Sorry to scare you, but on Halloween much of the chocolate Americans will hand out to trick-or-treaters will be tainted by the labor of enslaved children.
Big Chocolate’s Child Slavery Addiction
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Labor Rights
The Art of Extraction
The teacher assembles a collection of chocolate-chip cookies and toothpicks. This is how the elementary school children are supposed to learn about the costs associated with coal mining. Each cookie is a mining property. The students each receive $19 in play money, which they use to buy these properties. They examine the cookies closely to determine which ones to buy. They map their cookies. They buy mining equipment in the form of paperclips and toothpicks. Each minute spent extracting a chocolate chip costs $1. The chips that they do not surreptitiously eat can be sold for $2 apiece. When they are finished, the students must restore their property to its original condition using only their tools, a process that also costs money. Only after this labor can they determine their profits — and the costs of the mining process.
Can Migrants Save the Global Economy?
The global economic crisis has devastated workers around the world, none more than migrants whose daily wages are dependent on the whims of global financiers. Witness Dubai. Even before the meltdown of Dubai World, migrants whose labor literally built Dubai from the ground up suffered serious job losses with the onset of the global recession in 2008.
May Day Fails its Promise to Workers
Virtually no one in the United States celebrates May Day. Yet International Workers’ Day all started here, and we continue to export the violence faced by the workers it commemorates. Workers who sew our clothes, grow our flowers, and mine the metals used in our cars and cell phones are still experiencing the same problems confronted by U.S. workers a century ago.
Trading on Terror to Profit a Few
Even as Congress has finally begun a serious debate about whether U.S. troops should be withdrawn from Iraq, another part of President Bush’s "war on terror" is advancing with far less public fanfare. Last month, the Senate Finance Committee approved the implementation of the U.S.-Oman Free Trade Agreement and cleared the way for its consideration by Congress.