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Fuller Project contributor Eileen Guo’s piece was one of the first that looked at pregnancy and childbirth during coronavirus through a health equity lens. This story refocused the conversation about childbirth during COVID-19 from just the experiences of primarily white, upper middle class mothers to look at how much worse it would be for mothers of color, and particularly Black mothers, who suffer the highest maternal mortality rates in the U.S.
In addition, this story was the first to break two additional pieces of news on how COVID-19 was affecting childbirth: that at least one maternity ward in San Francisco was closing down and being converted to a COVID-19 ward, and that at least one hospital system was offering inductions at 39 weeks to get ahead of the expected COVID curve, the first known case of this happening — even before the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists gave any guidance on the matter.
The article has been cited in two academic papers, and was also cited in a letter to Senate majority and minority leaders from Senators Booker, Gillibrand, Harris and others, requesting that maternal health be included in a 2020 COVID stimulus package.
In December 2020, Congress approved funding for maternal mental health – historic funding as a part of the stimulus package.
During the summer of 2020, Fuller Project reporter Louise Donovan began looking into Lesotho’s garment industry as the coronavirus pandemic rapidly crushed the global supply chain, including in the small landlocked country in southern Africa, and upended livelihoods for millions of workers around the world.
J.C. Penney filed for bankruptcy and began closing over 150 stores across the U.S. around the same time. In speaking with several workers unions, Donovan learned that one garment factory in Lesotho had laid off staff specifically due to limited orders from J.C. Penney. While the collapse of the global garment industry during the pandemic had been reported on, no one had yet directly linked two women on each end of this crumbling supply chain: One in America, anxious about the impact of store closures, and another some 10,000 miles away, in Lesotho, with no income and living off church donations.
In a bid to understand how these two lives had been affected, Donovan began looking for sources. She spoke with 53-year-old Matefo Litali, a veteran seamstress, after a Lesotho-based workers union put them in touch. Her search for a former J.C. Penney employee proved tougher. Many women didn’t want to jeopardize their severance pay by talking to a journalist on-the-record. After trawling Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and Instagram with little success, she eventually switched to TikTok. Here she found videos uploaded by Alexandra Orozco, a 22-year-old freight team associate who was documenting – and, arguably, processing – the closure of her J.C. Penney store in Delano, California, online.
The authorities in Lesotho don’t compel garment factories to publish statistics on job cuts and many factory owners are not particularly forthcoming with this information. As the country is a lesser-known garment powerhouse compared to China or Bangladesh, there is simply less research conducted by labor rights organizations and groups. Donovan spent weeks collecting data from several workers’ unions and researchers to understand the depth of layoffs across the country’s some 50-plus garment factories.
When a big American retailer crumbles, such as J.C. Penney, the fallout across the globe is huge — and women are disproportionately impacted. Some 80% of J.C. Penney employees are female, according to the most recently available data from 2016. Women also make up the vast majority of garment workers around the world.
The Associated Press published the story, and it was picked up by more than 100 news outlets globally, including in Lesotho, and within the U.S., including The Washington Post and ABC, reaching an estimated 1.56 million readers. Readers also sent messages of support and encouragement to Alexandra, the former J.C. Penney employee in California.
Nearly three million Filipina women work abroad as migrant domestic workers, where they are paid low wages to clean homes, cook meals and care for comparatively wealthy families — under often exploitative conditions.
A year into a global pandemic, thousands were stranded with even fewer options to flee exploitation.
This story with the Guardian focused on Rowena, a 54-year-old Filipina domestic worker in Bahrain. She is one of more than a dozen Filipina women across Asia, Europe and the Middle East interviewed by Fuller Project reporter Corinne Redfern over nine months in 2020. Most of the women had lost jobs or had salaries cut by their employers during the pandemic. Others had found themselves subjected to physical abuse.
In April, Rowena’s boss said that due to the pandemic, he could no longer pay her monthly salary of $333. Instead, he said, he would provide her and the three other women he employed with $27 for food every two weeks, to be split between them. Rowena was due to leave Bahrain that month and return to the Philippines. But a few weeks later, her flight out of the country was canceled, and she found herself trapped. In September, her employer stopped giving the women their food allowance, leaving them with nothing. Rowena started working odd jobs around the neighborhood to earn enough money to eat.
In May, Rowena applied for a one-off sum of $208 in financial support from the Philippines Department of Labor and Employment. In early December, she received 75BHD ($204), seven months after she first applied for aid. She repeatedly told Redfern that she only wanted to go home, but the cheapest ticket from Manama to Manila costs more than twice as much as her aid check.
Redfern’s story was also featured in the Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast. Dozens of readers and listeners asked how they could support Rowena, and many offered to pay for her flight home. The Philippine Embassy in Bahrain intervened, and helped Rowena leave her employer. Embassy staff moved Rowena and the other two women to the embassy, where they were given food and shelter until flights home could be arranged.
The Philippine Ambassador to Bahrain confirmed that they recovered unpaid wages from Rowena’s employer, and that our reporting “brought to light” Rowena’s circumstances and “paved the way” for the Embassy to intervene. Rowena was repatriated to the Philippines on March 5.
This TIME Labor Day edition cover story focused on the lives of waitresses at one diner in Philadelphia to highlight the broader inequities — exacerbated by gender — that exist across the service economy, particularly within the tipped workforce. About 11.4 million Americans now work in jobs in restaurants and bars, a 52% increase from two decades ago. Two-thirds of them are women, and 40% are people of color. Christina Munce, the main waitress featured, is a single mother on food stamps and Medicaid who was making the Pennsylvania minimum wage for tipped workers, which is just $2.83 per hour. She made most of her money on tips, which means that her daily income depends on how many people dine on that day or how generous some strangers are feeling. Sexual harassment is rampant and paid sick days are nonexistent in Munce’s world.
Drilling down on policy and labor data, Fuller Project reporter Malcolm Burnley and TIME reporter Alana Semuels showed why women continue to be paid so low in restaurants, and how that’s concerning for the future of the country. Service work, without guaranteed hours or income, is expected to grow in America over the next decade.
Burnley’s reporting ensured that working women’s voices were central in the national policy discussion about the economy. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, then-US Senator Claire McCaskill echoed our reporting; Senator Cory Booker followed with an OpEd in TIME Magazine, and our article was shared by PA Governor Tom Wolfe and reacted to by then-Presidential candidate Andrew Yang. Several of the waitresses at the featured diner received hundreds of dollars in unsolicited donations from readers. Waitress Christina Munce received donations of over $3,000 from sympathetic readers, and was offered and accepted a full-time job with benefits.
A secondary focus of the article was the patchwork of state laws covering tipped workers, which are rarely updated and disproportionately affect women and people of color. Since 1991, the federal minimum wage has doubled for most workers across the country. Meanwhile, tipped workers’ minimum wages have remained frozen at the same levels. In 2019 alone, 16 states as diverse as Pennsylvania, Arkansas and Indiana introduced legislation to raise the tipped minimum wage to the level of all other workers, responding to waitresses who’ve marched on state capitols and on Congress.
In the article, Burnley and Semuels quoted Jacob Vigdor, an economist at the University of Washington, who said that in the next recession, “the primary hit is going to generally be in sectors that don’t involve providing basic services to other people.” That has proven to be true with the service sector, and women have been disproportionately represented on unemployment rolls during the COVID-19 crisis.
The Fuller Project partnered with The Guardian to report on migrant women who were sent back to Mexico within days of giving birth and without an opportunity to collect birth certificates for their U.S. citizen newborns. They were “expelled” under a policy Trump officials put in place during the pandemic. Around 400,000 people were subject to the policy since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which also prevented them from appearing in front of a judge or from being screened for asylum claims. These expulsions were largely carried out away from the public eye and compounded the suffering caused by an existing web of exclusionary border policies
Our investigation found that at least 11 new mothers and their U.S. citizen newborns were subject to the policy our reporter Tanvi Misra found, based on conversations with lawyers, two of the moms, and a review of hospital records. Among them was ‘Helene’, a 23-year-old woman from Haiti who gave birth in Chula Vista, California, only to be dropped off on the side of the road along the San Diego-Tijuana border three days later — just 25 minutes after she was discharged from the hospital, she told Misra through a translator. Misra later described the conversation:
“Whenever I’m able to speak to folks who’ve made this kind of journey, there’s a lot of moments of the conversations that stick with me. I am not always able to put them all in the story. In this case, it was how the woman described her journey to the U.S. She said it was beautiful & terrible (translated). Beautiful because she met a lot of people — other migrants — who encouraged her and gave her strength. Terrible because of all the awful things that can happen — (she listed rape, kidnapping ) — the violence of it.”This story was published on February 4 during vital weeks for immigration policymaking. On February 24, President Biden repealed various Trump-era border policies. The Biden administration also started exempting unaccompanied minor children and certain vulnerable families from the Trump policy under which the mothers in this story were “expelled.”
The story had an almost immediate impact. In April 2021, a month after it was published, all the women in the story were granted humanitarian parole, which allowed them to enter into the United States and start the process of requesting asylum. That July, the story was cited in a lawsuit filed by immigrant groups, which demanded government records related to the treatment of pregnant women and their children in CBP’s custody. The same month, the Homeland Security Office of Inspector General released a report reviewing one of the births in our story and concluded that the CBP did not properly track births in custody or always promptly release U.S. citizen newborns. And finally, in August, CBP issued a memo allowing for the exemption of pregnant women and women who had just given birth from “Title 42.”
While there had been some high-level media and academic reports about child care center closures in California, this article was the first look at actual county-level child care provider closures during the early months of the pandemic. It revealed an astonishing scale of closures in a state already deemed a “child care desert.”
Specifically, the data showed that more than 9,000 child care providers had closed between mid-March and July 31, 2020, and that roughly 1200 of these closures were permanent. It also found that the vast majority of closures were concentrated among small, home-based providers. A county-by-county analysis found that the loss of child-care spots was not spread evenly across California, and that the hardest-hit communities on a child population basis were in rural counties in the northern part of the state.
The Fuller Project was interested in data-driven pieces about the impact of COVID-19 on women, with a particular interest in how the pandemic was affecting the child care sector. Reporter Rikha Sharma Rani, a parent herself, was experiencing the impact of school and childcare closures from the pandemic first hand. That personal experience is what brought her to this story. She contacted the Department of Social Services and asked for detailed data about child care closures at the county level, which they provided. She was then able to build on that data and provide additional analysis to paint a clearer picture of the impact, such as the number of closures per population of children under five. The result was a data set that was one of the most extensive looks at child care closures since the start of the pandemic.
The article was an Apple News top story and was read by over 500,000 people. It was also syndicated by Yahoo! News, included in Politico’s California Playbook and shared by the Economic Security Project. The story contributed significantly to awareness about the growing child care crisis in California due to COVID-19. In September, the California senate passed SB 820, which expanded financial support to child care providers.
However, the real impact of the story was the focus on child care providers themselves. Child care providers are overwhelmingly women and women of color, and many of them are low income. But coverage of the issue overwhelmingly focused on the impact of child care closures on the economy or on families that relied on child care services and could afford to pay for them.. There was little coverage of the women providing the care, who were losing their livelihoods because of the pandemic. Sharma Rani centered them in this piece to underscore that child care closures matter not just because of the impact on the economy, but because the women who provide care matter too.
In Nigeria, estranged trafficking survivors struggle to return home during the pandemic with little help from the government. This reporting was syndicated in Spanish by El País, by Kenya’s Nation, Nigeria’s Premium Times, and eight other outlets and was sourced by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Our series in The Telegraph, on PBS NewsHour, and for The Fuller Project exposed wide-spread ramifications and causes of increased sexually abusive posts of children and a 200 percent increase in online posts (by Louise Donovan and Corinne Redfern).
We broke the news that the U.S. military spent $500K defending a U.S. Marine who murdered a trans woman in the Philippines. The New York Times featured the piece in its Morning Briefing Newsletter (by Corinne Redfern for New York Times Magazine).
We reported on timely new data from U.N. Women & the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) showing how COVID-19 has affected trafficking survivors and anti-trafficking organizations. The OSCE shared the reporting in their newsletter, and reporting was syndicated by PBS and highlighted by Fortune’s Broadsheet (Corinne Redfern for The Fuller Project).
Compounding factors place Black child care providers at risk in Pennsylvania. Providers struggle to stay open with revenue tied to state-run childcare subsidies (by Malcolm Burnley for The Fuller Project).
Women were more likely to drop out of the workforce as federal aid and protections expire. Our data-informed reporting done in collaboration with Reuters was syndicated by 25 newsrooms (by contributor Rachel Dissell and Jonnelle Marte of Reuters).
Many American farm workers have been forced to take their children to work and advocates say children as young as eight have been seen working in the fields. Our article led The Washington Post’s “Most Read.” Several members of Congress, Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, Farmworker Justice, Farm Policy and others cited and circulated the reporting (by contributor Erica Hellerstein).
