In his role at the director of child labor advocacy at the National Consumers League (NCL), Reid coordinates the activities of the Child Labor Coalition (CLC), which has 38 organizational members and strives to minimize exploitative child labor domestically and internationally and works to protect the health, safety, and wellbeing of child workers in the United States and abroad. The CLC has worked with Congress and federal agencies to improve child labor responses, educate the public about child labor issues, and organize responses from the nonprofit community.

Prior to joining NCL in 2008, Reid worked for 12 years at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs where he served as the communications director and led the Children in the Fields Campaign. Its goal is to end the legal loopholes in US child labor law that permit child agricultural laborers to work longer hours, to work at younger ages, and to perform hazardous work at younger ages than children working in other industries. That work to protect child farmworkers continues.
We face new challenges with the recent expansion of hazardous child labor in the US and state and federal child labor increasingly under attack. Internationally, critical US government funding for international child labor remediation projects has ended abruptly.

Ron Estrada serves as the chief executive officer of Farmworker Justice, a national advocacy organization based in Washington, DC that works to improve the living and working conditions of farmworkers and their families. Formally, Estrada served as senior vice president of corporate social responsibility and government relations for Univision Communications where he oversaw the portfolio with community-based organizations, key local and national stakeholders and leaders from public and private sectors.

Estrada also co-founded the Univision Foundation where he developed and directed the implementation of the foundation’s first charter.  Moreover, Estrada led Univision’s policy, advocacy, and CSR initiatives for network and local media teams representing 126 broadcast and radio stations throughout the US and Puerto Rico. Formerly, Estrada also served as senior executive for UnidosUS and the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Jennifer Sherer (she/her) is deputy director of EPI’s Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN) and directs EARN’s Worker Power Project, supporting research-organizing partnerships among EARN groups, labor and grassroots organizations to advance racial, gender, and economic justice through state and local policies that expand workers’ ability to unionize and collectively bargain.

Her publications include reports and articles on labor unions, public-sector collective bargaining, “right-to-work” laws, child labor, worker misclassification, wage theft, women’s labor education, labor oral history, and working-class voters, and her work has been cited by numerous local and national media outlets including The Washington Post, The New Yorker, NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, and NPR.

Prior to joining EPI in 2021, Sherer served as director of the University of Iowa Labor Center, leading statewide worker outreach, education, and leadership development programming in close partnership with labor unions and community organizations. While at the Labor Center, Sherer also directed the Iowa Labor History Oral Project, helped found the Center for Worker Justice of Eastern Iowa, co-coordinated the Midwest School for Women Workers, and served on the boards of the Labor and Working Class History Association, Labor Studies Journal, and EARN affiliate Common Good Iowa (formerly the Iowa Policy Project).

Sherer first became active in the labor movement over 25 years ago as a local union officer, a project staff organizer for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE), and a leader of student anti-sweatshop campaigns while earning her PhD. She has since served as a local labor council officer, volunteered in dozens of issue campaigns, and walked many picket lines.

Charlie Wishman became secretary-treasurer of the Iowa Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, in January of 2012, and president of the organization on May 1, 2020.

Charlie is a member of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Local 254.  He has also been a member of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW), American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

He has worked as community liaison for the Food Bank of Iowa and first became a union member working as an organizer for Iowa Citizen Action Network in 2006.  In 2009 he became a Communications Specialist for AFSCME Iowa Council 61.

In the fall of 2011 he came to work for the Iowa Federation of Labor as Communications Director.  Charlie also served as President of the Iowa Workers’ Compensation Advisory Council and also serves on the Iowa Workforce Development Board, the Labor Advisory Committee of the University of Iowa Labor Center, United Way of Central Iowa, the John L. Lewis Museum Board, The Iowa Labor History Society Board, the Labor Advisory Board of the Chicago Federal Reserve, as well as other boards and working groups to advocate for the advancement of  the cause of working people.

Charlie graduated from the University of Northern Iowa in 2002.  His family lives in Des Moines.  He is widowed and has two children who attend Des Moines Public Schools, Isaac and Ivy.

Kristina Cooke is an investigative reporter at Reuters focused on immigration. In 2025, she was part of a team of reporters who were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for coverage of the fentanyl supply chain. In 2023, she and colleagues were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for an investigation into migrant child labor in the United States. Originally from Germany, she joined Reuters in London in 2005 and is now based in San Francisco.