Avoid Hershey's on Halloween (and every other day)

This Halloween, I'm sure many trick-or-treaters will find their bags filled with lots of Hershey's chocolate. But please don't be one of the people who give that junk away.

I stopped buying and eating Hershey's chocolate last year, when I learned (and reported) that they were closing a candy factory in Reading, Pennsylvania, and moving 260 jobs to Mexico instead.

Now, in a Care2 human rights blog post, Beth Buczynski gives us three more good reasons to boycott Hershey's:

Sourcing

Much of Hershey's cocoa is sourced from West Africa, a region plagued by sourced labor, human trafficking, and abusive child labor. Hershey does not have a system in place to ensure that its cocoa purchased from this region is not tainted by labor rights abuses.

Priorities

While Hershey's CEO received an $8 million compensation package in 2009, many of the farmers who grow cocoa in Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana that ends up in Hershey products are barely able to cover their costs, and as a result, use unpaid child labor and even forced labor on their farms.

Greenwashing

Hershey points to various charitable donations to children in the US and programs in West Africa as examples of its social responsibility, yet has no policies in place to ensure that the cocoa used in its products is not produced with forced, trafficked, or child labor.

These points were derived from a recent report by Global Exchange, in conjunction with Green America, the International Labor Rights Forum, and Oasis USA. And they are just the tip of the iceberg.

Learn more:

>> Read the full report (PDF): Time to Raise the Bar

Hershey moves 260 U.S. jobs to Mexico

Life is not so sweet these days for workers at the Hershey candy factory in Reading, Pennsylvania, where they make York peppermint patties and other treats.

After 23 years in Reading, Hershey is moving 260 jobs to Mexico to take advantage of the cheaper labor south of the border.

This is exactly the kind of thing we do not need in the current economic climate. We need to see companies putting Americans back to work, not giving more of our jobs away to our cheaper foreign counterparts.

President Obama's proposed budget would end tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs to other countries. If, of course, the Republicans let that happen. Meantime, however, it's too late for all those men and women who spent more than two decades making those wonderful peppermint patties.

The cost of labor will go down, but surely the price of a peppermint patty will stay the same. The profits can then make the rich corporate executives even richer.

It seems that the American dream today is available only to the rich.