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.
$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.
Wow!
300k is so cheap to commit child labor! What an “affordable fee” to pay children like $5/hr and put them in dangerous situations. Best of all, they don’t know any better and you just lie to them!
Yay thank you America!!!
Great suggestions. Worker ownership would fix a LOT of things in this country.
Don’t need to nationalize it. Turn it into a cooperative instead. Every worker owns shares within the company. Profits are shared.
That’s the “transition to worker ownership” part. IANAL but I think that the government taking it over might be a necessary intermediate step if you’re compelling transition to a co-op.
Sooo … the solution to children workers is … communism?
I don’t think you know what the words “nationalize” or “communism” mean.
That’s capitalism. The business is given to its workers, not the state
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.
Or owner bankrupts tuff torq, gives himself a termination bonus, then makes a new LLC called Tough Tork
Could you explain what exactly “revenue per employee ratio” means? My thought would be that this is the value the average employee creates for the company minus the cost of employment per year, is that correct?
Revenue is all the money the company makes, before any costs
Revenue per employee is that amount divided by the number of employee
The after costs amount would be profit per employee
Whoever signed off on hiring literal children should be held accountable. Actually holding these people to accountability is the only way this is getting solved
You’d think since companies are people they’d be thrown in jail or something.
They would but companies usually are considered rich people so they get the same treatment.
Corporations are people until it comes to them committing serious felonies.
At that point they’re “too big to fail”
Cost of doing business
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?
Listen, we can’t all live in Finland, mate. This is just rubbing it in. And you over there with your tall treetops and loffy mountains.
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.
Just referring to an old song. Cheers for the Finn-Facts, though! I think I remember reading about this mountain business somewhere.
Lack of mountain business*
Heh.
Imagine how insanely productive kids must be at repetitive tasks. And it’s not like they have been exposed to the labour struggles, they’ll have to figure it out all of that on their own.
Companies found using child labor should have their business license revoked and forced to liquidate.
And the CEO / Board members jailed or sent to a forced labour camp. Either way I would be happy
Just thinking about some shitstain CEOs having to work an actual job instead of tea parties and coke and hookers, makes my day so much brighter. Thank you.
No prob, in these dark days we need some joy, even if it’s not from reality
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.
“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.
Are you from Tennessee? 'Cause you’re the only ten-year-old I see working on this assembly line.
“Pott, the general counsel for Tuff Torq’s majority owner, said the child workers were temporary and were not hired directly by Tuff Torq. He said they used fake names and false credentials to obtain jobs through a temporary staffing agency, and said Tuff Torq is ‘transitioning’ away from doing business with the staffing company.” They’re just passing the blame now that they got caught; otherwise, I’m sure they’d continue to turn a blind eye.
Yeah, they didn’t stop and go… “The staffing agency says you’re 18, I don’t buy it. Where’s your ID?”
They can’t attend school as often if they work, so an additional benefit in some circles.
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
John Deere really continuing to speedrun the Most Hated Company in America challenge I see
Well, they are 2 positions removed here… Staffing company illegally supplied the kids to a 3rd party supplier of John Deere.
It would be like, I dunno, someone hiring illegal employees for a glass company selling bottles to Coca Cola.
Place I was at just had multiple people working on the same name. X was the official employee and X officially works 80 hours a week. X is two people one of which doesn’t have papers.
That doesn’t sound tax effective for the person with papers
Let’s see what happens when Reps close the border… LMAO…
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?
Do you mean you don’t think it’s a problem at all? Or you’re angry that it’s only just become an issue?
Employing illegal underage migrant workers is definitely a problem and needs to be addressed.
And I’m not angry not sure why you interpreted my comment in that capacity.
I simply posed a question why employing teenagers has suddenly become an issue. Apparently people found my question offensive and assumed a position that I don’t hold.
My question wasn’t directly commenting on the article cited in this post but was in general since I have seen multiple posts indicating that more companies are employing more teenage workers not necessarily illegal migrant workers.
My question is why is this suddenly a problem since employing teenagers has been something that has been going on in this country since its conception.
Sure ok. There’s lots of things society used to tolerate but no longer does.
Times change. I was running a forklift at 14 and working construction at 16. Society has decided that it isn’t the way it wants things to happen anymore.
I imagine you are reading more stories because the economic downturn has pushed more families to do this.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that teenagers have always been working this isn’t a new phenomenon that has just now started to happen regardless of how many teenagers are working even if that number has increased.
I’ve seen some legislation in recent years where they dropped the minimum wage to work down which I don’t agree with but other than that where’s the problem here that’s what I’m asking?
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that teenagers have always been working this isn’t a new phenomeno
“People have always kept slaves, so there’s nothing wrong with slavery.” The sentiment of people like you a couple of hundred years ago.
Ever heard of a false equivalency? Because your above statement is a text book definition.
Also go fuck yourself for inferring that I somehow support slavery and for comparing legally employing teenagers and compensating them for their labor to buying, selling and torturing human beings and making them work for free.
(I understand that the company in the post was illegally employing underage migrants. I’m making a general statement concerning the entire teenage work force in American.)
There’s nothing wrong with employing teens within a set of standards and reason.
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?
