The New York Times has won the Scripps Howard Award in business and financial reporting for “Alone and Exploited.”
The Times’ Hannah Dreier brought attention to the United States’ failure to keep children out of unsafe working conditions and how young immigrants end up illegally working exhausting and dangerous jobs.
Dreier’s work has also won a Pulitzer Prize and the WERT Prize for this coverage.
Dreier set out in April 2022 to find out what was happening to the hundreds of thousands of children arriving in the U.S. alone during an unprecedented wave of child migration. Her reporting led her to 13 states and hundreds of children doing the work of adults and risking their lives in a country that outlawed child labor in 1938.
Dreier met young men and women who had suffered physical injuries and worked to the point of exhaustion at their jobs. She heard heartbreaking stories of those who died at their jobs.
To find these children and their stories she filed more than a dozen Freedom of Information Act requests with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and eventually sued in federal court to obtain data showing where children were released to sponsors who were not their parents. She overlayed the data with U.S. Census population density data to pinpoint areas with high concentrations of children not near relatives. Her reporting left her waiting in factory parking lots at midnight, attending quinceañeras with families and spending weeks at a time in places like Bozeman, Montana, and Parksley, Virginia.
Little was known about the resurgence of child labor in the United States before Dreier’s reporting. Dreier found children working in violation of child labor laws in all 50 states.
The impact of Dreier’s work has been felt across the country at national and state levels. Within days of the first piece being released, the White House began an immediate child labor crackdown. The U.S. Department of Agriculture retrained 8,000 inspectors to report child labor, and the U.S. Labor Department opened investigations into meat processing companies Perdue and Tyson. Illinois passed a staffing agency enforcement law, and Colorado gave injured children the right to sue employers. Arkansas and Minnesota increased child labor fines.
