Report of the August 2011 Human Rights Delegation to Hershey, Pennsylvania

A few weeks ago, ImmigrationProf reported on some serious allegations of mistreatment of foreign student workers by the Hershey Co.  A delegation of academics prepared an investigatory report of the charges.  See Download Human Rights Delegation Report on Pennsylvania J-1 Workers

The Report Authors are listed as

Colleen P. Breslin, Reuschlein Clinical Teaching Fellow, Villanova University School of Law, Pennsylvania

Stephanie Luce, Associate Professor of Labor Studies, Murphy Institute, City University of New York, New York

Beth Lyon, Professor of Law, Villanova University School of Law, Pennsylvania

Sarah Paoletti, Practice Associate Professor and Director of the Transnational Legal Clinic University of Pennsylvania Law School, Pennsylvania

Contributing Editors

Fran Ansley, Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus, University of Tennessee College of Law, Tennessee

William Quigley, Professor of Law and Director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, Louisiana

Here is an outline of the allegations from teh Executive Summary:

Between May and June 2011, approximately 400 foreign students from countries such as China, Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, Mongolia, Romania, Ghana, Thailand, and others, arrived in Pennsylvania through the United States’ Summer Student Travel/Work Program. The students all contracted through agencies in their home countries with the Council for Educational Travel, USA (CETUSA) to work for The Hershey Company packing chocolates at Hershey’s Eastern Distribution Center, III, in Palmyra, PA. The students came eager to participate in the educational and cultural exchange promised. The program that brought them to the United States is often referred to as the J-1 program, named for the visa issued by the U.S. Department of State that allows students to travel to the United States and to obtain short-term employment that will both expose them to the daily life of individuals living in the United States, and allow them to earn income to travel and see the country.

According to these J-1 students, the living and working conditions that they faced in Hershey fell far short of the program’s promise. The students described being employed in a packing factory, working at punishing speeds under abusive supervision in physically grueling work, that – after deductions were taken for housing and other employment-related costs – netted them a first week’s salary as low as $20 for the week. Students described the distress they experienced as the  weeks went by and they realized their income would clearly be inadequate to cover the costs of the program much less fund the travel and cultural exchange activity that had drawn most of them to the program in the first place. Further, the students told of finding themselves encased in a confusing web of contractual relationships set up among a group of corporations whose interwoven roles were difficult to unravel and where accountability seemed elusive at best. As students explained it, they worked packing products made by one company, inside a warehouse run by another, while technically employed by yet another company that withheld their rent money and funneled it to their “cultural exchange sponsoring agency” which in turn paid it over to private landlords.

KJ