Michael Grabell is a senior editor with ProPublica. Grabell has previously written about economic issues, labor, immigration and trade. He has reported on the ground from more than 35 states, as well as some of the remotest villages in Alaska and Guatemala. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The New York Times and on Vice and NPR.
Grabell has won two George Polk awards and has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize — in 2021, as part of a team covering COVID-19, and in 2019, with Ginger Thompson and Topher Sanders, for stories that helped expose the impact of family separation at the border and abuse in immigrant children’s shelters. The latter work also won a Peabody award and was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.
He previously won the Gerald Loeb Award for business journalism for his investigation into the dismantling of workers’ compensation and an ASNE award for reporting on diversity for his series on the growth of temp work in the economy.
The bill, inspired in part by a ProPublica investigation, will hold companies accountable for labor abuses by temp agencies and subcontractors they use.
Janio Salinas was buried alive in sugar. A newly released accident report and an undercover investigation by Univision reveal the obstacles OSHA faces in its temp worker safety initiative.
Daniel Collazo was pulled into a hummus grinder in 2011. New documents show Tribe Mediterranean Foods knew about the safety problem that caused his death, but did nothing about it.
The United States has some of the weakest labor protections for temp workers in the developed world. Here, we map out how countries compare based on data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
'Permatemping' cases highlight lack of U.S. protections for temp workers. Other countries limit the length of temp jobs, guarantee equal pay and restrict dangerous work.
Health and safety experts have identified steps regulators could take to decrease temp workers’ injuries but opposition from business and industry makes immediate change unlikely.
Dozens of babies die every year because hospitals do not perform a simple test that detects congenital heart defects. Seventeen states have yet to require the exam for newborns.
America is now dotted with “temp towns” – places where it’s difficult to find blue-collar work except through a temp agency and where workers often suffer lost wages, no benefits and high injury rates.
Hoy Estados Unidos está salpicado de “temp towns” – lugares donde es difícil encontrar trabajo manual si no es a través de una agencia de empleo temporal y donde los obreros frecuentemente sufren la pérdida de sueldos, ausencia de beneficios y altas proporciones de lesiones laborales.
After the deadly building collapse in Bangladesh, Walmart released a list of factories it had banned. But it has continued receiving shipments from two of them.
Algunas de las empresas más conocidas y de las agencias de trabajo temporal más grandes de Estados Unidos se benefician de – y colaboran de forma tácita con – un submundo de intermediaros del empleo, conocidos como "raiteros," quienes cobran tarifas a los trabajadores que empujan sus ingresos por debajo del sueldo mínimo. Así es como funciona el sistema en el barrio Little Village de Chicago, la comunidad mexicana más grande del medio-oeste.
Some of America's best-known companies and largest temp agencies benefit from — and tacitly collaborate with — an underworld of labor brokers, known as raiteros, who charge workers fees, pushing their pay below minimum wage. We explore the system in Chicago's Little Village, the largest Mexican community in the Midwest.
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