The Devastating Perdue Farms Scandal That Almost Everyone Forgot About

In 2023, The New York Times exposed an open secret in the U.S. poultry industry: Children, many of them migrants, were working overnight shifts inside Perdue Farms plants. The report detailed minors cleaning dangerous equipment and handling raw poultry, jobs that violate federal child labor laws. Perdue Farms agreed to pay $4 million in restitution, money directed to impacted children and organizations like Kids in Need of Defense, along with a $150,000 civil penalty. Perdue, one of the country's largest chicken processors, issued a statement saying it "strongly disagreed" that it should be held liable, insisting the settlement was about avoiding a drawn-out fight with the Department of Labor rather than an admission of responsibility.

For a brand most consumers associate with tidy bags of chicken nuggets, the revelations cast a long shadow. The story also landed at a moment when the industry was already under fire for repeated recalls, from Perdue's own frozen nuggets pulled from shelves to millions of pounds of chicken recalled across the industry. Food safety scandals tend to dominate headlines, but the child labor crisis revealed something deeper. A systemic failure in oversight and accountability.

If history is any indication, Perdue's child labor scandal will fade from view as quickly as the recalls that momentarily rattle consumer trust. In the past decade, headlines about contaminated foods have surfaced with unsettling regularity — from millions of pounds of frozen chicken pulled from shelves and Wegmans' cheese recalls over listeria concerns to news as strange as Walmart's frozen shrimp at risk of radioactive contamination. The country's largest beef recall, once a national talking point, now lives mostly in footnotes and archives. The collective memory for food industry crises tends to be short, a fact corporations often rely on.

The Perdue settlement illustrates how a company can pay fines, issue a carefully worded denial, and move on, while the underlying issues remain unresolved. Consumers may remember the tang of a chicken sandwich far more vividly than a federal inquiry. But whether it's hidden child labor or another food safety recall, the stakes go beyond dinner. The real scandal isn't just the violation itself, but how quickly we're asked to forget.