60 Minutes investigates how children as young as 13 could have been hired by PSSI, a Wall Street-owned company with a billion dollars in annual revenue, to sanitize dangerous equipment in slaughterhouses in several states. The heartbreaking issue came to light when teachers in Grand Island, Nebraska, noticed acid burns on a student. The Department of Labor then conducted an investigation, led by 17-year investigator Shannon Rebolledo, which brought upon a national audit of PSSI. That's when they learned employing minors was a standard operating procedure. PSSI eventually settled with the government and paid the paltry fine of $1.5 million. (Sensitive readers may want to skip this video.)
Rebolledo shares how PSSI was able to hire children to begin with:
The jobs are grim and dangerous–and so they are often filled by immigrants who are desperate for work. Some immigrants use false papers to routinely beat the federal identification system that is known as E-Verify. Employers have known for nearly 30 years that E-Verify is useless if the applicant has bought, borrowed or stolen an actual ID –which is common. and in the case of the children, E-Verify was especially dubious.
Shannon Rebolledo: These weren't close calls. In some cases, they were 13-year-olds working and they were identified by PSSI as being in their 30s. It's just not possible.
In its statement when the suit was filed, PSSI said, in addition to E-Verify, it has "industry-leading, best-in-class procedures…" including "extensive training, document verification, biometrics and multiple layers of audits."
Shannon Rebolledo: The system that they use automatically flags whether or not someone has certified that they are 18 or not. And what we found in our review was that it was regularly ignored if someone didn't certify that they were 18.
