Marksbury Farm is a small company headquartered in Lancaster, Kentucky. Our operations include selling meat from pasture-based production systems that have authentic, transparent, and local/regional supply chains. We also provide processing services for other customers which we conduct in our processing facility. Our team is comprised of about 70 employees. Following are details and context for the February 14 Department of Labor press release about Marksbury Farms.
While we will not reveal any identifying information for any of the minors at issue in the Department of Labor findings, their background and how they came to be in our employment should be noted. Four of the minors were 17 and the other three of the minors (who were 15, 15, and 16) came to Marksbury with their legal guardian. In two cases, their guardian was an employee and worked together on the same floor in proximity to the minors. The third was a homeschooled individual whose family is a friend of the Marksbury owners, who lived on a farm and was very passionate about farming and meat processing. This individual’s guardian brought him or her to work and viewed it as an opportunity for furthering education and gaining experience.
Out of the four 17-year-olds, three were hired only for summer jobs. The fourth minor was offered a job when he or she filled out an application at a career day in the local high school.
Hours Violations
Two of the three minors whose guardian was involved were also the only ones of the seven to be cited for working hours violations. The working hours rules are explicitly written with respect to school and the school calendar, and thus while we did not intentionally commit any hours violations, the fact of one of them being homeschooled and his or her educators/guardians facilitating the work experience resulted in less precise oversight concerning the rules for which hours could be worked. The second minor having a working hours violation worked alongside his or her guardian. This resulted in violations by virtue of him or her frequently traveling from work with their guardian. In both cases, the violations resulted from the unique circumstances involved, and we are committed to increased observation and oversight over such situations, so further violations do not occur.
Hazardous Occupation Order 10
The common violation for all seven of the minors was Hazardous Occupation Order 10 and with the exception of the two described above, this is the only violation. This resulted from an internal misunderstanding of what is meant by ‘Hazardous Occupations.’ Many of our management team have experience in restaurant kitchens in which similar processes and equipment to ours are used, and in which minors frequently work. The rule there is that minors must not be engaged in a hazardous task, even if they are employed in the kitchen or food prep areas with hazardous equipment or coolers. Our total processing team has fewer workers and our processing business has lower revenues than many food service locations similar to ones in which we have had experience.
Using this prior experience to inform our use of under-18 employees was not, as it turned out, a good guide. Despite the fact that over ninety percent of meat processing is conducted by companies having tens of thousands of employees in facilities measuring millions of square feet the labor category of “meat processing” makes no distinction for scale or throughput. By being in this category ALL tasks taking place in processing areas are considered hazardous work and thus dis-allowed for minors. This is true even to the extent that it was cited as a violation when one of these employees was squeegeeing the floor while the rest of the team was on break and no other work was taking place at the time.
All of the underaged former-team members were engaged in the following tasks: meat packaging, quality assurance, using a squeegee, and general picking up of trash around the premises, and trimming meat. They did not use powered saws, hydraulic equipment, or any of the other heavy industrial equipment that we would consider hazardous.
Ultimately the question of whether any of the individual tasks were ‘hazardous’ or not is moot as according to the laws, simply being in a cooler, a freezer, or in the same room as any ‘hazardous’ activity is, itself, a hazardous activity. Therefore every production employee under the age of 18 became a violation of this Hazardous Occupation Order 10 by walking into the facility on the clock. We simply didn’t properly understand the labor laws and, of course, we should have.
Moving forward and Corrective Actions
When the Department of Labor investigators came on-site we offered full access to all HR documents and all employees as we strongly believe in transparency. We certainly did not knowingly or willfully allow minors to work illegal numbers of hours or to participate in what we thought was a hazardous work environment or prohibited activities and so expected no violations and will take all necessary actions to ensure such violations do not occur again.
I have hesitations as to whether the following will be useful or not in setting minds at ease, but erring on the side of transparency, I can say that none of these individuals did any task that my own children and other children of owners had not done before — and at a younger age. Obviously, with our new understanding of child labor law, we will NOT be inviting our children to work with us in the future, but this fact might help illustrate that within the broad categories of what the Department of Labour considers hazardous are many tasks that reasonable and loving guardians consider age-appropriate work.
We are a small company that grew out of a small farming operation that slaughtered chickens on-farm. From time to time as we have grown, there have been experiences that very clearly prompt us to elevate our thinking and our self-perception. These lessons have long been learned and continue to present opportunities for education when it comes to professionalism around food-safety and product performance. Our attitudes around our workforce were proved by the DOL findings to be under-informed, certainly, and probably provincial as well.
Our specific response was to dismiss all minors from hazardous employment and undertake a deeper understanding of child labor laws from both human resources and our production management personnel. We do not have any production positions wholly free of what the DOL considers hazardous environments and therefore we no longer hire any production employees under the age of 18.