By Katie Johnston Globe Staff,Updated September 24, 2024, 12:04 p.m.
Three former seafood processing workers in Fall River filed a federal lawsuit in US District Court Tuesday.JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images
Three former seafood processing workers filed a federal lawsuit Tuesdayaccusing a Fall River plantof illegally employing them as 15-year-olds and forcing them to work in dangerous, discriminatory conditions.
The plaintiffs, all from Guatemala, were employed between July 2022 and January 2023 at Raw Seafoods, where they worked long hours cutting and sorting seafood, sometimes until 2 in the morning, according to the complaint filed in US District Court of Massachusetts. They suffered from a lack of sleep that kept them from attending school,the lawsuit notes, and one of the workers wasn’t allowed to take time off work to get a COVID vaccine required to enroll in school. The teenagers were also subject to racist insults, the filing states, and intimidated by a supervisor who told them they wouldn’t be able to get another job if they left, compelling them to stay on so they could continue sending money to their families.
“I remember being so tired and afraid of saying anything,” one of the workers, identified as S.S., said in a statement. “I had rashes all over my body all the time because of the work with the cleaning chemicals. In school, I couldn’t write the next day because my hands were freezer-burned from work. They often shook, so I couldn’t hold a pencil.”
The plaintiffs are identified only by their initials — M.R., Y.O., and S.S. — and were not available for interviews, according tolaw student interns at the Yale Law School’s Worker and Immigrant Rights Advocacy Clinic, who are helping represent them under faculty supervision, along with the Boston nonprofit legal firm Justice at Work.
Raw Seafoods, a family owned company founded in 1998, according to its website, said in a statement that it couldn’t address the charges because the workers and their supervisor aren’t named in the lawsuit. The company said it found out several months ago that some employees had been hired after submitting fraudulent documents misrepresenting their ages and legal names, but by that time, they no longer worked there.
“As a result, Raw Seafoods took steps to ensure that all of our future hires are in compliance with relevant employment laws and regulations,” the company said.
Raw Seafoods violated multiple federal and state laws, according to the complaint, as well as international human rights standards. And it isn’t alone, the workers’ attorneys noted.
“This is a systemic issue, and unfortunately we’ve seen that a lot of immigrant children face really dangerous working conditions,” said Chisato Kimura, part of the Yale legal team representing the workers.
Adrian Ventura, executive director of the Centro Comunitario de Trabajadores workers’ center in New Bedford, which worked with the teens employed by Raw Seafoods, has said that migrant children working in seafood processing plants is an “open secret”: the staffing agencies that employ them know they’re underage, he said, and the factories do, too.
In Massachusetts, children under 18 aren’t allowed to work in meat-processing plants or other potentially hazardous roles, and can’t work past 10 p.m. on school nights.
The Department of Labor has been cracking down on child labor violations in recent years, following a 2023 New York Times investigation that revealed how widespread the problem has become since the pandemic and a series of stories by The Public’s Radio that uncovered dozens of migrant children working in New Bedford seafood processing plants. The Labor Department launched a child labor investigation last year at several seafood processing plants around New Bedford.
Nationwide, nearly 5,800 minors were employed illegally in fiscal year 2023, according to the Department of Labor, up from less than 1,400 in 2013.
Many underage workers come to the United States alone to help support their families, which makes them less likely to report unpaid wages or unsafe conditions, advocates note. More than 2,000 unaccompanied minors arrived in Massachusetts in fiscal year 2024, according to the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement. The numbers of young migrants arriving in the state alone increased sharply in 2021, mirroring a nationwide spike, and have fallen slightly in the past two years. More than 40 percent of young migrants arriving alone in the United States are from Guatemala — nearly one-third of them under the age of 15.
Two of the former employees suing Raw Seafoods were here without their parents, according to the lawsuit, and all three were working to help support their families in Guatemala.
Katie Johnston can be reached at katie.johnston@globe.com. Follow her @ktkjohnston.
