LOS ANGELES (CN) — The U.S. Department of Labor over the weekend filed what it said was an urgent lawsuit to halt three Southern California poultry businesses from using child labor.
U.S. District Judge Otis Wright II on Monday issued a temporary restraining order to force the companies and their owners to stop using child labor, provide the Labor Department with the names of the people they have employed in the past year and their contact information, and not ship any products from the facilities where they used child labor.
In a complaint filed Saturday in federal court, the Labor Department said its inspectors last month discovered child laborers deboning poultry in one of the facilities in Irwindale.
"The children had been working at the facility for months and defendants continually removed goods from the facility the entire time, including after the search warrant, and over WHD’s objection," the department said, referring to its Wage and Hours Division.
The department seeks urgent remedies, including an injunction preventing the goods from entering commerce, or further traveling the channels of commerce, and disgorgement of the profits the companies have illegally obtained by shipping "hot goods" made by oppressive child labor, where children under the age of 18 are employed using sharp knives to debone raw poultry.
The three companies named as defendants in the complaint are L & Y Food of El Monte, which operates two poultry processing plants, Moon Poultry of Irwindale and JRC Culinary Group of Monterey Park. Fu Qian Chen Lu, according to the complaint, is the owner of the three businesses and responsible for their management.
The Labor Department claims the companies have obstructed its investigators, making it impossible for them to determine what happened with the chicken that was processed using child labor.
The department needs this information, it said, to notify any downstream purchasers of the "hot goods" that were made by oppressive child labor.
"Without this information, any such hot goods will continue in the stream of commerce to compete with law-abiding competitors," according to the complaint.
Gregory Patterson, an attorney for the companies and their owner, claims the Labor Department had planted an underage worker at the facility to put leverage on the businesses to settle overtime claims.
"We are informed that, in late January 2024, the DOL caused a 17-year-old to gain employment with Moon Poultry under false pretenses by presenting a fake government identification," Patterson said in a statement Wednesday. "The DOL then directed this person to work in a hazardous area of the Moon Poultry facility in Irwindale. The DOL did this in parallel with an overtime investigation wherein it demanded a multimillion-dollar 'posting amount' within days of its initiation without making any meaningful presentation of evidence of unpaid wages."
He added: "The DOL has cynically used the child labor allegation — which it manufactured — to strengthen its negotiating hand and attempt to force us into an early settlement of the overtime claims. The DOL is likely to be a defendant before this is over."
A Labor Department spokesperson said in response that Patterson's allegations are false.
"The Department of Labor has notified defense counsel that these claims are baseless, but he has nevertheless chosen to pursue them,” the spokesperson said.
Last month, Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su filed a petition to enforce the department's subpoenas for information from L & Y Food, Chen Lu and another business and individual in connection with an investigation of minimum wage, overtime, record keeping and child labor violations.
Those subpoenas followed the execution of search warrants at three poultry and meat processing and distribution sites in January where investigators interviewed workers and reviewed documents that showed workers were not paid the legally required overtime premium for the many overtime hours they worked.
"Alarmingly, respondents’ failure to comply with the subpoenas is happening as they impede the acting secretary’s investigation by intimidating a workforce of vulnerable, low-wage poultry and meat cutters and packers," the Labor Department said in its petition last month.
On the night the search warrants were executed, the companies began implementing changes to the terms of employment that made workers confused, angry, and fearful of losing their jobs, the Labor Department said.
Supervisors have been telling workers they put the “noose around their own necks” for talking to the Department of Labor and calling them slurs like dog and a derogatory term for indigenous, indio, for “causing all these problems,” according to the department.
In response to the petition to enforce the subpoenas filed in court, Patterson, the attorney for L & Y Food and Chen Lu, called the government's conduct "shocking and reprehensible."
"Under Acting Secretary of Labor Julie A. Su, the United States Department of Labor is systematically engaging in an organized extortion racket whereby honest businesses using lawful piece-pay practices are being targeted under extraordinary government coercion and intimidation," Patterson said. "The government is using the administrative process itself to functionally destroy the target business before it has ever had a day in court."
The companies in question, according to Patterson, haven't violated a single wage and hour law and are paying their workers bonuses, described as "piece-pay," based on their output, such as boxes of cut chicken. This, the attorney said, isn't illegal in California or the U.S. as long as it is more than minimum wage or overtime pay based on guaranteed minimum wage.
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