Since 2020, three workers have died at the Mar Jac chicken plant in Hattiesburg -- all of which the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found the company liable for.
Most recent was the July 2023 death of Duvan Tomas Perez, a 16 year old from Guatemala who was working as a nighttime custodian on the facility's killing floor, in violation of both federal and state law.
Michael McEwen
Mar Jac Poultry
Perez was employed under work identification listing him as a 32 year old man, issued to him by Onin Staffing, a staffing subcontractor Mar Jac and other poultry companies in the state often work with.
The teenager was not provided training on the dangerous equipment he was tasked with cleaning, and a wrongful death lawsuit filed by his family alleges management did not ensure the equipment was properly ‘locked out’ before he began his work.
But even before Perez’s death in 2023, the Georgia-based Mar Jac Poultry, a far-reaching firm that integrates processing plants, feed mills, hatcheries and transportation across the Gulf South, has long been a known entity to federal agencies like the Department of Justice and Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
After a yearslong investigation, the company settled with the DOJ in Oct. 2018 to resolve a longstanding suit in which Mar Jac’s Hattiesburg facility was found to have violated federal immigration law by discriminating against work-authorized, non U.S. citizens – primarily migrants from throughout Latin America who arrived in central Mississippi to work these very jobs.
In the years since, reports of workplace abuses and preferential treatment along ethnic lines have continued to pour out of the plant in East Hattiesburg, and others in the region.
“Mar Jac continues to face significant health and safety and abuse issues, even as recent as 2024 and into 2025. The company has been cited multiple times by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for serious violations, including incidents involving underage workers and fatal workplace accidents,” said Jessica Martinez, Executive Director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.
“Our hope is that Mar Jac is aware of this, which I'm sure they are, and is prompted to create change -- that folks in the country are paying attention and that workers will not stand for this injustice. They have an accountability as a company with the resources to exercise practices that protect the lives of its workers with dignity and respect.”
Comprising 25 grassroots, worker-led organizations across the country, National COSH, as its best known, works to build the power of those organizations to promote safety, health and justice in their workplaces and surrounding communities.
2025 marks the 13th year the group has published the annual ‘Dirty Dozen’ report, which is informed by both worker and advocate testimony in many of those local organizations, as well as federal investigations.
Martinez says in that time, Mar Jac has often stood out from other poultry companies, even in a notoriously dangerous and murky industry.
“Mar Jac is highlighted as one of those companies where workers face issues of repetitive motion injuries, chemical exposures, dangerous equipment, and extreme production speed because of the quota, so employers routinely discourage injury reporting or fail to provide adequate medical care to its workers,” Martinez told MPB News.
“This is something that happens across the industry, and Mar Jac is one of those that does it unapologetically, and is based on outsourcing blame to subcontractors at times and dodging responsibility for what we believe strongly are preventable deaths.”
For Duvan Perez’s surviving relatives, who relocated as a family to the Hattiesburg area from Guatemala’s western highlands in 2017, the fight for justice in his death remains both long and amorphous.
While also attending school, the 16 year old was working the night time custodian shift to help his family make ends meet; his death not only meant a loss of crucial income for the household, but also the loss of the family’s eldest child to a country they sought out years ago as a way to achieve a better life for them all.
After first being cited by OSHA in early-2024 for 17 violations in Perez’s death – all but three classified as serious and carrying a proposed penalties of more than $212,000 – Mar Jac later settled to pay nearly $165,000 in fines, and promised OSHA it would implement safety measures.
Nearly a year to the day of Perez’s death at the Hattiesburg facility, Mar Jac broke ground on a $25 million transload facility in nearby Perry County, announcing it as one of its biggest expansions in Mississippi to date.
And in Walker County, Alabama, where Mar Jac’s poultry plant is by far the largest employer, six teenagers were found working under forged documentation for several months in 2024, nearly leading to a month-long shutdown mandated by a federal court.
Jessica Martinez says that, especially amid ongoing proposals to either cut or drastically reduce OSHA’s budget for investigation and oversight, the enforcement capability of worker safety is now even less effective.
“Under the current administration we're seeing a complete disintegration of the agencies that can protect workers.By limiting the resources of agencies that do the enforcement work of the standards that currently exist, we are really creating a reality where we're going to see more worker fatalities, more injuries and illnesses for workers, and more long-term exposure to these hazards,” Martinez told MPB News.
“Right now we know the state of affairs in this country, and immigrant working communities are viciously being attacked. Working people are viciously being attacked, and there's an environment of fear that trickles down into the workplace where workers also fear speaking up.”
A representative at Mar Jac’s headquarters in Gainesville, Georgia, reached by phone, declined to comment for this story.