Reuters learned of underage workers at the Hyundai-owned supplier following the brief disappearance in February of a Guatemalan migrant child from her family's home in Alabama.
The girl, who turns 14 this month, and her two brothers, aged 12 and 15, all worked at the plant earlier this year and weren't going to school, according to people familiar with their employment. Their father, Pedro Tzi, confirmed these people's account in an interview with Reuters.
Police in the Tzi family's adopted hometown of Enterprise also told Reuters that the girl and her siblings had worked at SMART. The police, who helped locate the missing girl, at the time of their search identified her by name in a public alert.
Reuters is not using her name in this article because she is a minor.
Shit like this just makes it seem to me that it would be justifiable to just randomly start shooting suits
One former worker at the @Hyundai subsidiary told Reuters there were around 50 minors working over various shifts.
:jesus-christ:
So everyone involved with this is going to prison right???
Of course, the children will be imprisoned pending their deportation.
Detain them a few years while they "figure out what to do with them" and wow suddenly they're of legal working age :amerikkka-clap:
The law binds but does not protect undocumented child labor.
The law protects but does not bind :porky-happy:
OSHA inspections at SMART have documented violations including crush and amputation hazards at the factory.
The plant, whose website says it has the capacity to supply parts for up to 400,000 vehicles each year, has also had difficulties retaining labor to keep up with Hyundai's demand.
In late 2020, SMART wrote a letter to U.S. consular officials in Mexico seeking a visa for a Mexican worker. The letter, written by SMART General Manager Gary Sport and reviewed by Reuters, said the plant was "severely lacking in labor" and that Hyundai "will not tolerate such shortcomings."
SMART didn't answer Reuters questions about the letter.
Earlier this year, attorneys filed a class-action lawsuit against SMART and several staffing firms who help supply workers with U.S. visas. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia on behalf of a group of about 40 Mexican workers, alleges some employees, hired as engineers, were ordered to work menial jobs instead.
SMART in court documents called allegations in the suit "baseless" and "meritless."
Many of the minors at the plant were hired through recruitment agencies, according to current and former SMART workers and local labor recruiters.
Although staffing firms help fill industrial jobs nationwide, they have often been criticized by labor advocates because they enable large employers to outsource responsibility for checking the eligibility of employees to work.
One former worker at SMART, an adult migrant who left for another auto industry job last year, said there were around 50 underage workers between the different plant shifts, adding that he knew some of them personally. Another former adult worker at SMART, a U.S. citizen who also left the plant last year, said she worked alongside about a dozen minors on her shift.
Another former employee, Tabatha Moultry, 39, worked on SMART's assembly line for several years through 2019. Moultry said the plant had high turnover and increasingly relied on migrant workers to keep up with intense production demands. She said she remembered working with one migrant girl who "looked 11 or 12 years old."
The girl would come to work with her mother, Moultry said. When Moultry asked her real age, the girl said she was 13. "She was way too young to be working in that plant, or any plant," Moultry said. Moultry didn't provide further details about the girl and Reuters couldn't independently confirm her account.
SMART in court documents called allegations in the suit “baseless” and “meritless.”
The kids were just hanging out at the plant. As kids do. Kids being kids y’all. Probably shooting tik tok videos.
Adventure Time. Come on grab your friends. We'll go to very distant lands.
capitalist hellscape with child workers
hometown of Enterprise
:sus-deep: The simulation is failing
I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories; of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted, body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway in the affairs of men.
- Eugene V. Debs (from Statement to the Court Upon Being Convicted Of the Sedition Act)
Redditors were literally posting some dumb shit about child labor in china theother day lmao
Nobody ever needs to force a 12 years old to do anything. They're all super easy to work with.
Incidentally, remember when we used to have corporal punishment? Gen Z has gotten so weak and lazy, amirite? Anyways...
Same Redditors also think kiddie creeping is okay as long as it's not a "forced" transaction, just an economically coerced one.
