Watch this video.
Or read this article.
WTF America?
From the second link above:
Wow Hershey! A WHOLE week off! A day of education? Really??
This is Third World shit. Near slave labor.
Fuck you Hershey. You should be ashamed.
Recently discussed in MPSIMS.
ETA:
Not that i want to discourage your Pitting; just thought you might be interested.
And their chocolate sucks.
I was thinking of posting this in MPSIMS then decided to post here. I did a quick and dirty search in this forum and thought is was fresh(ish).
If Mods want to close this feel free.
Yeah I want to rant but the MPSIMS thread is apparently more developed.
Up to you…I am cool with it either way.
I don’t want to come off as Marxist, but capitalism depends on exploitation to work. Unless you have a product or service for which there is a lot of demand and not much competition, the only way to make a profit is to cheap out on suppliers and/or workers. That’s where the profit margin lies, bottom line. You either exploit or be exploited. Granted, some forms of exploitedness can be lucrative, but it’s nothing compared to what the exploiters are getting off of them.
chocolate?
just because it is brown does not mean it is chocolate…
I forgot the other path to profit, which is to dupe someone into paying more than the product or service is worth, which is really just another form of exploitation, anyway.
Fail.
Another classic road to profit is governmental subsidies or controls. A lot of times these are zero sum games (for instance, railroad right of way giveaways or current food subsidies,) but sometimes these both create a barrier to entry which creates good profits and helps consumers, for instance, doctors’ licensing. While I think that we need to help create more doctors because even if we have truly universal health care there would still be people going without due to lack of doctors, I don’t think the way to go about that it to let just anyone call themselves a medical doctor without any licensing requirements. Some say this is getting the government to clamp down on capitalism in order to gain great income for the current doctors, others say that this is to protect the consumers, I think it’s a little bit of both.
I was waiting to see the Hershey CEO quoted as saying, “It’s my way or the highway!”
Elucidate.
Uh… why should Hershey’s be ashamed for giving them a week off?
Capitalism doesn’t require exploitation. All it requires is the same basics of trade that we all learn in grade school social studies.
I can make 20lbs of chocolate an hour. I’m good at it, and I have a good process. By the same token, I can make one shirt an hour.
You, like the average person in Analogyland, can only make 5lbs of chocolate an hour, for whatever reason, but damn with the needles boy, you can make four shirts an hour.
So at some point, we trade–I give you 10lbs of chocolate, and you give me two shirts. And wouldn’t you know it, we BOTH think we’ve traded a half-hour of work and got products worth two hours of work in exchange. Profit!
Add in a medium of exchange (read: money) and a few more people, and bam–capitalism.
The problem inherent in capitalism is when I get a bunch of guys and teach them all my 20lbs-per-hour chocolate technique if they work for me. If I let them take home 19lbs of chocolate every hour they work, and keep one for myself as payment for inventing the method and knowing who to buy the supplies from, I get pretty well off and they are almost as well off as they would be if I were out of the picture–and nearly 4 times better off than they would have been without me.
If I, on the other hand, take 14lbs of their hourly production each, then I get mega-rich and they’re exploited (only taking home a little more than they would on their own, even though they’re producing far more).
As nearly as I can tell, because it’s alleged that Hershey’s is violating the terms of the work-study program that got these exchange students over here in the first place, and relying on the fact that they’re foreign students to prevent them from complaining about systematic labor violations–and then trying to smooth all that over with “a week of vacation”.
But Hershey doesn’t run the plant; the students are employed by a subcontractor.
Right. It’s out of their chocolate-stained hands.
The article does not give enough details to determine if the wages were “slave” level or not. It only says that the students didn’t think they earned enough, they didn’t like lifting 50 lb boxes, and they didn’t like working the graveyard shift. Pardon me if I wait until the results of the investigation are available before buying into the OP’s claims, which are, at this point, unsubstantiated.
However, I do agree that Hershey’s so-called chocolate sucks.
It is less the actual wage (which looks like minimum wage to me) than forcing the students to pay the company to work there which makes their net take home laughable (bolding below it mine).
According to the article linked in the other thread, the workers were there for all of two months, so yeah, a week and a day off seems pretty generous, actually.
There’s probably something wrong with the program in the first place if the jobs students get can’t even pay their expenses. But I don’t see where Hershey or Exel has treated them badly by a long shot.
You mean besides stealing their money?