Apparently children were out there stamping and pressing metal for Hyundai instead of going to school. This particular factory makes parts used in a third of all U.S. Hyundai sales.
The girl, who turns 14 this month, and her two brothers, aged 12 and 15, all worked at the plant earlier this year and weren’t going to school, according to people familiar with their employment. Their father, Pedro Tzi, confirmed these people’s account in an interview with Reuters.
Several of these minors, they said, have foregone schooling in order to work long shifts at the plant, a sprawling facility with a documented history of health and safety violations, including amputation hazards.
One former worker at SMART [the factory], an adult migrant who left for another auto industry job last year, said there were around 50 underage workers between the different plant shifts, adding that he knew some of them personally. Another former adult worker at SMART, a U.S. citizen who also left the plant last year, said she worked alongside about a dozen minors on her shift.
Another former employee, Tabatha Moultry, 39, worked on SMART’s assembly line for several years through 2019. Moultry said the plant had high turnover and increasingly relied on migrant workers to keep up with intense production demands. She said she remembered working with one migrant girl who “looked 11 or 12 years old.”
I’m pretty sure the Hyundai plant was built in Alabama based on a series of tax breaks and other financial options offered by the state’s economic development coalition. That’s part the reason Alabama also got a Mercedes plant.
I would hope those financial inducements are curtailed or completely removed, in addition to whatever criminal and civil liabilities the company will face, based on this.
Thanks, you saved me some typing. Exactly the verse I was going to write.
And I’ll add
“We’ll try to stay serene and calm”
“when Alabama gets the bomb.”
They’ll probably pay a small fine, and then promise to never do it again, without admitting any wrongdoing. Then they’ll immediately go back to using child labor.
I’m quite sure you don’t know what you’re talking about. I live in Alabama, and I’ve seen several businesses with violations not nearly as severe as this be shut down. Granted, they were much smaller businesses, but just because Alabama is a Southern state don’t assume we look the other way on situations like this.
I would suspect there were more than tax breaks on the bargaining table. The Alabama government probably said “Listen, child labor is technically illegal. But as part of our ongoing effort to cut government waste, we don’t hire any inspectors to actually go out and check on conditions in your factories. So if you were to employ children, we’d have no way of knowing that. And as a bonus, we have the same policy on toxic waste disposal.”
Well good, now we’ll have a chance to see if the law gets enforced on a large multi-billion dollar corporation the same way it gets enforced on a small business.
Yeah, there’s a reason states like Alabama make it easy to abuse their workers and there’s a reason that companies like Hyundai operate there. It’s the same reason companies operate in a lot of undeveloped parts of the world, you can do what you want to the workers.
