I’ve never been hurt, I’ve never seen anything bad happen and ignore that all regulations were written in blood and lifelong trauma. Then there’s the myriad situations where migrant children can be abused because they’re low risk victims.
Right! This seems to be the prevailing missing puzzle piece to most of these people’s thought process. They’re skipping over the fact that CHILDREN are WORKING instead of, oh I don’t fucking know, BEING CHILDREN?
And you had all the protections afforded a citizen. You could speak up and not worry about deportation. If they didn’t pay you, you had recourse. These people don’t. So don’t kid yourself when you think you’ve worked similar conditions.
Deportation the hell are you talking about?
If the company is hiring illegal underage immigrants they themselves are breaking the law.
Moreover even though they might be illegal underage immigrants they still have protections under us law child labor laws don’t change due to your status as an individual in the United States.
And the fine they got was less than the revenue generated by one of those children.
Times change. I was running a forklift at 14 and working construction at 16. Society has decided that it isn’t the way it wants things to happen anymore.
I imagine you are reading more stories because the economic downturn has pushed more families to do this.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that teenagers have always been working this isn’t a new phenomenon that has just now started to happen regardless of how many teenagers are working even if that number has increased.
I’ve seen some legislation in recent years where they dropped the minimum wage to work down which I don’t agree with but other than that where’s the problem here that’s what I’m asking?
have always been working this isn’t a new phenomenon that has just now started to happen regardless of how many teenagers are working even if that number has increased.
Moral ought from an is
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that teenagers have always been working this isn’t a new phenomeno
“People have always kept slaves, so there’s nothing wrong with slavery.” The sentiment of people like you a couple of hundred years ago.
Ever heard of a false equivalency? Because your above statement is a text book definition.
Also go fuck yourself for inferring that I somehow support slavery and for comparing legally employing teenagers and compensating them for their labor to buying, selling and torturing human beings and making them work for free.
(I understand that the company in the post was illegally employing underage migrants. I’m making a general statement concerning the entire teenage work force in American.)
There’s nothing wrong with employing teens within a set of standards and reason.
