Company fined $650K for hiring children to clean meatpacking plants

As an investigator watched cleaners walk into a pork processing plant, she noticed something unusual: A few carried “pink and purple sparkly backpacks” as they entered the Sioux City, Iowa, facility around 11 p.m.

That observation became evidence in a probe that now has led a Tennessee-based sanitation company to agree to pay nearly $650,000 in fines for hiring at least two dozen children to work overnight in slaughterhouses and meatpacking facilities. In at least one case, a child was seriously injured.