Blackstone Meatpacking Firm Known for Amputations and Deaths Fined $1.5 Million for Child Labor Violations

On Friday, the U.S. Department of Labor announced $1.5 million in fines for Wisconsin-based Packers Sanitation Services, Inc., or PSSI, for violations of child labor laws in eight states.

According to the Labor Department, PSSI employed at least 102 children from 13-17 years old in hazardous occupations and had them working overnight shifts at 13 meat processing facilities in eight states. Principal Deputy Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division Jessica Looman said in a statement:

“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. 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.”

As it turns out Packers Sanitation Services, Inc. or PSSI, was acquired by Blackstone Group in May 2018. PSSI wasn’t just an acquisition for Blackstone, it was also a partnership.

Blackstone or BlackRock – What’s the Difference?

Blackstone Group’s founder and CEO is Stephen A. Schwarzman, who is Jewish. Schwarzman is a close friend of BlackRock’s Larry Fink as well as a major financial contributor to former President Donald Trump.

Tax cuts and rollback of worker safety regulations, folks. Believe me,  you’re gonna love it.

While this company may sound distinct from BlackRock, it is, but in name only. Blackstone is inextricably linked to BlackRock and its founder and CEO, Larry Fink, also Jewish, because Fink got his start at Blackstone when Schwarzman left Lehman Bros to create Blackstone.

Fink eventually wanted to create his own Jewish instrument of financial debt slavery and political control, so he created BlackRock under the umbrella of Blackstone. Fink and Schwarzman allege that they created the confusion as an inside joke.

Trust me, Larry, no one is ever going to find out about our child exploitation scheme at PSSI.

It should also be noted that Blackstone and BlackRock are distinct entities and should not be further confused with Black Cube which is an Israeli intelligence firm that protects pedophiles like Harvey Weinstein.

Blackstone/PSSI Amputation Rate 5X Higher Than Manufacturing Industry

PSSI stood out as a particularly dangerous workplace with one of the highest numbers of serious injury reports compared to its relatively small number of employees. PSSI’s amputation rate was actually five times the rate for all manufacturing workers. To put this data into perspective, AT&T had around 280,000 employees in 2015 and 28 severe injuries reported; whereas PSSI had around 17,000 employees and 24 severe injuries reported. Additionally, analysts noted there could be more injuries than reported, “there is strong empirical evidence that these numbers could be an undercount.”

This is because PSSI uses a complicated system of job codes in its OSHA reporting so these injuries are significantly undercounted. The GAO indicated in their 2016 report that OSHA did not require plants to report contractors’ injuries, and the highly fragmented sanitation industry uses multiple job codes resulting in a lack of comprehensive data on cleaners’ injuries. Accordingly, since purchased by Blackstone, OSHA has only been able to conduct investigations of just four amputations and three fatalities of PSSI employees, including one decapitation.

Child Injuries

Blackstone/PSSI employed children who sustained injuries through the course of their illegal employment. According to the DOL report:

“Children were working with hazardous chemicals and cleaning meat processing equipment including  back saws, brisket saws and head splitters. Investigators learned at least three minors suffered injuries while working for PSSI.”

Since PSSI is a contractor for major publicly-traded companies, that also means that these firms may have knowingly engaged PSSI while these violations were going on.

PSSI Clients Investigated by DOL.

Trump Administration Increased Meatpacking Line Speeds While Rolling Back Injury Reporting Requirements

In 2019, the Trump administration rolled back safety regulations protecting workers including changes to underground mine safety inspections, offshore oil rigs, and line speeds in meat processing plants. Trump’s USDA lifted line speed requirements in hog processing plants, which was part of an effort to stripdown food safety inspections at the plants that are legally prevented from processing more than 1,100 hogs per hour. Agriculture department officials wrote that these increases and cuts food safety inspection staff would save taxpayers $8.7 million. How much did the change save/make Stephen A. Schwarzman?

Mark Lauritsen, director of meat packing and food processing for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union disagreed:

 “Common sense would tell you [that] you cannot increase line speeds at a fast, repetitive motion and not expect injuries to go up.”

Trump’s OSHA implemented a rule that relieved companies with 250 workers or more from a previous obligation to submit detailed injury and illness data. At the time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued that the proposal should go further, arguing that proprietary information such as hours worked and number of workers could be of value to competitors.

Both efforts stood at odds with Trump’s 2016 rhetoric in which he promised to create more protections for workers not less. In December 2016, President-elect Trump told workers at an Indianapolis air-conditioner plant:

“We need regulations for safety and the environment and things. We want to protect our workers.”

And yet when Trump took office in 2017, OSHA scrubbed a running list of worker deaths from its home page.

Caravans Are Just 21st-Century Jewish Slave Ships

According to a Bloomberg Business article about the sanitation industry “America’s Worst Graveyard Shift is Grinding Up Workers” using illegal labor benefits the meatpacking industry:

“The sanitation companies also assume the headaches and risk of staffing positions that only the destitute or desperate will take – very often undocumented immigrants. And they relieve the big producers, including household names such as Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride Corp., of responsibility for one of the most dangerous factory jobs in America.”

Many workers in the sanitation industry are illegal immigrants or hold a criminal record and are thus intentionally limited in their choice of workplace. Felons or those who have recently crossed the border illegally are less likely to challenge an employer that disregards safety issues or practices wage theft.

Illegal immigrants are also heavily indebted to microfinance lenders in Central and South America from whom they borrowed money to pay smugglers to come to the United States. These microfinance lenders are often subsidiaries of major banks that are actively participating in human-trafficking operations.

White truck with Jewish Star of David picking up slave cargo in 2018.

Jewish Debt-Financed Wealth Extraction

Leonard Green & Partners and AlpInvest Partners acquired PSSI in 2014 for $1 billion. Leonard I. Green, who was Jewish, was founder and CEO of Leonard Green & Partners. AlpInvest Partners invests heavily in Blackstone and is owned by the Carlyle Group, whose largest shareholder is Vanguard and 5th largest shareholder is BlackRock. In May 2018, The Blackstone Group bought PSSI for an undisclosed amount.

Blackstone and Leonard Green/AlpInvest extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from PSSI through transactions known as dividend recapitalizations. The purpose of these transactions is to add debt to Packers Sanitation’s balance sheet in order to collect dividends for themselves.

As such, Packers Sanitation paid Leonard Green and Alpinvest $340 million in debt-funded dividends in December 2017. Packers Sanitation paid a $135 million dividend in June 2019 and another $297 million dividend in November 2020 to the Blackstone Group.

The Blackstone Group has since loaded PSSI with $350 million in debt financing in November 2020, refinanced the company’s $1.1 billion in debt in February 2021, and added another $185 million in debt financing in August 2021 with some of that money earmarked for the purchase of Safe Foods. So, in effect, Stephen A. Schwarzman is building a billion-dollar food empire on illegal scab labor.

Le Happy Schwarzman.

According to the previously mentioned Bloomberg article, aggressive profit-taking and highly leveraged companies directly impact worker safety. In the article, David Michaels, who was head of OSHA during the Obama Administration, suggested that big debt is a potential red flag, asking rhetorically:

“Are they reducing the costs to pay the debt by pressuring workers to work faster?”

Yes. And now they’ve been caught subjecting children to these conditions.