As Republicans push to weaken child labor safety laws in states where they have a political majority, a company that cleans and services machinery in food processing plants has been fined more $1.5 million for using children as young as 13-years-old to clean dangerous equipment, including those with blades, the Washington Post reports.
The US Department of Labor cited Packers Sanitation Services for using 102 children to spray dangerous chemicals on factory equipment, including machines with “razor sharp blades” and “head splitters”–equipment used to automatically butcher and process meat–to clean them as part of their normal business practices.
Republican legislators in states like Ohio and Iowa have introduced proposals that would lower the ages of children eligible to work, extend the hours they are eligible to work to help employers, and/or reduce the safety considerations on the jobs such children would take. An estimated 300,000 to 500,000 children under the age of 18 work in the American agriculture industry alone, with some Republican-led states allowing employers to require children under the age of 16 to work up to 12 hour days.