Another day, another batch of fresh reports about outrageous labor abuse featuring illegal aliens in the Land of the Free. Tragically, once again the horrific Industrial Revolution specter of mistreated child workers is prominently featured.
On Nov. 14, Liberty Nation reported that the US Labor Department had discovered a major food sanitation cleaning company for meatpackers had “at least 31 children” working under extremely hazardous conditions. The company involved, Packers Sanitation Services Inc. LTD (PSSI), has been known to rely on illegal aliens to perform job duties that frequently involve serious bodily injury and even death. December brings more evidence of massive unchecked illegal immigration spurring a return to the working environment of America’s sweatshop days circa 1905.
Illegal Aliens Contracted Out by the State
An investigation by The Arizona Republic discovered that local companies in the Grand Canyon State are hiring prisoners who have US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detainers against them as hourly workers. The paper wrote on Dec. 12:
“At least 18 people who have the detainers, which means that they can be turned over to immigration officials and deported from the country, were involved in jobs including packaging salads for one of the world’s largest fresh food processors, building trusses and frames for homes for a local construction company and working for lead-generating telecommunications companies. Those jobs paid at least $4.75 an hour, far below the federal or state minimum wage or what companies would actually pay for the work on the outside.”
Shawshank State Prison Warden Samuel Norton would be proud. It’s hard to imagine a more ludicrous image of the degradation of the modern American workplace than a criminal illegal alien that ICE wants to deport cold-calling people around the country at a telemarketing phone bank.
(Photo by Nik Wheeler/Corbis via Getty Images)
Prisoners have long been made to work, of course. But farming out inmates to private companies is far different from having them repair state roads or work the fields that provide food to the jailhouse kitchen. Pair this state-controlled cheap-labor employment agency with the explosion in illegal immigration numbers and a climate is created in which prisons have a de facto incentive to welcome easily exploitable foreigners into their yards.
“The Republic found an additional eight people classified with ICE detainers who had worked directly for Arizona Correctional Industries, a for-profit business run by the Department of Corrections. ACI uses prisoners and pays them sub-minimum wages to do forced labor for companies,” the paper continued.
“The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry has used at least 15,700 ‘Mexican nationals’ as hired hands over the past 15 years. Those prisoners are people who were born in Mexico and either have legal residency here, don’t have authorization to live here or are here under a visa program,” The Republic related.
Clocking in at the Plant at Age 12
Things get much uglier in Alabama. An investigation has found “at least four major” auto parts suppliers to car makers Hyundai and its subsidiary Kia have utilized child labor in recent years. Reuters reported Dec. 16:
“At a plant owned by Hwashin America Corp, a supplier to the two car brands in the south Alabama town of Greenville, a 14-year-old Guatemalan girl worked this May assembling auto body components, according to interviews with her father and law enforcement officials. At plants owned by Korean auto-parts maker Ajin Industrial Co, in the east Alabama town of Cusseta, a former production engineer told Reuters he worked with at least ten minors. And six other ex-employees of Ajin said they, too, worked alongside multiple underage laborers.”
These are not isolated incidents. “[A]s many as 10 Alabama plants that supply parts to Hyundai or Kia have been investigated for child labor by various state and federal law enforcement or regulatory agencies, according to two people familiar with the probes,” Reuters stated. Just as with meatpacking sanitation company PSSI, which brings in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year, we are dealing here with a highly successful large corporation that benefits financially from the vile exploitation of children as cheap labor.
Hyundai’s “fast growth and popularity in recent years has led it to become the third-largest automaker by U.S. sales,” Reuters noted. In July, the wire service reported that a 12-year-old boy was working alongside his 14-year-old sister and 15-year-old brother at a Hyundai-owned auto parts supplier essential to its assembly line in Montgomery.
The “children ... were among a larger cohort of underage workers who found jobs at the Hyundai-owned supplier over the past few years, according to interviews with a dozen former and current plant employees and labor recruiters,” Reuters related. “Several of these minors, they said, have foregone schooling in order to work long shifts at the plant, a sprawling facility with a documented history of health and safety violations, including amputation hazards.”
Real human beings are suffering due to the federal government’s refusal to secure US borders, and the very nature of work in this country is being profoundly warped in a way that inevitably impacts working-class citizens.
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