The human cost to that chicken you buy

http://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/magazine/child-labor-dangerous-jobs.html

At 14, Marcos was maimed while working the overnight cleaning shift at a Perdue slaughterhouse in rural Virginia.

He is one of thousands of migrant children living far from their parents and working dangerous jobs.

In towns like Marcos’s, the practice is an open secret that everyone lives with.

The Kids on the Night Shift

By Hannah Dreier

Photographs by Meridith Kohut

Published Sept. 18, 2023, Updated Sept. 20, 2023

Late on a Thursday in February 2022, Marcos Cux, who had just turned 14, bundled up in green rubberized overalls and a matching jacket that was too big for his slight shoulders. He packed a pair of steel-toed rubber boots and two layers of gloves, because even a small tear could lead to a chemical burn. As others in the house slept, a cousin drove him to his cleaning shift at the chicken slaughterhouse, a half-mile-long industrial complex on a stretch of bare highway in rural Virginia, set behind hedges and a tall metal fence.

The plant, which is run by Perdue Farms, processes 1.5 million chickens a week. Before dawn each morning, trucks haul in birds stuffed so tightly in layers of steel cages that they cannot move. Seagulls wheel around above, drawn by scraps in dumpsters. Workers inside hang the birds upside down in a darkened kill room. Bursts of electricity stun them, and the conveyor line runs their necks past sharp blades. They pass through the defeathering room, where the line plunges into foamy hot water, and then on to other machines that remove feet, heads and guts. Finally, rows of workers slice what remains into packageable parts.

When Marcos and the rest of the cleaning crew got there after midnight, the plant had a putrid smell workers sometimes felt they could taste. They sloshed through water, grease and blood, which drained into a channel that snakes around the plant under grates. Marcos gathered up chicken pieces left by the day shifts, working quickly because the whole facility had to be sanitized by 5 a.m. He took the covers off the channel and began using a pressurized hose to spray the machines down with 130-degree water.

He came from a village in Guatemala to this small town on the Eastern Shore of Virginia several months earlier. Before he left, his family was struggling to pay for electricity and skipping meals in the aftermath of the pandemic. They couldn’t afford formula for his infant sister. His parents were growing desperate and knew that while adults who arrive at the U.S. border are generally turned back, minors traveling by themselves are allowed in.

The policy dates back to a 2008 law intended to protect children who might otherwise come to harm on their own in Mexican border towns. In the 15 years since, the carveout has become widely known in Central America, where it shapes the calculations of destitute families. Marcos’s parents decided he would go north and find a way to earn money. They borrowed against their land to pay a coyote — technically a human smuggler, but in this case, more like a travel agent — to help him reach the United States without being kidnapped or hurt. He made his way to an adult cousin in Parksley, a town of 800 people bookended by the Perdue plant and another sprawling chicken operation run by Tyson Foods.

His cousin, Antonia de Calmo, was living in an already-cramped home with her husband and four children in a trailer park called Dreamland, but she agreed to take in Marcos after his mother called in tears and said that they had no other options. Federal law bans minors from cleaning slaughterhouses because of the risk of injury. But with the help of a middle-school classmate who already worked at the plant, Marcos bought fake documents that said he was a man with a different name in his 20s. When he was hired, children made up as much as a third of the overnight cleaning crew at the Perdue plant, workers told me. The work was harder than Marcos expected, but it also paid better than he could have imagined — around $100 for each six-hour shift, more than he could make in a month back home.

After he finished hosing down the machines, he started scrubbing blood and fat off the steel parts with chemicals that, if they hit skin, created welts that could take months to heal. Shortly after 2:30 a.m., he thought he saw a bit of torn rubber glove within the conveyor belt of the deboning area and reached in to grab it. Suddenly, the machine came to life. Across the factory, another worker had failed to see Marcos crouched with his left arm deep inside the assembly line and turned it on.

The belt caught the sleeve of Marcos’s baggy jacket and pulled him across the floor. Hard plastic teeth ripped through his muscles, tearing open his forearm down to the bone. By the time someone heard his screams and shut off the power, his arm was limp, a deep triangular gash running down the length of it. A rope of white tendons hung from his elbow to his wrist, horrifying the workers who gathered around him. He understood from their faces that something was badly wrong but didn’t feel any pain as the wound began gushing blood and he started to lose consciousness.

A supervisor called 911 to report the injury. “We don’t know what to do,” she said, her voice rising. “It’s bleeding out.” The dispatcher ran through a list of questions about his condition. “And how old is that person?” the dispatcher asked.

The supervisor did not respond.

“Even if you had to guess?” he asked.

Still no response.

“Like, 20s? 30s?” he asked.

“Um,” the supervisor said, her voice shaking.

Another moment passed, and the line went dead.

When the paramedics arrived, a dispatcher reported “massive amounts of bleeding,” and Marcos was flown to a trauma unit in Baltimore for emergency surgery. He lay in the hospital for two weeks as medical staff wondered why the paperwork for this boy with long eyelashes and a round baby face said he was an adult man named Francisco.

The morning after Marcos’s injury, workers in Dreamland began talking about a child whose arm had been nearly torn off at the plant. Word soon spread through town. There were reasons that supervisors, teachers, federal inspectors and even police officers had said nothing for years about children working at the slaughterhouses. Everyone understood that the children were under extraordinary pressure to earn money to pay off their travel debts and help their families back home. They were living on a remote stretch of peninsula with few job options — if the plants shut down because of a labor scandal, the local economy could collapse. Now, with an eighth grader in the hospital, many wondered if they had been wrong to keep quiet.

For most of the last century, Parksley was an almost entirely white agricultural community, with a migrant labor force that cycled in and out with the rhythms of the tomato and corn crops. That started to shift when the two plants opened in the 1970s, just as American consumers were developing an appetite for boneless, skinless, nugget-size chicken. More processing steps required more workers, and the companies, which now produce one in three pounds of poultry consumed in the United States, became the area’s biggest employers.

It was dangerous, grueling work, and half the plant employees quit each year. The managers found a solution to chronic turnover by looking to migrant seasonal workers, who now settled in Parksley and other nearby towns in Accomack County and worked year-round at the plants.

In recent years, poverty worsened in Central America, and the work force changed once again. More than 300,000 migrant children have entered the United States on their own since 2021, by far the largest such influx in memory. Most have ended up working full time, fueling a resurgence in child labor not seen in a century, with children living far from their parents and working illegally in all 50 states. At slaughterhouses, it is no longer only Spanish-speaking adults seeking jobs but also children, most of them from Guatemala, which is one of the most impoverished countries in the region.

‘If companies like this looked too closely at who was working, no company would be able to keep going.’

The pandemic was especially crushing to the agricultural highlands where Marcos’s family raised animals on a small plot of land. The odd jobs that kept them afloat disappeared during the shutdowns, food prices soared and then his father fell ill. When his parents told him he would be going to the United States to work, he was initially excited — he pictured a land of skyscrapers and shopping malls.

After crossing the border, Marcos spent a few weeks in a shelter run by the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency is responsible for releasing migrant children to adults who will protect them from exploitation while their cases move through the immigration system, a process that takes years. So many children were crossing in the early days of the Biden administration that the shelters filled up, and children were sometimes held at jail-like facilities run by Customs and Border Protection. H.H.S. urged shelter workers to send children to their sponsors more quickly.

Children usually arrive in the United States with some idea of who might take them in: either a parent or sibling or, about half the time, a more distant relative or family friend. While parents and siblings often support the children who come to live with them, other adults are more likely to take children in only on the condition that they work and pay rent. Of the dozens of children who have been released to sponsors in and around Parksley during the past three years, more than 90 percent have gone to adults who are not their parents.

Marcos gave the shelter staff Antonia’s phone number, and the agency contacted her and sent a list of requirements for sponsors. The first was to provide Marcos with food and shelter. Another was to send him to school. Nearly last on the list was a pledge that he wouldn’t work. Antonia agreed to them all, but she had no intention of keeping Marcos from working. She knew that was why he had come. She, her husband, her oldest daughter and most people she knew worked for the chicken plants, and it seemed likely that he would find a job there, too.

Marcos and Antonia said H.H.S. officials never came to check up on him after he arrived in Virginia. But they decided to enroll him in school anyway, just in case. “I had to go to school, but I only came to help my family,” he told me in one of many conversations in Spanish during the past year.

Migrant Child Labor in the U.S.

• Alone and Exploited: A New York Times investigation found that migrant children, who have been coming into the United States in record numbers, are ending up in dangerous jobs that violate child labor laws.
• U.S. Ignored Warnings: After The Times published its investigation, the White House announced a crackdown on companies that hire migrant children. But all along, there were signs of children at risk that the Biden administration ignored or missed.
• A New Crisis: Hannah Dreier, who spent 10 months reporting The Times exposé, joined “The Daily” to discuss the failures that have led to the explosive growth of migrant child labor in America.

Marcos began attending eighth grade in the Accomack school district, where more than 1,000 of the county’s roughly 4,700 students were learning to speak English. Marcos borrowed $800 from Antonia to buy fake papers from a man in a nearby trailer, and at 13 he was hired onto the overnight sanitation shift. Each morning, Antonia picked him up from the plant at 6:30, and 20 minutes later, he was waiting in front of Dreamland for the school bus.

While teenagers work legally all over America, Marcos’s job was strictly off limits. Federal law prohibits 14- and 15-year-olds from working at night or for more than three hours on school days. Older teenagers are allowed to put in longer hours, but all minors are barred from the most dangerous occupations, including digging trenches, repairing roofs and cleaning slaughterhouses.

But as more children come to the United States to help their families, more are ending up in these plants. Throughout the company towns that stud the “broiler belt,” which stretches from Delaware to East Texas, many have suffered brutal consequences. A Guatemalan eighth grader was killed on the cleaning shift at a Mar-Jac plant in Mississippi in July; a federal investigation had found migrant children working illegally at the company a few years earlier. A 14-year-old was hospitalized in Alabama after being overworked at a chicken operation there. A 17-year-old in Ohio had his leg torn off at the knee while cleaning a Case Farms plant. Another child lost a hand in a meat grinder at a Michigan operation.

In Accomack, cleaning staffs once worked directly for the slaughterhouses. But years ago, the plants started delegating this work to outside sanitation companies, which pay less and allow brands to avoid accountability for problems. The largest such U.S. contractor, Packers Sanitation Services Inc., says on its website that it can “take the liability and risk off your facility’s record.” The Biden administration has pledged to start fining brands for violating child-labor laws, but so far it has imposed penalties only on subcontractors.

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