What happened recently at the Hershey candy factory, in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, has to be considered one of the weirdest and most outrageous labor stories of the new year.
First the outrageous part. According to a story in the New York Times (February 21), Exel, the logistics company hired by Hershey to oversee its Palmyra operation, was found guilty by OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) of intentionally failing to report 42 serious injuries in the plant over a period of four years. Those 42 accidents constituted 43-percent of all such injuries that occurred during that period…
… And now for the weird part. According to that NYT story, many of these employees were student workers here in the U.S. on an “international cultural exchange program,” recruited by SHS Staffing Solutions, the subcontractor hired by Exel (the contractor hired by Hershey), to man up the operation. Apparently, Exel was using hundreds of these foreign workers to do the heavy lifting.
Which raises several questions. For one thing, what sort of “international cultural exchange program” involves the participants doing manual labor in a factory? What is so “culturally beneficial” about heaving cases of Kit-Kat candy bars on the graveyard shift at a Hershey plant? And if it’s an “exchange” program, does this mean it’s a two-way street? Are an equal number of Americans traveling to foreign countries to do this kind of work? Are American students volunteering to spend summer vacations working in Ukrainian salt mines? If so, it’s the first we’ve heard of it…