Dear Friend and YDA activist,

Hershey’s Chocolate World is the sweetest place on Earth to be, at least according to the fun little tune that plays on the company’s website. It’s not an actual chocolate factory, but an amusement park style ride replete with all of your favorite, smiling chocolate pals, singing animatronic cows, and actors portraying happy factory workers in spotless coveralls. This fantasy version that Hershey sells to its visitors stands in stark contrast to the truth.

In an actual Hershey’s facility young university students from places like Turkey, Moldova, and the Ukraine, all visiting America under the U.S. Department of State’s poorly regulated J-1 visa program, were exploited for their labor in conditions that seemed a return to America’s 19th Century worker abuses. Needless to say, they did not find Hershey to be anything close to the sweetest place on Earth.

The U.S. state department describes the J-1 visa program as a means to “…provide an extremely valuable opportunity to experience the U.S. and our way of life.” These future doctors and engineers all paid between $3,000 and $6,000 for the privilege of taking part in the J-1 visa program.

Unfortunately, the only experience that these students wound up with was a crash course in corporate greed.

The experience of the U.S. and our way of life that the students received was in the form of hard, physical labor at a Hershey’s warehouse. They lifted 50-pound boxes fed from a conveyor belt every minute for eight hours a day, often on overnight shifts. Many students complained that there was only time for work and sleep. Taking their concerns up with management wasn’t an option because, according to some of the students, managers were verbally abusive and threatened to send workers unable to lift heavy boxes back to their home countries, which would disqualify them from the J-1 visa program and potentially bar them from future re-entry into the U.S. The meager wages that they were paid for this harsh labor amounted to less than minimum wage, after miscellaneous fees and deductions for overpriced company housing were taken out.

Finally, with support from the National Guest Worker’s Alliance, along with Pennsylvania labor leaders, these students were able to stage a strike and bring attention to this abusive exploitation of the J-1 visa program. Most Americans think that we abandoned these types of labor practices in the 19th century. In truth, Hershey isn’t all that different from many modern companies in that they are constantly in search of ever cheaper labor. These companies don’t want to collectively bargain with American workers; instead, they prefer to create a convoluted system of subcontracting, downsizing, and temporary employment that has us all running in a race to the bottom.

Hershey used to have its own unionized employees working in their warehouse, now Pennsylvanians no longer have those jobs and the company outsources its distribution to a non-union company that hires most of its workers from the J-1 visa program.

Sadly, this isn’t the only reported abuse of the J-1 visa program, but now, thanks to the resolve of these students and their union allies, the U.S. Department of Labor is opening an investigation into the matter. These students certainly got more than they had bargained for when they signed up to participate in the J-1 visa program, but because they organized and stood up together to demand justice they were able to make a difference for themselves and others.

We all need to stand up and demand the same to get America back on track and moving, again.

America not only needs to create more jobs, but needs to create good jobs, with quality of life sustaining wages and benefits, with freedom for employees to organize to protect their rights, and with dignity and fairness for all men and women. These goals will remain out of reach, so long as we are silent and allow for such abuses to take place. Stand up with these students, your neighbors, and workers across the country and demand the return of the American dream.

Rocco Giammaria (PA)
Chair, YDA Labor Caucus
AFSCME

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