16-year-old worker who ‘should not have been hired’ dies in Mississippi poultry plant

A 16-year-old Guatemalan boy died last week after his body became ensnared in the machinery he was hired to clean at a poultry processing plant in Hattiesburg, Miss., prompting two federal investigations.

According to a police report, authorities found Duvan Pérez’s body trapped in a conveyor belt around 8 p.m. on Friday. After conducting an autopsy, Forrest County Coroner Butch Benedict determined that Pérez’s accidental death was caused by fatal injuries from workplace equipment. The autopsy results will be released next week after a pathologist inspects the body, he added.

Pérez’s death is the third at the Mar-Jac Poultry plant over the past three years, according to data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Pérez’s death comes just two weeks after another 16-year-old boy died following a workplace-related incident at a Wisconsin sawmill. The cases have reignited criticisms about the use of child labor as Republican lawmakers have pushed bills to relax protections — despite a surge in high-profile cases involving mostly migrant children working in some of the nation’s most dangerous industries.

“How many more children must die?” Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the country, tweeted Wednesday. “We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Any lawmaker who wants to undermine child labor laws, in 2023, is a disgrace.”

Since 1938, federal law has barred anyone under 18 from holding “particular hazardous” or “detrimental” occupations - including operating or cleaning the machines found inside meat and poultry processing plants. Still, the Labor Department has recorded a 69 percent increase in children being employed in violation of federal law since 2018. With the agencies finding over 3,800 children had been illegally hired - of which 688 were working in hazardous occupations - fiscal 2022 marked the year with the most incidents since 2008, according to Labor Department data.

In one investigation conducted last year, federal investigators found scores of migrant children who had been hired to sanitize meatpacking plants across the country. Some of them described a grueling night shift spent using industrial-grade chemicals to clean dangerous and sharp machinery - at times, suffering chemical burns or sleep deprivation that affected their schooling, The Post previously reported.

Now, Pérez’s death has pushed two Labor Department divisions - OSHA and the Wage and Hour Division - to launch investigations, an agency spokesperson said.

Hattiesburg police have also opened a probe, a spokesperson said.

Mar-Jac Poultry said the teenager’s death was a “tragedy” that was “compounded when we learned that the victim was a minor.” The company said Pérez “should not have been hired,” adding that it relies on staffing companies to hire candidates, whose ages and immigration status must be verified through the government’s E-Verify electronic system.

“Mar-Jac would never knowingly put any employee, and certainly not a minor, in harm’s way but it appears, at this point in the investigation, that this individual’s age and identity were misrepresented on the paperwork,” the company said, adding that it would conduct “a thorough audit with the staffing companies to ensure that this kind of error never happens again.”

In the past three years, at least two other employees have died following workplace-related incidents at Mar-Jac Poultry’s Hattiesburg plant, OSHA records show. In 2020, 33-year-old Joel Velasco Toto was killed. The plant was fined $6,827.

A year later, 28-year-old Bobby Butler died after he got caught in a piece of machinery, according to an OSHA report. Mar-Jac was fined $27,306 for his death in 2021, but the company is contesting the penalties, records show.

Before those deaths, the Labor Department in 2009 proposed $379,800 in penalties against Mar-Jac after issuing 37 serious safety and health violations.

“Mar-Jac Poultry management should not wait until a serious injury or death occurs to any of its workers before making the necessary changes to its safety and health program,” Gei-Thae , director of OSHA’s Atlanta-East area office, said in a news release that year.

The company did not immediately respond to questions about the incidents.

In Hattiesburg, a city some 90 miles southeast of Jackson, Pérez’s death reverberated deeply. The teen, who migrated to the United States six years ago, loved spending time with his family, going to the gym and listening to music, according to an obituary. One of his “greatest accomplishments” was buying his own car.

“Our hearts are heavy with grief for the loss of this young Latino worker,” the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity, a Jackson-based nonprofit organization, said in a statement. “Our Latinx and Indigenous families come here to the United States looking for a better life for ourselves and our children.”

“We come seeking a dream that doesn’t exist,” the statement adds.