NYT - (archived: https://archive.ph/cKRTn ) Death on the Night Shift at Frozen Pizza Factories in Chicago

Undocumented workers help feed America’s hunger for prepared foods, but some take jobs with staffing agencies that expose them to hazardous conditions.



By Marcela ValdesChurchill NdonwieDanielle Ivory and Steve EderPhotographs by Sebastián Hidalgo
Dec. 21, 2024
Updated 8:10 a.m. ET

On a brilliant day three years ago, a grieving crowd gathered on the South Side of Chicago to bury Adewale Ezekiel Ogunyemi.

In Nigeria, Mr. Ogunyemi had not earned enough working in a bank to support his mother, wife and two daughters. So in 2019, he flew to the United States on a tourist visa and obtained fake identity documents. He then signed on for temporary work at several staffing agencies in the Chicago area.

Shy and laid-back, he was often assigned to do night jobs. One agency, Snider-Blake Personnel, sent him to scrub machines at Rich Products Corporation, which makes food products that have been sold at stores like Walmart and distributed by suppliers like Sysco.

One night in July 2021, workers at Rich heard a scream. Rushing to an area of the plant where the dough for frozen pizzas rises, they found Mr. Ogunyemi, who was 42, tangled in a machine that helps the dough ferment. His right arm had been pulled through the conveyor and wrapped around his head. His chest was crushed. The fire department had to free him from the machine, and he was pronounced dead at the hospital.

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To more fully understand the hazardous conditions in some of these workplaces, reporters reviewed thousands of pages of regulatory documents, lawsuits, police reports and internal company records, and interviewed researchers, staffing industry veterans and labor advocates, as well as more than 100 temporary workers, most of whom entered or remained in the United States illegally.

The investigation found that many people employed by the staffing industry, including unauthorized workers, have been placed in dangerous situations where they suffered serious physical harms — fractures, amputations, miscarriages — or death. When it comes to redress, The Times found, it has been hard for some of the workers or their families to hold the manufacturers to account because the staffing agency, as their actual employer, acted as a legal shield.

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