Nashville, May 9 (RHC)-- A cleaning company based in the U.S. state of Tennessee has been fined over $649,000 after a U.S. Labor Department investigation found it was employing at least two dozen children, some as young as 13 years old, to clean slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants. 

Fayette Janitorial Service was found to have hired children to work overnight cleaning shifts, at times using corrosive materials to clean “dangerous kill floor equipment” at facilities in Sioux City, Iowa, and Accomac, Virginia. 

Earlier this week, New York Times reporter Hannah Dreier won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing how thousands of migrant children, most of them from Mexico and Central America, risk their lives working at meatpacking plants and factories.