hearthside

After The Times reported last year that children hired by an outside staffing agency were working on Cheerios and other household products at the contract manufacturer Hearthside Food Solutions, the company said it had begun requiring workers to prove their ages with government-issued photo identification.

The manufacturer, Hearthside Food Solutions, has been under federal and state investigations since The Times revealed child labor at other facilities in February.

The very first anecdote in this 5,000-word opus is about a 15-year-old girl bagging cereal on the graveyard shift in the Hearthside Food Solutions plant in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Hearthside, after the Times ran the investigation, said they were going to be doing inspections on the manufacturing floor, and 75 percent of their workforce didn’t show up the next day.

The Michigan attorney general’s office also was looking into the case, and state and federal labor agencies were investigating Hearthside Food Solutions, which runs 39 plants in the United States.