In 1938, the United States outlawed child labor, promising that children would no longer toil long hours in dangerous conditions. Eighty-five years later, Hannah Dreier of The New York Times revealed that America has failed to keep that promise.
She documented migrant children working in violation of child labor laws in all 50 states, making products for some of the country’s best-known brands. The punishing circumstances, grueling hours and fatal accidents—and the willful ignorance of the U.S. government and complicity of employers—would have stayed hidden if not for Dreier’s work.
Dreier began in April 2022 with a question: What happened to the hundreds of thousands of children arriving in the U.S. alone, an unprecedented wave of child migration? Traveling to 13 states and speaking to hundreds of working children, she revealed that child labor had become a new economy of exploitation.
She discovered children running industrial milking machines in Vermont and building lava rock walls in Hawaii. Children worked on Gerber baby food, Fruit of the Loom socks, General Motors car parts, J.Crew shirts, Oreos and Cheez-Its. Marcos Cux was 14 when his arm was torn open at a Perdue slaughterhouse. In a visual investigation, Dreier and several video journalists documented children working on roofs; they also created a version for TikTok and Instagram, where children were more likely to see it.
To find children, Dreier developed a new approach to analyzing federal data. The Times sued the Department of Health and Human Services to obtain ZIP code-level data showing where children had been released to nonparent sponsors. Dreier overlaid this with U.S. Census population density data to pinpoint areas with high concentrations of kids living far from close family. The Times visualized this exclusive data to show where migrant children are living far from their parents in the U.S.
She spent weeks at a time in small towns, sitting outside plants at the midnight shift change and visiting day labor sites at dawn. She met children in schools and found them a few hours later reporting to factory jobs.
Using court records and dozens of public record requests, Dreier hunted down the outcomes the government did not track. She built a database of migrant children killed on the job. Another database showed how rarely the government prosecuted child labor trafficking cases; another detailed the crushed limbs and seared lungs migrant children suffered in workplace injuries.
With the permission of the children’s parents and sponsors, The Times used children’s full names and rich details to bring their stories to life. Dreier tracked down parents in villages with limited phone reception, and hired interpreters to communicate with adults who spoke Indigenous languages.
Dreier’s reporting was sensitive and challenging: Supervisors sent companywide warnings about her. The Labor Department banned inspectors from speaking with her. Slaughterhouses distributed flyers with her photo.
Still, more and more sources risked their jobs to go on the record because of the tenacity of her reporting.
