50 Children Found Working in Alabama Hyundai Factory
Migrant children have allegedly been found working at a Hyundai supplier in Alabama after police launched a probe into the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl who ran away with a 21-year-old plant employee. SMART Alabama in Luverne, an automotive parts manufacturer that has supplied parts for...
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ROSENBERG: Earlier this year, My reporting partners, Christina Cook and Joshua Schneier, and I, we published a story about a Guatemalan teenager, who shortly arriving to the United States last year, got a job in a chicken processing plant, which is a very big industry in the area of Enterprise, Ala., where our reporting focused. And, you know, clearly these chicken plants can be pretty hazardous places to work. So, you know, through that reporting, we found out it's relatively easy in some cases to get documents, you know, where if you're a minor, you could basically, you know, pick an age and say that you were older.
So these workers can be very vulnerable to exploitation because they're working without authorization, and, you know, they're often very hesitant to speak up. But once we published that story, we started hearing about kids also in Enterprise, Ala., who were working in a nearby auto manufacturer that is about an hour away. This Smart Alabama plant is in Laverne, which is 40 miles from Enterprise. And we were hearing that some of them were much younger ages than the teenagers that we had written about before. So obviously that caught our attention.
MARTIN: Can you just tell us a little bit about how the hiring worked so that a 12- or 13-year-old could get hired to work at a manufacturing plant like this? I mean, I think people would see if an older teenager, somebody 17 or 18 or 19, was not honest about, you know, his or her age. But I think 12 or 13, I think - I don't know. I don't know too many 12- or 13-year-olds who look like they're old enough to work in manufacturing. So I'm just - so how did it work?
ROSENBERG: Yeah. Well, you know, for a lot of local migrants in the area who might not have legal work documents, we've learned that they often find jobs through various staffing agencies. And from speaking to labor experts and workers themselves, we know that these staffing agencies can often have their own lax hiring practices. They often make - you know, sometimes will make minimal checks when hiring. Labor experts said that while these staffing firms are very common throughout the U.S. and in many different industries, sometimes companies can kind of use them as a buffer if there's, you know, unsavory hiring practices, and they can say they didn't know what was going on because the workers came from staffing firms. But we did speak to former workers who were working alongside some of these younger minors and told us that there was no way that they looked old enough to work, even if they might not, you know, admit their age when they're on the line.
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