Child labor abuse coverage wins Sidney Award

Robert J. Lopez, Barbara Davidson and Lorena Iñiguez Elebee win the December Sidney Award for their two-part series exposing child labor abuses on California farms, produced in partnership with Capital & Main, the Los Angeles Times and the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

Experts estimate that between five and ten thousand minors work in California’s fields. Children as young as twelve can legally work up to forty hours a week in agriculture when school is not in session and on weekends. But several of the youth interviewed started working in the fields in their early teens and one started at the age of six. None of the youths were aware that they needed work permits. Many described feeling sick after being exposed to pesticides.

One young woman named Araceli recalled working in a freshly sprayed vegetable field at the age of 13. “Sometimes, it would be really, really pungent,” she said, adding that she’d get headaches and feel like throwing up. Sometimes the skin peeled off her fingers and they turned white.

Regulators failed to investigate a majority of the 2,600 complaints filed against agricultural employers for alleged violations of the state’s outdoor heat law. Repeat offenders were not fined despite hundreds of violations of pesticide safety laws. State officials issued just 27 citations for child labor violations over an eight-year period, and more than 90% of fines were never collected.

“These reporters uncovered a regulatory system in disarray,” said Sidney judge Lindsay Beyerstein, “California is failing these young workers.”

Within days of the series being published, state officials announced that they were launching joint task force operations and other efforts to improve enforcement. California lawmakers are also calling on state pesticide regulators to develop educational materials designed for underage farmworkers to inform them of their rights under the law and how to report problems.

Lopez is an independent journalist and fellow at the McGraw Center for Business Journalism. He was part of a Los Angeles Times team awarded the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2023 with several Times colleagues for local reporting.

Davidson has long focused her photojournalism lens on people attempting to maintain their dignity in the face of uncertainty in conflict zones. She honed her story-telling approach, through multiple assignments over two decades across 58 countries, covering war, humanitarian crisis, and the human condition for the Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, and The Washington Times. Davidson is a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy award-winning photojournalist and twice named International Photographer of the Year by POYi.

Elebee is a senior data and graphics journalist at the Los Angeles Times.