The Exclusive Poultry in La Puente, Calif.
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The Labor Department says that a Los Angeles-based poultry processor hired children(*14*) as young as 14 to debone chicken with sharp knives and hid minors in closets when investigators showed up to ask questions, according to court documents and a recent consent decree with the corporate announced Monday.
“The Exclusive Poultry and owner Tony Bran willfully withheld employees’ hard-earned wages, endangered young employees and retaliated against employees to conceal their wrongdoing,” said Jessica Looman, administrator of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. She added that the division “will proceed to work at every level of the industry to prevent employers or retailers from exploiting employees, including children, for profit.”
The corporate’s attorney, Anthony McClaren, told NBC News: “These were just allegations and the case was in its infancy. We were just starting to do our own discovery to understand whether or not these allegations were true.”
McClaren said that his client didn’t know whether children had been hired but that the corporate concluded that a resolution with the federal agency “was in the very best interest of moving forward.”
McClaren said that following the settlement, the corporate is effectively out of business.
The Labor Department’s investigation began as an inquiry into allegedly unpaid wages in August 2022, when an adult employee complained to the federal agency, according to court documents.
Labor investigators repeatedly went to the corporate’s poultry processing locations and said in affidavits they saw young employees they estimated were 14 to 17 years of age, but the employees refused to talk and would run from them.
The Labor Department told NBC News it subsequently confirmed that among the employees were(*14*) as young as 14.
Investigators alleged in court affidavits that employees told investigators that minors deboned chicken, worked additional time six days every week and didn’t attend school, and that a few of those children had been injured on the job.
The investigators also alleged that after the Labor Department launched its investigation, Bran, the corporate owner, yelled at the employees in Spanish, “threatening that he believed they’d ‘opened their traps’ to the Department of Labor and that for this reason, he can be reducing their pay.”
Employees allegedly told investigators that minors who worked at the corporate were hidden in closets and bathrooms when the investigators arrived in order that they wouldn’t be found.
As a part of the consent decree, the corporate has agreed to three years of monitoring by a 3rd party to ensure no minors are hired and wages are paid back.
The investigation and subsequent consent decree with the corporate are a part of an industry-wide crackdown on wage theft and child labor by the Biden administration. In fall 2022, the department found greater than 100 children, some as young as 13, cleansing slaughterhouses for a Midwestern firm.