Workers for a company recently found to have hired more than 100 children to clean slaughterhouses have repeatedly used stolen identities to get hired, according to former company managers, local police officials and individuals who told NBC News their identities were stolen.
A Texas woman reported having her ID used twice by workers for Packers Sanitation Services Inc., the second time years after she’d already complained to the company.
A former plant manager who did not want to be identified told NBC News that PSSI repeatedly hired people with obviously fake IDs. “There’s no one else who wants to do [the work],” he said.
PSSI employs 17,000 workers nationwide and sanitizes more than 400 slaughterhouses and other facilities during overnight shifts. Working conditions are hazardous and it is against the law for anyone under 18 to work there. The company reached an agreement with the Labor Department after investigators uncovered children as young as 13 working dangerous jobs in 13 locations in eight states. In February, the company paid a $1.5 million fine and agreed to three years of increased oversight.
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Company spokesperson Gina Swenson told NBC News that the company maintains rigorous controls over who is hired. “We have underscored repeatedly,” she said, “that the only way our extensive procedures can only be circumvented is through deliberate identity theft or fraud committed against our company — as occurred here.”
Swenson said the company’s compliance hiring process has successfully caught over 8,000 instances of identity verification issues since 2020, which she said clearly demonstrates a commitment to rooting out violations rather than tolerating them.” She said, “It also speaks to the significant and growing level of identity fraud private employers are being asked to combat. This directly contradicts the false claims made by these anonymous former local employees who are unjustifiably…
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