ProPublica/NPR series on chicken farming business wins Aronson Award

A ProPublica and National Public Radio series “Sold for Parts” about how chicken farms built their business in immigrant workers has won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College.

In the series’ first piece, ProPublica reporter Michael Grabell told the story of how Case Farms, a major chicken supplier for Kentucky Fried Chicken, Boar’s Head, and others, built its business by recruiting some of the world’s most vulnerable immigrants. Undocumented, and some underage, these workers were subjected to harsh and illegal workplace conditions. But if they protested or were injured on the job, the company used the workers’ undocumented status to get rid of them.

To document this hidden scandal, Grabell spent time in Rust Belt towns and rural North Carolina talking to skittish workers and immigration advocates. He gained rare access to the front lines of a Case Farms chicken plant in Ohio, and traveled to the highlands of Guatemala to see first-hand what had happened to injured workers after Case Farms summarily disposed of them.

Grabell then teamed with Howard Berkes to explore a different twist on the scandal. They analyzed 14 years of Florida insurance data to expose how employers and insurance companies were getting out of paying workers’ compensation benefits by using a state law to ensure injured undocumented workers were arrested or deported. The reporters also identified Florida’s biggest culprits in the business community.

Read more here.