Jerry Su, Period 1, 12/19/23

Jerry Su
Pd 1
12/19/23
Modern Mythology 2024

Social-Political Awareness
Article

Child labor has been a problem since the earliest times of humanity, seemingly impossible to correct due to a variety of factors beyond our governmental control. Children made up missing workers that companies needed doing dangerous work for low income. Child labor unions and laws were set in force in the early 1900s, and supposedly they wiped out all illegal activity involving underage children in hazardous workplaces.

However, coming back to modern day 2023, it has come to the public’s attention that food-processing industries had been employing children. Children as young as 13 and 14 have been working at slaughter-houses all over rural and town areas of middle America. As of recently, one such child has died working a night shift at one of the slaughterhouses in Mississippi.

Duvan Perez was hired to clean up at Mar-Jac Poultry in Hattiesburg, and was said to have been shoved into a machine that happened to be turned on. This happened on July 14, 2023, during a late night shift. Mar-Jac Poultry had “strict” rules against workers under the age of 18, but how did Perez get hired? Apparently, Mar-Jac has a third-party company file in and employ workers for them, and they somehow got Perez hired. The company dug in to research and found out that Perez had been using a fake ID, one of someone who was the age of 32.

The US department of labor investigated the slaughterhouse and came to realize that there were more children there under the age of 18, all using fake IDs. In their investigation of Packers Sanitation Service Inc. (company involving cleaning of slaughterhouses), it has come to a conclusion that about 102 children have been illegally working across 13 locations in 8 states in the US.

As much as the companies that hire children are to blame for the rising numbers of underage employment in meat-packing industries, they aren’t the only factors that affect the graph. One of the biggest factors is poverty in underdeveloped countries, such as Guatemala. In many villages of Guatemala, poverty is such a problem that they have to split an egg to five to feed multiple people. Education is also a huge problem, because of the decline of Education offered in Guatemala, children start migrating out in hopes of finding educational opportunities elsewhere.

Both children and adults end up being smuggled into America, however, due to their poor economic status, they can only be smuggled a few at a time, and have to pay a hefty fee for it. The migrants usually end up in secluded towns, most of them coincidentally being towns whose economy runs on slaughterhouses. There, they get paid above minimum wage, and could slowly afford to bring in their family from Guatemala. This becomes a never ending cycle, poverty leads to migration, migration leads to working dangerous jobs for cash, and cash leads to bringing more people.

As a note, even though the companies that had been “unknowingly” employing underage children into the dangerous labor force are mostly to blame for the spike in child labor and deaths, they cannot take the full blame for the situations that are happening currently. The entire ordeal is beyond our own control, as the Government cannot support correcting every single fault that is happening all over the world.

This is comparable to the Gods and mythology, since the natures of both realities are that mankind cannot control everything. To control something efficiently, one must sacrifice something else. Whether it would be time, human casualties, or just outright destruction, to stabilize one situation causes a disruption in another situation. Just like God’s punishment in the bible, it reveals crucial insight that no matter what we do, we cannot prevent the unpreventable, problems are born endlessly from what we solve.

So to conclude, yes, children working illegally in slaughterhouses is bad. It would be very much preferable if such situations were eliminated. However, just eliminating children working in such environments would not fix the big problem of poverty and migration. The overall big picture has way more to it than we think, with these situations as mere puzzle pieces. We must take this one step at a time, and slowly progress to combat economical situations, and to do so we must work together as a country/world united. Which, realistically speaking, will never work out due to the nature of each country around the world.

Source:

“Minor Who Died in Poultry Plant Accident Got the Job with the Identity of a 32-Year-Old.” NBC News, 18 Dec. 2023, www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/slaughterhouse-children-documentary-rcna129405. Accessed 19 Dec. 2023.