The New York Times’ Julia Preston reports on the Iowa Labor Commission’s finding that 57 underage workers were employed at Agriprocessors, a meatpacking plant in tiny Postville, Iowa. The investigation comes after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in May, which detained 389 undocumented immigrants working at the plant. That raid had discovered 24 under-age workers, some as young as 13, working as many as 17 hours a day.

Immigration reform critics have denounced the mega-raid for targeting vulnerable, mostly Guatemalan immigrants instead of their employers. But the labor commission’s finding moves the spotlight to another federal agency: the Dept. of Labor.

Regardless of the politics de jour of immigration law enforcement, shouldn’t Labor be making sure meatpacking plants are safer than those described in The Jungle? It shouldn’t take the Iowa labor commission to lay out these postmortem findings. Federal inspectors need to be on the scene.-MB

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