The candy giant is just the latest big name to throw the corporate union-busting playbook at its fed up workers.
By
There’s a bittersweet battle taking place in Stuarts Draft,
Virginia.Randi Hagi/WMRA
Workers at the Hershey Company’s
second-largest factory are seeking to unionize.
In response, the candy manufacturing giant is throwing the full force of the
corporate union-busting playbook at them.
The Virginia plant employs about 1,300 people,
none of whom are sharing in the record profits reaped
during a pandemic when Americans ate their weight in candy.
Hershey now stands accused of mistreating
the workers who made that possible. Employees are speaking out about
grueling hours, company surveillance, and harsh retaliation. Some even refer to
the factory as the “Hershey Prison.”
One woman named Janice Taylor told the labor outlet More Perfect Union that she had to work for 72 consecutive days. “I was exhausted both physically and mentally,” she said.
Other Stuarts Draft workers are leaving
reviews of their workplace on Indeed.com,
reporting that exhausted employees “walk around like zombies.” One says they
had to miss their daughter’s graduation because they couldn’t get two hours
off. “Most weeks you work seven days and it’s hard to get a day off,” another
explains. “Really hard if you have a family.”
“You don’t get to have a life,” warns
another. You just “work until you drop.”
Another common complaint is that Hershey
has created a two-tier system at the factory, where newer workers are paid less
and have significantly fewer benefits.
It’s no wonder the Hershey workers in
Stuarts Draft voted to hold union elections to join the Bakery, Confectionery,
Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM). Hershey has vocally opposed the effort,
holding “captive audience” meetings telling workers to vote against the union
and even saying in job listings that
Stuarts Draft is a “Non-Union plant.”
The company’s opposition to the union
drive is puzzling. Since 1938, workers at Hershey’s original Pennsylvania
factory have been unionized under the same union, BCTGM Local 464. But Hershey opposes its Virginia
workers having similar rights.
The company even created a website, WeAreHersheySD.com, that tells Stuarts Draft employees that the BCTGM — the same union
their Pennsylvania colleagues are members of — is not their “friend.” The
website also warns about the
possibility of strikes costing employees wages.
The site fails to mention that striking
BCTGM workers at Kellogg’s just
won a new five-year contract ending the same two-tiered pay system the Stuarts
Draft workers want to end.
This Hershey union effort is part of a
growing trend among workers at big-name companies like Starbucks and Amazon. A
successful unionization vote at
one Starbucks location in Buffalo, New York, has now sparked similar efforts at
more than 70 Starbucks stores in 20 states.
Workers in Bessemer, Alabama, are redoing a union
vote that Amazon had illegally interfered in. Even museums like
the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim are seeing union
activity.
And in early February, the Biden
administration issued a set of recommendations “to
promote worker organizing and collective bargaining” — a far cry from the
blatantly anti-union posture of
Biden’s predecessor.
Hershey enjoys a reputation for being a just company.
It runs a private school for
low-income children in Pennsylvania. Its CEO Michele Buck has boasted about
its commitment to sustainability, social responsibility, and human rights.
In an online talk last year, Buck even said that her
company was focused on “the well-being of our employees,” including “their
emotional well-being and their economic well-being.”
The company’s union-busting shows that
talk is just sugarcoating. But if Hershey’s won’t guarantee dignity, safety,
and fairness, maybe its workers will do it for them.
is the host of “Rising
Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show on Free
Speech TV and Pacifica stations. This commentary was produced by the Economy for
All project at the Independent Media Institute and adapted by
OtherWords.org.