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The article gives hardly any information. Clearly what they did was wrong, but child slave labor isn't what I would label this without further information. The only minor discussed in the article was a 16 year old from another event that gave them reason to ban people under 18 from working in meat packing plants saying they are more dangerous.
The local who did comment said that kids worked second shift so they could work around their school schedules. Implying the kids are going to school, which more than likely rules out the slave part.
The company should get hit HARD for breaking labor laws and putting minors at risk of injuries. Had those same minors been working down the street at the movie theater or such, it may have been completely legal.
The raid happened at 9pm, and labor laws for minors limit working hours till 11pm (in Ohio)
Anybody not being paid a living wage is functionally a slave and the reason this company was using immigrant children is because they could grossly underpay them and pocket the difference.
If it were an option for meat production, they would have just taken the Nestlé approach and used child slaves that were geographically distant enough to be swept under the rug.
But regardless, the company almost certainly won't be "hit hard". They'll be given a slap on the wrist for getting caught and will continue doing deeply fucked things in a deeply fucked industry.
If by some miracle the people responsible are actually punished, there's still a thousand other companies racing to the bottom because that's how the system is rigged.
Any company paying suppliers and workers fairly will fold to any competition that doesn't because few people are paid enough to be able to afford products from people who are paid enough.
It's a problem far, far deeper than children working at a single factory and I'm not even slightly surprised that a company that feeds live animals into blenders is at the bottom of that hole, furiously digging.
Fixed fines only exist to punish the poor. The factory just see fines as being a cost of business.
Even better, you can just enter them right into spreadsheets so you know exactly how profitable it will be to steal wages from children, even if you get caught.
Whenever you have people working in a foreign country in a way that potentially violates immigration or labor law, it's safe to assume that there is some coercion going on. Then you throw in the fact that it's children, and you're guaranteed that coercion is happening. In my mind, that's the question. What choice did the kids have? Not much of one.
Bear in mind that the company could have hired locals and it could have hired adults, which would have put it on the right side of the law and would have avoided language issues. But the company did what it did, and what you see in situations like this all around the world is that it's almost always because they can save money by treating their employees worse, overworking them, underpaying them, ignoring labor law, and knowing that the employees won't have any recourse when they're abused.