Left to right: Hillman board member Danny Glover, Broadcast winner Brian Ross, and foundation president Bruce Raynor.

On Tuesday night, the Sidney Hillman Foundation recognized excellence in journalism in service of the common good at our annual Hillman Prize ceremony and reception in New York City.

Click here to see all the photos of Tuesday’s event. 

On Tuesday, May 7, the Sidney Hillman Foundation will present its annual prizes for outstanding journalism in service of the common good. Please join us to honor the winners at 6:00pm at the New York Times Center in Manhattan. A cocktail reception will follow the program. The event is free and open to the public. RSVP to info@hillmanfoundation.org

To mark the upcoming occasion, we bring you a special pre-Hillman edition of Sidney’s Picks, featuring the work of all of our winners. 

• Special Officers’ Award for Public Service: Awarded in memory of murdered Bangladeshi trade unionist Aminul Islam, in solidarity with all Bangladeshi garment workers fighting for justice in the workplace. 

• Broadcast Journalism: Brian Ross, Rhonda Schwartz, Matthew Mosk and Cindy Galli, “Brian Ross Investigates: Tragedy in Bangladesh,” ABC News. An expose linking Tommy Hilfiger and other iconic U.S. brands to a factory that burned in Bangladesh killing over 29 workers. Aminul Islam helped Ross and his team find proof that these brands were made in the burned factory. 

• Book Journalism: Tracie MacMillan, “The American Way of Eating,” Scribner. MacMillan went undercover as a farm worker, a produce stocker at Walmart, and as a kitchen worker at Applebees to expose the inner workings of America’s food system and document the struggles of the low-wage workers who feed us all. 

• Newspaper Journalism: Patricia Callahan, Sam Roe and Michael Hawthorne, “Playing With Fire,” Chicago Tribune. Reveals how the chemical and tobacco industries colluded to introduce toxic and ineffective flame retardants into furniture. 

• Magazine Journalism: Shane Bauer, “No Way Out,” Mother Jones. Bauer describes how prionsers in California can be thrown into solitary confinement without due process on flimsy evidence of gang activity, like owning political pamplets or drawing stars on a Christmas card. Bauer draws on his own experience in solitary confinement as a political priosoner in Iran. 

• Web Journalism: Alison Young and Peter Eisler, “Ghost Factories,” USA Today. This innovative, digital-first series revealed that thousands of homes across the country have been built on sites contaminated, and that the EPA knew about the risk for over a decade but failed to act. 

• Photojournalism: Rick Loomis, “Beyond 7 Billion,” Los Angeles Times. Loomis travelled the world to explore the impact of earth’s rising population on the environment, the economy, the status of women, and the role of religion in public life. 

• Opinion & Analysis Journalism: Andrew Sullivan, The Dish. For his pioneering advocacy for marriage equality. 

• Sol Stein Prize for Labor History: Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh.

Meet Sohel Rana, the tycoon who owned Rana Plaza, the Bangladeshi factory tower that collapsed last week in the worst industrial disaster in the nation’s history:

SAVAR, Bangladesh — Barely 20 miles from the national capital, this gritty suburb is now a dusty, chaotic industrial center littered with factories that produce clothes for leading Western brands. Building codes are often unenforced, regulatory oversight is flimsy and the men wielding power often travel with armed guards.

And perhaps no one wielded power more brazenly than Sohel Rana. He traveled by motorcycle, as untouchable as a mafia don, trailed by his own biker gang. Local officials and the Bangladeshi news media say he was involved in illegal drugs and guns, but he also had a building, Rana Plaza, that housed five factories.

Upstairs, workers earned as little as $40 a month making clothes for retailers like J. C. Penney. Downstairs, Mr. Rana hosted local politicians, playing pool, drinking and, the officials say, indulging in drugs.

Now Mr. Rana, 35, is under arrest, the most reviled man in Bangladesh after the horrific collapse of Rana Plaza last week left nearly 400 people dead, with many others still missing. On Tuesday, a top Bangladeshi court seized his assets, as the public bayed for his execution, especially as it appears that the tragedy could have been averted if the frantic warnings of an engineer who examined the building the day before had been heeded. [NYT]

Rana is part of a new class of wealthy and ruthless men who have ridden Bangladesh’s apparel boom to riches. Until his arrest, he lived outside the law. He and his father even seized property by force to build Rana Plaza: 

Rabindranath Sarkar, who had bought land in partnership with Mr. Rana’s father, said the family sent thugs to seize part of his share of the land and then retaliated when he filed a complaint with the local police.

“Rana chased me through Savar with weapons,” he said. “The police wouldn’t even dare to protect me. The police were always scared of them.” [NYT]

The day before Rana Plaza collapsed, an engineer told Rana that the building was critically compromised, but he waved off the engineer and told journalists everything was okay. His arrogance cost over 400 lives. 

On May 7th, the Sidney Hillman Foundation will present a special Officers’ Award for Public Service to the garment workers of Bangladesh struggling for safety and justice at work in memory of the late Aminul Islam, a garment worker and trade unionist with the Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity. Mr. Islam was kidnapped, tortured, and killed, presumably for his tireless activism on behalf of apparel workers. 

The Hillman judges had decided to honor Mr. Islam’s memory weeks before the most recent building collapse in Bangladesh, the worst industrial accident in the nation’s history. We hope that by drawing attention to violence against labor activists like Mr. Islam and to the dangerous working conditions he opposed, we can help make the garment trade safer in Bangladesh. 

Our namesake, Sidney Hillman came to prominence by leading a garment workers’ strike in Chicago in the early 20th Century. The work of Aminul Islam and his brothers and sisters in Bangladesh represents the values that Hillman himself held dear.