A Global Reckoning Around Labor Conditions. An emotional worker is shown in The Guardian documentary The Great Abandonment. Nearly 200 million migrant laborers were stranded without wages, food, and housing after India Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced one of the harshest COVID-19 lockdowns in the world in 2020. Image from The Great Abandonment. India. Grantees Expose Labor Abuses in Qatar, India, the U.S. “I didn’t have any choice but to go abroad to work,” said Surendra Tamang, a migrant worker from Nepal. After laboring through extreme heat and brutal working conditions building Qatar’s World Cup stadiums for six years, now at 31, he will likely be on dialysis for the rest of his life. With eyes on the World Cup since matches began on November 20, flagrant labor abuses of migrant workers are once again in the global spotlight. The Pulitzer Center has long reported on the rights of workers, efforts to organize labor unions and worker advocacy groups, modern sla
How College Campuses Use AI To Monitor Student Protests . How do campuses protect and save the lives of students at risk of harming themselves or others? Software that uses artificial intelligence to scan students’ social media activities has been touted as the best way. Pulitzer Center AI Accountability Fellow Ari Sen revealed a lesser-known use of an AI tool known as Social Sentinel: surveilling campus protests. In a groundbreaking investigation for The Dallas Morning News, Sen discovered that campus police used Social Sentinel to track protests over a Confederate statue, student criticism of school officials over an alleged mishandling of a rape complaint, and even protests against a visiting U.S. senator at a town hall. The reporting discovered that the company actively marketed the tool to university officials as an inexpensive solution to “mitigate” and “forestall” student protests while publicly maintaining that the service was not a surveillance tool. On Wednesday, Oc