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      Company Hired 24 Minors to Clean Slaughterhouses, Labor Department Says

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      Fayette Janitorial employed at least 24 children between the ages of 13 and 17 to work overnight shifts cleaning dangerous equipment at plants in Virginia and Iowa, federal regulators said.A Tennessee-based company employed at least two dozen children as young as 13 to work overnight shifts cleaning dangerous equipment in slaughterhouses, including a 14-year-old whose arm was mangled in a piece of machinery, the Labor Department said on Wednesday.The department filed a request on Wednesday for a temporary restraining order and injunction in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa against the company, Fayette Janitorial Service LLC. It provides cleaning services at slaughterhouses in several states, including Iowa and Virginia, where the department said an investigation had found that the company had hired children to clean plants.The Labor Department opened its investigation after an article in The New York Times Magazine reported that Fayette had hired migrant children to work the overnight cleaning shift at a Perdue Farms plant on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.Fayette did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesman told The Times in September that the company was unaware of any minors on its staff and learned of the 14-year-old’s true age only after he was injured.Meat processing is among the nation’s most dangerous industries, and minors are barred under federal law from working in slaughterhouses because of the high risk of injury. But that has not stopped thousands of destitute migrant children from coming to the United States from Mexico and Central America to work dangerous jobs, including in meatpacking plants.The Labor Department found that Fayette had hired at least 24 children between the ages of 13 and 17 to work the overnight shift cleaning dangerous power-driven equipment at a Perdue plant in Accomack County, Va., and at a plant operated by Seaboard Triumph Foods in Sioux City, Iowa. Fifteen children were working at the Virginia plant, and at least nine children were found to be working at the Iowa plant, the department said in its complaint requesting the injunction and restraining order.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Chaos or Conscience? A Republican Explains His Vote to Oust McCarthy.

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      Asthaa Chaturvedi, Olivia Natt and Rachel Quester, Paige Cowett, Lisa Chow and Marion Lozano and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThe ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy a few days ago demonstrated how powerful a small group of hard-right House Republicans have become and how deep their grievances run.We speak to one of the eight republicans who brought down Mr. McCarthy: Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee.On today’s episodeRepresentative Tim Burchett of Tennessee’s 2nd Congressional District.Tim Burchett is one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust Kevin McCarthy.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesBackground readingHow have the Republicans who ousted Mr. McCarthy antagonized him before?Although some names have started to be bandied about, there is no clear replacement candidate for the speaker’s position.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Michael Barbaro More

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      Nashville elects Tennessee’s first openly transgender politician

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      A transgender woman won election to a seat on Nashville’s city council, becoming the first openly transgender person to be voted into political office in Tennessee.Olivia Hill, 57, secured one of the four open at-large seats on the metro council of Nashville, a politically liberal city in an overwhelmingly conservative state.Her triumph made her the first transgender woman to be elected in Tennessee, according to the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, an advocacy group aiming to get LGBTQ+ people into public office.Hill was elected Thursday, winning 12.9% of the vote, NBC News reported.She was born and raised in Nashville, according to her campaign website, and is a military veteran, having served in the US navy’s engineer division for 10 years. Overall, she has been an engineer for 36 years.Hill previously worked at the Vanderbilt University power plant, retiring in December 2021, the Tennessean reported. She sued the university in September 2021 after experiencing intense workplace discrimination; the two parties reached an out-of-court settlement.Hill is a public speaker and advocate for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, and she has served on the board of directors for the Tennessee Pride Chamber.“My expertise is fixing things, and while my focus is repairing Nashville’s outdated infrastructure, I also want to ensure that our city is represented with true diversity in a state where the ruling party thinks I should head to the closet,” Hill said in a media release on Thursday following her win, according to the Associated Press.Women now make up the majority of Nashville’s metro council, the AP reported.Annise Parker, the president and CEO of the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, applauded Hill’s victory. Parker noted that Hill’s historic election comes as Tennessee’s state legislature passes laws discriminating against transgender communities.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Nashville voters clearly reject the hateful rhetoric that has grown louder in Tennessee politics lately,” Parker said in a statement.“Olivia’s victory proves that transgender people belong everywhere decisions about them are being made, including local office.”Tennessee’s numerous anti-LGBTQ+ laws include bans on drag shows and gender-affirming care for minors. More

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      Gloria Johnson Announces Bid for Marsha Blackburn’s Senate Seat

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      Gloria Johnson, who barely avoided expulsion for her role in a gun control rally in the State Legislature, is hoping to unseat Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican.Gloria Johnson, a Democratic state representative from Tennessee who narrowly avoided being expelled from the Legislature in April after taking part in a gun control protest on the statehouse floor, announced plans on Tuesday to run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Republican.Ms. Johnson, 61, received a flood of national attention after she joined two other Democrats, Representatives Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, to interrupt debate on the floor of the Republican-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives and rally for stricter gun control measures in late March, just days after a shooting at a Christian school in Nashville that killed six people.In retribution, Republicans moved to expel the three Democrats — sometimes called the Tennessee Three — from the Legislature. Mr. Jones and Mr. Pearson were both ousted. Ms. Johnson was stripped of her committee assignments but avoided expulsion by just one vote. (Both men were later voted back into their positions.)Last week, the State Legislature held an emotional and chaotic special session meant to be devoted to public safety that ended without agreement on any significant new restrictions on firearm access.In a video announcing her Senate campaign, Ms. Johnson led with that issue, playing clips of news coverage of the Nashville shooting and highlighting her involvement in the gun control protest.“When my friends and I believed mothers and fathers who lost children at Covenant deserved a voice, and we fought for it, they expelled them,” she says in the video.Ms. Johnson, who represents parts of Knoxville, was first elected to the Tennessee House in 2012, then lost subsequent elections in 2014 and 2016 before again winning in 2018. For the 2024 Senate race, she is running in a contested Democratic primary against Marquita Bradshaw, an environmental justice activist who unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 2020.Both hope to unseat Ms. Blackburn, 71, who in 2018 became the first woman elected to represent Tennessee in the Senate.In her video, Ms. Johnson suggested that Ms. Blackburn was beholden to “extremists and billionaires,” criticizing her views on abortion.Senator Blackburn’s campaign spokeswoman, Abigail Sigler, accused Ms. Johnson in a statement of being a “radical socialist” who “would be a puppet” for President Biden and progressive Democrats. More

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      Two of expelled ‘Tennessee Three’ Democrats target re-election

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      The Tennessee representatives Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who became Democratic heroes as members of the “Tennessee Three”, are hoping to once again reclaim their legislative seats on Thursday after they were expelled for involvement in a gun control protest on the House floor.The young Black lawmakers were both reinstated by local officials, but only on an interim basis. To fully take back their positions, they must advance through a special election. Both easily cleared their primary election in June, and now face general election opponents for districts that heavily favor Democrats.Jones, who lives in Nashville, is up against the Republican candidate Laura Nelson. Meanwhile, Pearson, from Memphis, faces an independent candidate, Jeff Johnston.“Let’s send a clear message to everyone who thought they could silence the voice of District 86,” Pearson tweeted earlier this month. “You can’t expel a movement!”Jones and Pearson were elected to the GOP-dominated statehouse last year. Both lawmakers flew relatively under the radar, even as they criticized their Republican colleagues’ policies. It wasn’t until this spring that their political careers received a boost when they joined fellow Democrat representative Gloria Johnson in a protest for more gun control on the House floor.The demonstration took place just days after a fatal shooting in Nashville at a private Christian school where a shooter killed three children and three adults. As thousands of protesters flooded the capitol building to demand that the Republican supermajority enact some sort of restrictions on firearms, the three lawmakers approached the front of the house chamber with a bullhorn, and joined the protesters’ chants and cries for action.Republican lawmakers quickly declared that their actions violated house rules and moved to expel their three colleagues – an extraordinary move that has been taken only a handful of times since the civil war.The move briefly left about 140,000 voters in primarily Black districts in Nashville and Memphis with no representation in the Tennessee house.Ultimately, Johnson, who is white, narrowly avoided expulsion while Pearson and Jones were booted by the predominantly white GOP caucus.House Republican leaders have repeatedly denied that race was a factor in the expulsion hearings. Democrats have disagreed, with Johnson countering that the only reason that she wasn’t expelled was due to her being white.The expulsions drew national support for the newly dubbed “Tennessee Three”, especially for Pearson and Jones’s campaign fundraising. The two raised more than $2m combined through about 70,400 campaign donations from across the country. The amount is well beyond the norm for Tennessee’s Republican legislative leaders and virtually unheard of for two freshman Democrats in a superminority.Meanwhile, more than 15 Republican lawmakers have funneled cash to fund campaign efforts of Jones’s Republican opponent, Laura Nelson. Nelson has raised more than $34,000 for the race. Pearson’s opponent, Jeff Johnston, has raised less than $400 for the contest.Thursday’s election will also influence two other legislative seats.In Nashville, the community organizer Aftyn Behn and former Metro councilmember Anthony Davis are currently vying to advance to the general election for a house seat in a district in the city’s north-eastern region that opened after Democratic representative Bill Beck died in June.Meanwhile, in eastern Tennessee, Republican Timothy Hill will face Democrat Lori Love in a general election for Republican-leaning district 3. The seat was left empty when former Republican representative Scotty Campbell resigned following a finding that he had violated the Legislature’s workplace discrimination and harassment policy.Hill served in the state house from 2012 until 2020 and rose to the position of majority whip. He later left his seat to run for an open US House seat in 2020, but lost in a crowded primary to current Republican US representative Diana Harshbarger. More

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      DeSantis Is Unhurt After Car Crash in Tennessee

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      The crash occurred in Chattanooga as Mr. DeSantis and his team were traveling to a fund-raiser there, a spokesman said.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was involved in a car crash in Chattanooga, Tenn., on his way to a fund-raiser there on Tuesday, according to his spokesman, who added that Mr. DeSantis was unhurt.“This morning, the governor was in a car accident while traveling to an event in Chattanooga, Tenn.,” Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for Mr. DeSantis’s presidential campaign, said in a statement. “He and his team are uninjured. We appreciate the prayers and well wishes of the nation for his continued protection while on the campaign trail.”A spokesman for the Chattanooga Police Department said that Mr. DeSantis’s four-car motorcade was traveling on Interstate 75 on Tuesday morning when traffic suddenly slowed, causing the lead vehicle to brake sharply and resulting in a pileup.Only vehicles in the governor’s motorcade were involved, and the police were called around 8:15 a.m., according to the police spokesman, Kevin West.“I don’t think they were going real fast,” Mr. West said.He added that a female staff member had suffered what he described as “minor injuries,” but that she was able to attend the event alongside Mr. DeSantis.The campaign said that the staff member “was assessed on site by medical personnel and cleared to depart.”Mr. DeSantis was scheduled to attend a fund-raiser in Chattanooga held by local Republicans on Tuesday, as well as events in Knoxville and Franklin. More

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      Tennessee toughens voting rules for people with felony convictions

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      Tennessee, already one of the strictest and most complicated states in the country for voting rights restoration, has enacted a new policy that makes it nearly impossible for people with felony convictions to regain their right to vote.Tennessee has one of the highest rates of disenfranchisement in the United States. More than 9% of the voting age population, or around 471,600 Tennesseans, can’t vote because of a felony conviction, according to a 2022 estimate by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice non-profit. More than 21% of Black adults are disenfranchised.The vast majority of people who can’t vote have completed their criminal sentences but have outstanding court debt, including unpaid child support payments.Previously, someone with a felony who wished to vote again had to pay all debts and then get government officials to sign off on a form – called a certificate of restoration – affirming their eligibility to vote. The process was burdensome, especially compared to the automatic restoration that occurs in a majority of states upon release from prison or after a period of probation or parole.But on Friday, the state’s division of elections added another hurdle. It said that someone with a felony had to first successfully receive a pardon from the governor or have a court restore their full rights of citizenship. Once that is done, the person must then complete the certificate of restoration process to get their rights restored.Mark Goins, the state’s director of elections, said in a Friday memo the change was necessary because of a recent state supreme court decision in a case called Falls v Goins. In that decision, the state supreme court ruled that a man who had been convicted of a felony decades ago in Virginia and had his voting rights restored there still had to go through Tennessee’s process for restoring voting rights.The court read two different portions of Tennessee law, one from the 1980s and one from 2006, to say that there was a two step process for those with out of state convictions to become eligible to vote: first they had to receive clemency from the state where the conviction was, and then they had to go through the Tennessee process. The court made it clear that its ruling was narrow. “We limit the scope of our analysis to these facts and these facts only,” it said. But Goins interpreted the decision broadly, saying it applied to anyone with a felony conviction in Tennessee, even though the case did not address that issue.A representative for the secretary of state’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“It’s very hard to get your restoration of citizenship – even harder than getting a Certificate of Restoration,” said Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center who has been involved in a number of lawsuits challenging Tennessee’s rules around felon disenfranchisement, including the Falls case.“The new process is more difficult than the procedures that existed before the legislature created Certificates of Restoration in 2006 and it puts Tennessee in the bottom of the barrel on rights restoration as one of the only states with a fully discretionary process, alongside Mississippi and Virginia.”In Virginia, anyone convicted of a felony is permanently barred from voting unless the governor restores their voting rights. In Mississippi, those with certain felony convictions must have an individualized bill approved by a supermajority of both chambers of the legislature and the governor before they can vote again. Very few people have successfully made it through that process, and Mississippi is the only state that disenfranchises more of its citizens than Tennessee.Tennessee’s confusing process for restoring voting rights has already come under considerable scrutiny. In 2022, a Memphis woman named Pamela Moses was sentenced to five years in prison for submitting a Certificate of Restoration when she was ineligible to vote. Moses said she believed she was eligible and a probation officer who filled out her form made a mistake and said she had completed her sentence.A judge overseeing the case overturned her conviction after the Guardian published documents that had not been turned over to Moses in which probation officials acknowledged the errors. More

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      I’m a drag queen in Tennessee. The state’s anti-drag law is silly, nasty, and wrong | Bella DuBalle

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      I am the show director at Atomic Rose, a nightclub in Memphis, Tennessee. I first discovered drag through Shakespeare. I’m a founding member of Tennessee Shakespeare Company, and I got to play some drag roles there. Growing up in the conservative south, I had learned to suppress anything considered feminine as a safety mechanism. Drag was the first time I was able to put the feminine parts of me forefront, as a source of pride and strength rather than shame or weakness. I fell in love with the art, and I’ve been doing it now for over a decade.On 2 March, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed into law two bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community. The first, SB1, outlaws all gender-affirming healthcare for minors. SB3, the “anti-drag bill,” redefines drag performers as adult cabaret artists and classifies drag as a prurient art form. “Prurient” is a legal term referring to a shameful or morbid interest in sex.If SB3 is enforced in the way its backers would like, it would prohibit any public drag displays – meaning no Pride events, no Drag Queen Story Hours, no drag performances in any place that might be seen by a minor. This would shut down all-ages drag brunches and other family-friendly functions. It would even raise questions about venues like mine that have large windows and lots of passersby. Would that qualify as viewable by a child? The law’s language is vague and incredibly broad.SB3 was supposed to take effect on 1 April but a local drag theatre troupe I used to work with, Friends of George’s, filed a suit against it. “The law prohibits a drag performer wearing a crop top and mini skirt from dancing where minors might see it,” their complaint notes, “but does not prohibit a Tennessee Titans cheerleader wearing an identical outfit from performing the exact same dance in front of children.”A federal judge temporarily blocked the law through 26 May while it is adjudicated. We are confident it will be overturned as a blatantly unconstitutional infringement on free speech. Even the judge – a Trump appointee – has effectively said as much, which is telling. Multiple district attorneys, including Memphis’s Steve Mulroy, have also called the law unnecessary and unfair.As for SB1, the US Department of Justice recently filed suit against Tennessee to prevent the bill from going into effect on 1 July as originally scheduled. We hope to see it swiftly overturned as well.Although neither of these laws currently has legal standing, they have absolutely had a chilling effect on freedom of expression and the queer community. Organizers in Knoxville said they may have to cancel their annual Pride parade if SB3 goes through. I also know some local non-queer venues that have shut down their shows out of fear or uncertainty. Theatre, ballet, and opera companies are asking lawyers, “Can we still produce Peter Pan with a female Pan? Can we do Mrs Doubtfire? Is it okay for us to put on Shakespeare the way it was traditionally performed?”Transgender and gender-nonconforming people are worried about just being in public. The rightwing pundit Michael Knowles recently called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated from public life entirely”; I think people with that worldview, who view trans folks as embodiments of an ideology rather than actual human beings, could see a trans woman in public and say, “That’s a man impersonating a woman.” SB3’s language never uses the word “drag”; it only refers to “male and female impersonators.” My fear is that the language is intentionally and maliciously vague.These attacks on the queer community are part of a broader political impulse. SB1 and SB3 are just two items on what we call Tennessee’s “Slate of Hate.” I get the sense that many of our elected officials are not as politically experienced, savvy or well-versed in law or public policy as they present. Children and families in Tennessee face very real issues, but our state’s legislative session was obsessively focused on trans kids, pronouns, drag queens, and the like – all in the guise of “protecting children.”Tennesseans overwhelmingly support stronger gun control, particularly after the Covenant shooting – one of many horrific mass shootings in Tennessee in recent years. Yet the legislative session ended having done nothing to address these concerns. This comes as little surprise: our governor recently signed into law a widely-opposed permitless carry bill – at a gunmaker’s factory. How is this protecting children?Last year, the Southern Baptist Convention released a list of over 700 of their ministers accused of sexual abuse, with many of the ministers in Tennessee. And that’s just one denomination. There is no record, not a single documented instance, of a child ever being harmed or abused at a drag show. Statistically speaking, children are far safer at a Drag Queen Story Hour than at church. Yet we aren’t attempting to legislate whether parents can take children to church. How is this protecting children?Tennessee is dead last in the nation in the stability of our foster care system – failing the nearly 9,000 children under the state’s care. This information was released by the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth after multiple failed attempts to dissolve the commission by state senator Jack Johnson – who incidentally also introduced both SB1 and SB3. How is this protecting children?We have real and difficult issues in Tennessee that require real and difficult solutions. Rather than confront the problems constituents are begging them to address, rightwing lawmakers are concocting solutions to imaginary issues. And it’s not just here in Tennessee; conservative legislatures across the US have realized there is an easy political power grab to be had by vilifying a minority group. Over 650 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in 46 states since the beginning of the year. This is beyond alarming.I am reminded of a not-too-distant past when the Nazi government painted queerness as inherently evil, a danger to families, children and culture. It resulted in pink triangles, camps, executions, the burning of books and the destruction of the Hirschfeld Institute. The othering and dehumanization of a minority group is always the first step toward their eradication.In the last election cycle, about 10% of queer Tennesseans voted. In that same cycle, nearly 60% of our elected representatives ran unopposed. It is well past time we elect officials focused on solving the myriad problems facing their constituents rather than those championing a far-right Christian nationalist agenda.
      Bella DuBalle is a drag artist in Tennessee More