Controversial contractor to eliminate 175 positions at JBS’ Greeley plant

GREELEY — Packers Sanitation Services Inc., which federal investigators recently deemed to be a repeat offender of child-labor regulations, is laying off or relocating 175 contract sanitation employees who work at a JBS USA meat-processing facility on Eighth Avenue in Greeley.

“By way of background, PSSI is a privately held sanitation contractor that has sanitized (the) JBS USA facility since Jan. 1, 2000,” according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act notice filed Tuesday with the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. “Recently, we received unforeseen notice from JBS USA that it has decided to contract (with another company at) the Greeley, Colorado, location, meaning that PSSI will cease services at this plant effective April 18, 2024. This will result in the layoff or relocation of all PSSI employees at this plant.”

In a letter to employees that was attached to the WARN filing, PSSI said it will offer every Greeley employee an opportunity to transfer to another job site within “a reasonable commuting distance” from the JBS plant. 

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“Your separation is not a reflection on you or your work performance for this company,” PSSI, representatives of which did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday afternoon, wrote to employees. 

PSSI, headquartered in Kieler, Wisconsin, and owned by the Blackstone private-equity firm, is “the premier provider of food safety solutions in North America, offering comprehensive sanitation services, chemical products, pest management, and intervention solutions for food processing facilities,” according to its website. 

In the past, some of those “comprehensive sanitation services” have been provided to meatpackers by child laborers, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

PSSI paid $1.5 million in civil penalties last year after federal regulators “found the company employed at least 102 children — from 13 to 17 years of age — in hazardous occupations and had them working overnight shifts at 13 meat processing facilities in eight states,” the department said in a 2023 news release. 

Investigators determined that four underaged workers were employed by PSSI in the Greeley JBS facility. Dozens more children, some of whom were found to be “working with hazardous chemicals and cleaning meat processing equipment including back saws, brisket saws and head splitters,” worked for PSSI at JBS plants in Nebraska and Minnesota, the labor department said. JBS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday afternoon.

While PSSI told investigators that it had not knowingly hired minors, “the child labor violations in this case were systemic and reached across eight states, and clearly indicate a corporate-wide failure by Packers Sanitation Services at all levels,” principal deputy administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division Jessica Looman said in a 2023 statement. “These children should never have been employed in meat packing plants and this can only happen when employers do not take responsibility to prevent child labor violations from occurring in the first place.”

Ex-PSSI CEO Dan Taft retired last year in the wake of the child-labor scandal and was replaced by Tim Mulhere, according to an April 2023 NBC News report. 

The company, under Mulhere, pledged to be proactive in addressing the child-labor problem inside America’s slaughterhouses, but PSSI’s business appears to have taken a hit since the results of the federal investigation were made public.

JBS and other meatpacking heavyweights such as Tyson Food Inc. and Cargill Inc., are cutting ties with the sanitation-services provider at some or all of their processing facilities, according to a 2023 report in Fortune magazine. The decision not to renew PSSI’s contract at the Greeley plant could be evidence of JBS looking elsewhere for its sanitation services. Greeley-headquartered JBS does “not tolerate child labor or unsafe working conditions,” a company spokesperson told food-industry publication Food Drive last year.