State and federal agencies have launched a sweeping investigation into child labor and other potential labor law violations at multiple New Bedford seafood processing plants and construction companies.
The U.S. Department of Labor is investigating Atlantic Red Crab and Sea Watch International, two seafood processors in New Bedford. The federal agency is also investigating Workforce Unlimited and B.J.’s Service Company, staffing agencies that operate in New Bedford and Rhode Island and “provide labor to certain host companies, including in the seafood processing industry in New Bedford,” according to a Labor Department letter dated Nov. 16.
The state attorney general is also investigating Kerrigan & Axon, a Falmouth-based construction company, and Pro-Line Co., a concrete contractor in New Bedford. In addition to child labor, the agencies are also investigating possible violations of minimum wage and overtime pay requirements, according to agency letters outlining the investigations.
The Labor Department is attempting to uphold labor laws in industries that are often staffed by undocumented immigrants, many of whom are vulnerable to exploitation and working illegally with falsified paperwork. Sometimes child workers are unaware of the laws set in place to protect them, or intentionally skirting those laws in order to work, said multiple children interviewed by The Light who said they have worked at the seafood processing companies under investigation.
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The probe comes amid an unprecedented surge in child labor throughout the country. According to data from the Labor Department, the number of children employed in violation of federal law has increased more than five-fold since a low point in 2015. In July, Labor Department heads announced a renewed focus on pursuing child labor cases. Inspectors at the time had already found 4,474 children working illegally since the start of the year — a 44% increase over the previous year, according to the Labor Department.
A Labor Department spokesperson confirmed Monday that it is investigating the New Bedford seafood companies.
“The Wage and Hour Division is wholly committed to the strategic enforcement of worker protections focused on the nation’s most vulnerable workers,” a Labor Department spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Light. “Combating illegal child labor and enforcing the rights of workers employed in industries that pay low wages and have a history of high rates of violations are among our highest priorities. This includes seafood processing.”
Seafood processing and construction are among the most dangerous industries. In Massachusetts, tight guidelines limit hours for workers under age 18. Further restrictions prohibit those under 16 from working in construction, warehouses, freezers or other industrial jobs involving heavy machinery.
But for children working in New Bedford, the rules aren’t always clear. Often, those same rules conflict with the unsettling reality of their lives as children far from home, saddled with debt and under tremendous pressure to work.
Kids at work
Faviola is one of an unknown number of children who have worked in New Bedford’s seafood plants.
She immigrated from Guatemala when she was 15 and said she quickly found work at Sea Watch. For the first year, she didn’t attend school. Instead, she worked six days a week. Her shift would begin at 6 a.m. and often didn’t finish until 6 p.m. The job, she said, involved sorting clams, crushing the shells and extracting the meat for packaging. She said she also used a chemical solution to clean the machines.
“It would sting my eyes,” she said, in a brief interview. She said she didn’t know the name of the chemical.
Four other children interviewed by The Light described similar stories of working long hours in contact with dangerous machinery and chemicals. Each was between the ages of 15 and 17. Each had recently immigrated to the United States from impoverished villages or small farms in the highlands of Guatemala. Each supported families in both Guatemala and New Bedford. To work more hours, most said, they had forged paperwork to claim they were older than 18.
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Some tried to attend school. Others simply don’t have the time.
A girl named Lazaro said she began working at a processing plant at age 13. She said she worked five nights a week, from 3 p.m. until 3 a.m., using tweezers to pick the bones out of salmon and whitefish. It’s illegal in Massachusetts to employ children under 14.
“I would go to school, but I would be so tired that I would sleep through my classes,” she said. “Sometimes, I just wouldn’t go.”
Lazaro, who is now 17, said she feels lucky. Working such long hours, she paid off the debt of about $5,000 she had borrowed from a bank in Guatemala to pay a smuggler, also known as a coyote, for her journey to the United States. Her mother has also since moved to New Bedford and has encouraged her to focus on school. Lazaro is now enrolled at New Bedford High, she said, and dreams of becoming either a nurse or a police officer.
Faviola, now 17, has also temporarily stopped working to attend New Bedford High. But in the year that she worked in seafood processing, she wasn’t able to pay off the loan that financed her migration from Guatemala to New Bedford. Now, each month, it is accruing interest. And her family is still expecting her to send money home. She knows she should stay in school, she said, but she doesn’t know if she can afford to stop working through the school year.
“It is difficult because I have family in Guatemala and I need to send them money,” she said. “I came here to work. But now, I’m not working. I can’t send them money.”
Who’s to blame?
When the Labor Department launched the investigations, it didn’t only target the seafood companies. It also set its sights on staffing agencies, which are contracted by companies to provide workers for low-wage jobs like those in seafood processing.
Historically, the staffing agencies have acted as a firewall for the seafood companies. It allows them to avoid culpability for hiring undocumented workers or potentially violating labor law. The workers are technically employed by the staffing agency, not the company itself.
“It isn’t like I hired this person, but the staffing agency sent that person to my building,” John Williams, owner of Atlantic Red Crab, told The Public’s Radio in September.
Seafood industry leaders in New Bedford, who didn’t want to use their names for fears of being associated with child labor, said they felt sympathy — both for the children and the companies under investigation. Some placed the blame on the staffing agencies for not thoroughly vetting their workers, putting the companies at risk. Some even placed the blame on the children, who forged paperwork to appear old enough to legally work.
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“They hired an illegal immigrant who produced fake documentation. That’s the company’s fault?” said one. “I can promise you that no one is actively trying to use child labor.”
Behind all the finger-pointing is a growing problem. A record number of unaccompanied minors have immigrated to the U.S. in recent years. Since 2021, more than 300,000 migrant children have entered the United States on their own, according to data from the Labor Department.
That has presented a significant challenge to political and civic leaders in New Bedford. Some say they believe the best course of action is stronger enforcement of the current laws governing child labor, which would leave room for children to work, but also provide tight guidelines and limitations on hours.
Andrew O’Leary, superintendent of New Bedford Public Schools, said child labor laws are clear and should be followed.
“Young people do work. That can be a good thing,” he said. “The law makes sense in terms of the hours that they are allowed to work.” State labor law currently restricts children under 18 from working more than nine hours a day or after 10 p.m., with stricter rules for children under 16.
The school system has cooperated with the Labor Department, O’Leary said. It has added training for teachers to identify signs of children being exploited in the workplace. It has also begun educating students about their rights as workers.
“To be clear: the best place for these young people is in school,” he said. “But it’s not a problem that is easily solved. We want students to be aware of their rights in this country, too.”
Others say the current system has already failed children — and stronger laws should be adopted to prevent children from working in dangerous industries like seafood processing.
“The fact that is happening in a civilized industry, in America, in 2023, is a serious problem,” said state representative Chris Hendricks, of New Bedford, who said he is crafting legislation that would prevent anyone under 18 from working in seafood processing plants. “It’s high time we take a look at seafood processors and start to prevent young children from working these dangerous jobs.”
Email reporter Will Sennott at wsennott@newbedfordlight.org.
Let’s add more layers here. The interest by the coyotes is usually $300 per week until the loan is paid in full, so the family’s home in Guate is in serious jeopardy placing a burden on the young to work. And NB’s school system fails to engage the students to attend school thru language deficiencies as stated in the federal settlement agreement with the USDOJ. These children are victims first thru the system not the parents.
How about blaming all of the permissive laws that encourage migrants to come to Massachusetts? Seems like those laws have created a siphon where money is sent to these coyotes and overseas because we are too weak to enforce our immigration laws. Why should we endure all these societal problems like homelessness, drug use, child labor, instead of just enforcing the law?
The undocumented in New Bedford aren’t leading to the drug or homeless problem. Those are from right here in the good ole USA. When you’re 15 and working 72 hours a week, there isn’t a lot of time to mess around and risk deportation.
Yes,YEs,YES!!!
There are no obvious solutions to the immigrant problem. What is obvious is that the vast majority of the immigrants are the victims of societies doomed by climate change and the turmoil that follows when civilizations collapse. What is becoming increasingly obvious is that far too many of us who were handed the entitlement of being born in the USA think that we have earned that entitlement and are therefore better than.
Shocking that child labor went up immediately after “gut every single department” Trump took over. This shouldn’t surprise anyone.
It is 100% the fault of the company. Most of the time they’re found to be the ones falsifying the paperwork. Someone fresh to this country is not going to have the tools/knowledge to know what they need, how to get it, and to make it unscrutible. Blame the business owners.
The true victims are the small businesses fisherman and employees, laborers that have been shut down by the short sidedness of this article. Merry Christmas to those that think this shortsighted righteousness is positive. The many families that rely on these jobs regardless of age both in processing and the fishing boats that feed the processing plants have been canceled in the process of the reverberating outfall of canceled contracts from large grocery chains that don’t want to be associated with bad press. The logic here is that somehow we are protecting a young person by limiting their ability to earn a living after they literally walked an entire continent to find economic stability. What’s not reported on here is what happens to their families or themselves if they don’t pay their debts to the coyotes often tied to cartels or to the countless families who are now suffering this Christmas because there is no market to harvest crab or other fish species. To the small businesses that will simply be replaced by other foreign seafood commodity companies who can utilize unregulated labor and simply import seafood in where labor is a fraction of the cost and working conditions are horrific and the quality and health standards are unchecked. This article and the one before it is simply choking local small businesses and therefore strangling what’s left of domestic food economies. I can tell you first hand we (our fisherman, our processor workers, and indirectly the shoreside businesses that survive off of us are suffering this Christmas season because of this article. One solves nothing at all by righteousness in a vacuum. We live in a globalized world and for a young person to voluntarily migrate to this country because it was the best option they had for economic opportunity it should not come at the cost of strangling the economic viability of one’s ability to sustain themselves. We are now strangling an already struggling industry. I recommend that we start thinking holistically before we bring this community as we know it to an end.
So let me get this right. A illegal immigrate falsified documents so they can get a job and you want to blame the company that hires them? I feel bad for the hundreds of people who will loose there job when the company goes out of business. How about some accountability for the person falsified there documentation, lied and misrepresented themselves. Nah, that makes to much sense