The company, Tuff Torq, was fined nearly $300,000 for hiring 10 children. It must also set aside $1.5 million to help the immigrant minors who were illegally employed.
Immigrant children as young as 14 were found working illegally amid dangerous heavy equipment at a Tennessee firm that makes parts for lawn mowers sold by John Deere and other companies, according to Labor Department officials.
The company, Tuff Torq, was fined nearly $300,000 for hiring 10 children. As part of a consent agreement with the federal government, the company is also required to set aside $1.5 million to help the children who were illegally employed. Ryan Pott, general counsel for Tuff Torq’s majority owner, the Japanese firm Yanmar, acknowledged the violations to NBC News.
notice no one is going to jail.
The company is being fined, so no single person is being held accountable monetarily either
Google tells me:
Tuff Torq has 513 employees, and the revenue per employee ratio is $311,891. Tuff Torq peak revenue was $160.0M in 2023.
They were fined $300,000. So less than one employees’ worth of revenue.
Cost of doing business, as usual.
Fined $300K, but also have to give up $1.5M in profit for the 10 kids. $150,000 per kid, or, you know, 1/2 of the revenue they generated. ;)
Well I’m sure a company with ethics, like John Deere probably, will stop doing business with Tuff Torq now. Definitely.
No, they’ll just re-negotiate their contract to get a better deal causing Tuff Torque to treat their remaining employees worse.
$300k is a joke. Every manager should be in prison and the factory should be nationalized. Keep the legit (adult) employees there, and transition the business to worker ownership.
Do that a few times and you’ll see some changes in how businesses behave.
So I was a teenager in the early 2000s and many, many of my teenage classmates including myself had jobs. Some full time some part time.
Personally I worked at a paper mill from the age of 15 until I moved out of state.
But the minimum age was 14 to be able to work at that time.
I’ve just been seeing a lot of posts like this indicating young teenage children working and I don’t see why this is all of the sudden an issue?
You ever seen a kid get killed in heavy machinery? Have you ever seen a kid get permanently maimed on heavy machinery? That shit changes you. As a society we’re all supposed to learn from those horrors but instead we stay real myopic and say I’ve never been hurt, I’ve never seen anything bad happen and ignore that all regulations were written in blood and lifelong trauma. Then there’s the myriad situations where migrant children can be abused because they’re low risk victims.
So your logic is, “some kids die and get hurt working, so no kids should work”?
Precisely. They should have a childhood.
Right now 14 year olds just look at phones and go on social media which is a direct harm. Working would be more healthy for their body and their mind.
we’re exploited enough as is and corporate greed is only getting worse, there’s absolutely zero need to put children in a position to be exploited.
If they dont want to be “exploited” then they shouldnt apply for the job.
What the fuck? You think employees should be exploited because they need money to survive? Force them to work 80-hour weeks for minimum wage? Scream racist epithets at them if they aren’t productive enough? How about beat them with a metal rod if they step out of line?
Tennessee: old enough to make assembly line lawn mower parts
Florida: not old enough for social media.
But old enough to have a rifle/shotgun. And not just in Tennessee:
From TN and got my first shotgun for my tenth birthday.
5 years too late. You could have shot that at 5 years old with minimal bruising.
It was a .410 so you’re not wrong
“The Labor Department has prioritized child labor enforcement since last spring amid a 152% increase in children found to be illegally employed since 2018, according to department figures.”
Mostly immigrants I’d bet
Also illegal immigrants
Of course they are. Why else would you oppose immigration, except to be able to exploit illegal immigrants?
By virtue of being here unlawfully, they have little recourse. That fact alone is essentially leverage for any “employer” to exploit them over.
It’s clearly not because they are a drain on the system, because that’s been disproven time and time again. Their economic contributions far outweigh whatever little social programs they’re able to obtain.
So it must be because they are a great pool of cheap, under-the-table, sub-minimum-wage, exploitable labor. Just like prisoners and prostitutes (except for the sans sub-minimum wage part. Plenty of illicit sex workers that are unpaid victims of trafficking, but if the John is paying less than $7.25 an hour, they should really know better)
By virtue of being here unlawfully, they have little recourse. That fact alone is essentially leverage for any “employer” to exploit them over.
Ah yes, keep your employees at least as culpable as yourself, and thus exploitable. These are mob tactics. Hey, maybe slapping these monsters with a RICO suit is the way to go here?
Mobsters didn’t have Citizens United.
If CU were around in the 1920s, we’d still be in prohibition.
What a shit hole country
Oh but c’mon, it’s a country where undiagnosed schizophrenics have the freedom to buy semi-automatic firearms, proudly rapist lying bankrupt fraudsters can become the president and guns are the leading cause of death for children!
What’s not to like?
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Actually, there’s not a single mountain in the whole country.
Norway wanted to give us one but it didn’t work out in the end.
Also, compared to American Redwoods, our trees really aren’t that tall.
So it’s more like us over here with our thick, short forests and our potato fields.
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Lack of mountain business*
Heh.
Saw the headline, said, “I bet they’re immigrant children.”
Surprise, surprise.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1173697113/immigrant-child-labor-crisis
Yup. Republicans claim they want to close the border, but have no problem exploiting the labor supply.
Let’s see what happens when Reps close the border… LMAO…
