Legal News

Owners, Managers of Kosher Meat Plant Face Child Labor Allegations

By Dan Slater

A truck leaves the AgriProcessors slaughterhouse and packing plant Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2004, in Postville, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

There’s trouble in Postville. Yesterday, the NYT reports, the Iowa attorney general brought an array of criminal charges for child labor violations against the owners and top managers of Agriprocessors, a meatpacking plant where nearly 400 workers were detained in a May immigration raid.

The state charges were the first to be brought against the owners, Aaron Rubashkin and his son Sholom, and senior managers at the plant since a May 12 immigration raid that netted nearly 400 workers. Federal prosecutors convicted nearly 300 workers, most of them illegal immigrants from Guatemala, on document fraud charges, with the majority sentenced to five months in prison. Advocates for immigrants had criticized federal prosecutors for punishing the workers but not the managers.

(If you’ve read Stephen G. Bloom’s book “Postville,” you’ve heard of the Rubashkins before. The Rubashkins are Lubovitch Jews who, over two decades ago, traveled from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to Iowa in order to turn the Hygrade meat processing plant into a glatt kosher processing plant, complete with shochtim — or professional kosher slaughterers — and a rabbinical inspectorate.)

The complaint charges that the plant employed workers under the legal age of 18, including seven who were under 16, from Sept. 9, 2007, to May 12. Some workers, including some younger than 16, worked on machinery prohibited for employees under 18, including “conveyor belts, meat grinders, circular saws, power washers and power shears,” said an affidavit filed with the complaint.

Under Iowa law, employing a worker under 18 on the floor of a slaughterhouse is a criminal misdemeanor with a maximum punishment of 30 days in jail and a fine of $625. But the charges multiplied to more than 9,000 because a new one was brought for each day and each offense. If convicted, the Rubashkins could face more than $5 million in fines and significant prison sentences.

In a statement, Chaim Abrahams, a senior executive at the plant, denied the accusations and said the company would go to trial “to put to rest the insidious notion that it knowingly employed under-age workers.” Abrahams said the minors had lied about their age, and he predicted that Iowa prosecutors would not be able to prove that managers knew their employees were not old enough to work.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 10, 2008 (boomark / email).