Date of publication: June 8, 2011
Source: New York Daily News
By Tori Ackerman
Hershey's sweet candy bars have a bitter origin in West Africa - one involving kid labor, protesters outside the chocolate giant's Times Square store charged Wednesday.
The demonstrators accused the confection king of welshing on its vow 10 years ago to eliminate using child laborers in their West African cocoa farms. Hershey's is lagging behind its competitors who have already improved regulations on workers, they said.
"I think that it's time to end all the empty promises," said Tim Newman, an activist with the International Labor Rights Forum. "Right now we know that hundreds of thousands of kids in Ghana and the Ivory Coast are still working in hazardous conditions."