Staff reporter Teresa Cotsirilos on working at FERN

In a recent FERN exclusive story, “The child workers who feed you,” Teresa Cotsirilos dug into investigation data from the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division and found that more than 75 percent of recent child-labor violations were committed by employers in the food industry.

This story quickly received widespread attention when Mother Jones republished it, which helped the piece reach nearly 8 million online readers in addition to a social media audience of 2.7 million. About a week after the story was published, U.S. Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Peter Welch (D-VT), members of the Senate Agriculture Committee, introduced the bicameral Child Labor Exploitation Accountability Act, legislation aimed at holding corporations accountable for the exploitation of children and workers in the food industry. The bill prohibits the Department of Agriculture (USDA) from contracting with companies that have committed egregious labor law violations and/or contracted with vendors that have incurred, and failed to rectify, serious worker or labor infractions.

Teresa talks here about why this type of impact is important and what makes FERN different from other news organizations.

“FERN is a lot less concerned with how many clicks a given article gets …. It is much more concerned with what the sociopolitical impact of a story might be and whether that story was able to make any notable change.”

“Because of that I think FERN is really special and I feel really lucky to work here.”

Please support the work of reporters like Teresa!