RANEY ARONSON-RATH: In recent years, an unprecedented number of unaccompanied minors have arrived at the U. S. border. A recent investigation reveals how some of these minors end up working underage in unsafe jobs.
MALE VOICE: I just cut my hands up a lot.
MALE VOICE 2: It’s very, very hard.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Journalists Nadine Sebai and Nina Sparling are reporters with The Public’s Radio, a station serving Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts. Together with FRONTLINE, they spent two years investigating child labor in the local seafood industry. They learned that the federal government had begun investigating the labor practices of at least three local companies.
NADINE SEBAI: Nathanael, who is now 15, said that on some days he worked from 6 in the morning to 6 at night.
They spoke with migrant teens working underage, and they uncovered flaws in the systems that government agencies rely on to protect them from child labor. I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, editor in chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, and this is the FRONTLINE Dispatch.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Nadine and Nina, thank you so much for joining me on the Dispatch.
NINA SPARLING: Thanks for having us.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yeah. So, you spent two years investigating potential child labor violations in the seafood processing industry here in New England. But before we go over what you found, tell us how this story came to your attention.
NADINE SEBAI: So it was late in 2019. At the time, I was a South Coast Bureau reporter covering southeastern Massachusetts in the area. And I was trying to learn a little bit more about the immigrant community — the Central American community in New Bedford— where our story was predominantly based. And I called a source who had deep communications with the migrant community and kind of in passing, she was like, ‘Oh, you know, and these teens, they are working in the fish houses and they’re falling asleep in class’ and it’s just a really big problem. And, Nina and I were able to go into one of the high schools and we spoke to so many kids there who said that they worked at seafood processing facilities.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Yeah. So, when you were learning about this, I mean, you’re starting to hear stories. How did you actually encourage the kids to go and talk to you on the record?
NADINE SEBAI: So, one of the things that we did at the very outset is we tried to explain that we would do whatever we could to protect the identity of the kid that we were speaking to, and, um, if they were under 18, we got permission from their sponsors or from their parents to be able to speak with them. And what we really tried to emphasize was the fact that we wanted to show the migrant teen experience. We’ve all, we’ve all seen, you know, the waves of kids migrating to the border, unaccompanied minors coming to the border, but they actually end up somewhere in the U.S. And they’re living with families, and they have things that happen afterwards, and they usually come with debt and with bills to pay, and they have to go to school. And so what we told the kids was we want to show that experience. We want to tell people about that life in this particular area.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Nina, tell me, what were your findings? How many kids? What were the overall findings that you and Nadine were able to explore and investigate?
NINA SPARLING: Yeah, so, we talked to more than two dozen migrant teens who told us that they worked in seafood processing plants in New Bedford at some point over the last six years. And many of those teens got their jobs through staffing agencies. Many of them described to us a situation where they felt like they had to work to support themselves, to support their families, to pay off immigration debts. Many also told us they got fake IDs to get those jobs, um, and, and that’s sort of what, what the situation was on the ground. And then I spent a lot of time looking at the enforcement agencies and through conversations with experts and through public records, we really identified a pattern where enforcement agencies, by and large, rely on complaints, um, to find investigations and also to prove violations. And that’s difficult in this context, as one, um, former regulator said it to me, the migrant teens working with fake IDs aren’t going to show up in a spreadsheet somewhere. So it takes a lot of resources and a lot of work to get people to talk to you about what’s going on with their jobs.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. So, you spoke to Nathanael and Joel, two young men who are cousins who crossed the border together as young teens. Tell us about them and how they figure into your story.
NADINE SEBAI: Nathanael and Joel are both from Mazatenango, Guatemala. And, um, they… essentially were a very prime example of what we had seen over the last two years. Teens, um, working for long hours. They hadn’t entered school yet, but they were working extremely long hours at a seafood processing plant, Atlantic Red Crab and also other facilities in Rhode Island. As I mentioned, both of the kids are from Guatemala and, um, both were escaping gang violence. Um, they, they were getting pressure to sell drugs. And of course, if you don’t, there are consequences to that. Joel ended up moving to Tijuana, Mexico, a few years before Nathanael joined him to cross the border. But Nathanael and Joel ended up in Tijuana and they decided to cross the border through the Pacific Ocean, like at a beach in Tijuana. Um, and the way that they crossed was incredible. It was at night, high tide. They said the water was freezing. Joel didn’t know how to swim and Nathanael was moving ahead of him, and Joel started drowning. But eventually he was able to find his way out. But he had told us that he felt like that was the end of his life. Like he thought he was going to die. They finally made their way out and ran to the border before officials could stop them.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Hmm. That’s an unbelievable story and you’ve heard so many of those types of stories, right?
NADINE SEBAI: Oh, of course.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: When they make it, what kind of pressures are they under?
NADINE SEBAI: When they did arrive, their sponsor, Nathanael’s sister, um, took them in and they lived with Nathanael’s sister, her two little kids, her husband and another relative. And essentially when they came, it takes some time to get a kid enrolled in school because you need so much documentation to be able to, you know, get into the school year. And the kids wanted to help the family, and wanted to support themselves. They didn’t want their sister to have to kind of pay for them all throughout the way. It was already natural for Joel, for example, to get a job. He had been working for years as a teenager before he even made it to the United States. And so, finding a job was their opportunity at that time.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Okay, so, they need work, right? And, and we understand that, but tell me how they start to work at the seafood plant.
NADINE SEBAI: Okay. So the process of how Nathanael and Joel got their jobs is extremely similar to many of the other kids that we spoke to. Usually what happens is that a family member connected Nathanael and Joel to a staffing agency. In this case, it was Workforce Unlimited, based in Rhode Island. And they inquired about availability for a job. They were given the job. They didn’t fill out an application. They didn’t provide their legal identity paperwork, like before they were able to enter the seafood processing plant. Within the next day or two, a van came, picked them up before dawn, early in the morning. It’s a 40 minute drive about to New Bedford, to Atlantic Red Crab, and um, as Joel mentioned, you know, they told them, this is your job, and this is what you’re going to be doing.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Okay, so, let’s talk about these companies, these intermediary companies. What did you all find? Nina, do you want to take this?
NINA SPARLING: Yeah. As Nadine said, many of the kids that we talked to told us that they got their jobs through staffing agencies. And so what that means is that they went to an agency whose sole function is to hire and screen workers and then send those workers to jobs at other companies. And we found some contracts between staffing agencies and seafood companies that sort of let us look at the legal side of it a little bit. And the staffing agencies are taking on the responsibility of things like making sure the papers are real papers, making sure that the kids are of legal age to work, covering workers comp insurance and that kind of thing. So they’re really doing all that kind of legal nitty gritty stuff. And we talked to the owner of Atlantic Red Crab, and the chief operating officer, and they explained that for them, um, it’s both like a streamlining process. It makes it easier to hire workers when you’re not in the process, when you don’t have to do all of that work. Um, it also lets them – the seafood industry is a really seasonal industry. So it’s not the same amount of work every season of the year, every week of the year, every day of the year. Um, so it gives – the companies use staffing agencies for labor market reasons, really, at the end of the day.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So when you guys looked at this holistically speaking, you’re looking at this ecosystem… you’re looking at the teenagers who’ve traveled here, the need for work, the debt that they have, um, where did you see the accountability points when you’re doing your reporting?
NINA SPARLING: What we found in our reporting is that there’s really, there’s like a patchwork of agencies, um, who are responsible along different pieces of, of the journey, um, that a kid makes from Guatemala across the border and in our case into, into New Bedford or into Southern New England. The Office of Refugee Resettlement is responsible for vetting the sponsors that kids go to live with, um, so the families who take them in. And what we found is that in many cases, kids were being released to families who really didn’t have the means to support them. And so then once migrant teens are here, this responsibility kind of shifts to labor law enforcement agencies who are responsible for making sure that the people who work in companies in seafood processing plants are allowed to do that work and aren’t put in harm’s way by doing that work. And that those enforcement efforts are complicated um, because the labor law enforcement agencies largely rely on complaints to identify violations and to start investigations. And these workers, many workers are really, really quite unlikely to complain about conditions on the job. Um, and then we found there’s also a role for state labor law enforcement agencies, in this case, the attorney general’s office in Massachusetts. So it’s, it’s really split.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Speaking of the plants, talk me through what it’s like when you go into a plant like this and what is the work like?
NADINE SEBAI: Yeah, so, we ended up being able to go to Atlantic Red Crab, which is where Nathanael and Joel said that they worked. It smells like fish.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right. Understandable.
NADINE SEBAI: The air is very moist. It’s very moist. Um, just so much moisture in the air. There is unbelievable amount of product. Um, the day that we went on the tour, they had collected, um, 20, 000 pounds of crab, and that was a low number, but 20, 000 pounds when you see it in real life is just insane. And that crab has to go somewhere. Some of it like goes out and is like sold whole, but a lot of it is killed, cleaned, and processed. And that’s where the workers come in. And that’s where Nathanael and Joel said they worked. They said that they cleaned crab, killed crab, and weighed crab as well in the facility where we visited.
NINA SPARLING: And just one quick detail about that facility that it is so loud. It’s so loud when you walk in. It’s just, it’s the kind of like persistent sound of big machines running and Nadine can talk about some of the machines.
NADINE SEBAI: Yeah, definitely. And this is one of the complaints that Nathanael had. There’s this machine. It’s like really complex to like describe. They have these like two wire wheel looking bristles on like left and right side and then there’s like a centerpiece and essentially a worker will take a crab and then like shove the crab inside this like metal bar to like kill it and then rip the legs off clean the legs with these bristles that are moving like super quickly and that’s what’s kind of causing that incessant sound. Um, and then throw those crabs down to shoot and then move them for weighing and processing and all that other stuff. Um, and it was this sound that Nathanael said drove him absolutely mad, and I, I mean, I understand that because it was extremely loud.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So kids who are 16 in Massachusetts and Rhode Island can work, right? But there’s like a certain type of work they can do or not. Working in a plant like this… describe the dangers of it and the challenges of being a teenage worker in that environment and what it’s like.
NADINE SEBAI: So, before we even started this investigation into teen workers, I had been reporting on migrant adults working in seafood processing facilities in New Bedford. And this was during COVID. And I was trying to understand how COVID was impacting them. And in talking to adults, I started to recognize all of the dangers from their point of view of working in these types of facilities. Um, one thing is like ergonomic issues. You’re doing the same act over and over and over again. You’re standing for hours on end. Many people are standing in freezers, um, for long amounts of time. There’s sharp equipment. There’s power driven machinery. Um, many people have lost fingers, have their hands go really numb from working with frozen seafood. It’s just a really, it’s just a very hard place for adults to work in. And so it became this point where we were trying to understand, okay, well we know about child labor laws, and they’re in place to protect kids from those sorts of things, right? So, how, how is this happening?
NINA SPARLING: Yeah. And I, I think just one more thing on that one. I remember that Nadine had a conversation pretty early on with a woman who used to work in occupational health and safety, um, who said that any work that’s dangerous for an adult is presumptively dangerous for a child as well. Um, and so we know from, uh, records from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, also from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that work in a seafood processing plant, the rate of injuries and illnesses on the job is much higher than the national average. We found records that showed people have lost fingertips, broken bones, suffered chemical burns, all in plants in New Bedford. And OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, has fined several New Bedford processors, um, for violations in, in recent years, and that includes two adults who have actually died on the job, um, since 2014. So it’s just, just to give some context for what, what the risks really are of doing this work.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: And the teens that you talked to, did any of them sustain injuries themselves?
NADINE SEBAI: So, the teens we spoke to had numerous complaints. One were the injuries suffer from repetitive work. So extreme shoulder pain, extreme wrist pain, numbness in their hands, respiratory issues, um, getting fish bones stuck even through their gloves into their fingers and like pricking them. Um, we had one kid, um, that we met who suffered a severe chemical burn on his wrist. He was cleaning the processing plant at the end of the day and it slipped through his glove and the chemicals got all over him. Um, so, it’s not the safest of places.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Right, right.
NINA SPARLING: And I would say one thing about that that is also true of other, um, it’s also an issue that that sort of came up in the context of child labor laws is that the penalties that companies pay when injuries do happen, um, experts have told us that they’re sort of insufficiently low. Um, so for the two deaths that happened in, in New Bedford. They both happened at the same company and that company paid about $36,000 in penalties for both incidents and in the context of, of, you know, what are pretty significantly sized companies. And that’s also an issue that has come up around the fines for child labor law violations as well.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Just being very low?
NINA SPARLING: Yeah, and I think part of the idea of a fine is there’s a sort of threat of being fined just would act as a deterrent Um, and I think one expert described the fines for child labor violations as a cost of doing business.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: So, when you actually were able to speak with the Atlantic Red Crab Company, what did they say about the presence of underage workers at their facilities?
NINA SPARLING: So, one of the things that we found out towards the end of our investigation was that the Department of Labor, the U. S. Federal Department of Labor had opened investigations into two seafood processing plants and one staffing agency in New Bedford for possible violations of anti-retaliation, overtime, and child labor laws, and Atlantic Red Crab was one of those companies. Um, and so we reached out to them once we found that out. And,when we spoke to the owner of the company and, and um, some sort of C suite, if you will, what they had to say is that the workers in their plants come to them through staffing agencies. So, in their mind, it was the staffing agency’s responsibility to make sure that the workers that were being sent to Atlantic Red Crab were of age and of legal immigration status and all of those, all of those things. The way that the chief operating officer of the company put it to us is, she said, if I hire a plumber, I expect them to do their job well and that’s it. Uh, and so that was sort of her, the way that she understood it. They did tell us, um, Atlantic Red Crab told us that Department of Labor investigators had come to their facility in, um, over the summer and removed one teenage worker. When we told them what Nathanael and Joel had told us about their work at the plant, they said they weren’t aware of it, um, and didn’t support child labor. It’s not an objective of theirs by any means. Um, and I think that hearing that from Atlantic Red Crab, that they, understand the responsibility to be in the hands of the staffing agency was really interesting because that’s something I talked to a lot of experts about exactly that question. Um, the technical term is joint employment. But really, the question is when your workers are hired through a staffing agency, who is responsible at the end of the day for, for any issues? And it’s a really contested question. Um, there, there is though an understanding from many federal agencies that, that what’s called the host employer, does have responsibility and accountability, uh, when violations are uncovered, when issues do come up,
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: It’s really good that you were able to speak directly with them. Tell me about the staffing agency’s response, Workforce Unlimited. What do they say about underage workers in these jobs and what is their accountability in this?
NADINE SEBAI: So, we made numerous phone calls, emails, text messages. We left so many voicemails. We visited the Workforce Unlimited office, uh, numerous times to try and get anything from their side of the story about allegations posed against them, um, and about not only Nathanael and Joel, but other allegations that the DOL posed, um, over time and anti retaliation claims. And we heard nothing from them.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Were you able to talk to any staffing agencies at all? I know that this is something that you really were investigating and looking into.
NADINE SEBAI: Yeah, we spoke to one temp agency, Superior Temps, which happens to be another temp agency that Atlantic Red Crab uses to hire workers. Um, and essentially what they said was that they don’t hire kids. And they are very vigilant about the documents that they review and that this is not a problem on their end. They did mention that the DOL did come to their company and request to see records and that according to Superior Temps, um, everything came out clean. Now we had our own records of teenagers who said they worked at seafood processing facilities through Superior Temps. And we verified that information through pay stubs, their birth certificates and their fake I. D. S. So that’s where we kind of left it there. We also spoke to another temp agency worker. Um, we didn’t name where that worker worked, um, but that person provided us information about how kind of the fake ID process in terms of getting hired works within their temp agency.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: You both spent two years on this. What has happened since?
NINA SPARLING: So we’ve seen, even as we were kind of wrapping up a reporting, some things have started to shift. Um, one of the issues we identified was, um, it takes kids a long time to get work permits. And there’s been a lot of public pressure and increase in public pressure to speed up that process for kids also for adult migrants. Um, so that’s in motion. And more recently, we’ve seen some legislation that’s been introduced at the federal level to try to address some of the problems that we identified, and our local lawmakers in Rhode Island have said that our reporting contributed to their support for that legislation. And so those bills are looking to increase the penalties when companies are found to be in violation of child labor laws. They are also are sort of to make it easier for law enforcement agencies to hold both companies and their subcontractors accountable. We don’t know what’s going to happen to that legislation at this point. It’s too early to say, um, but that’s, that’s where things stand.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Great, Nadine and Nina, thank you so much for joining me on the Dispatch and for your incredible work over the last couple of years.
NADINE SEBAI: Thanks so much.
NINA SPARLING: Thanks, Raney.
RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Thanks again to Nadine Sabai and Nina Sparling from The Public’s Radio. You can read and listen to their stories, Underage and Underprotected, in English and Spanish on Frontline. org. Their work was supported by Frontline’s Local Journalism Initiative.
