The Sweetness In The Chocolate Comes From Pain

You give these Moldovans a chance and what do you get? Trouble. What's a little back pain against the opportunity to learn the American way, from the ground up? Literally.

I was at Hershey Park not long ago with a few of my kids and I know they have an orphanage or something up there too. It's a foundation type set up. So I'm surprised to hear this.

But then I got to the part where big companies hire temporary foreign workers to save money on taxes and social security. And then I wasn't surprised anymore.

A Moldovan student on a State Department foreign exchange program wrote the department a pleading e-mail complaining of the working conditions at a Hershey packing factory, The New York Times' Julia Preston reports.

"Pleas hellp," Tudor Ureche, a college student who was participating in the U.S. government's J-1 visa program, wrote in the email. He added that he was suffering from severe back pain from the work, and that his bosses said his temporary visa would be revoked if he complained.

Ureche never received a response. But two months later, at least 200 foreign exchange students walked out of the Pennsylvania factory in protest, saying they spent thousands of dollars to pay for their cultural exchange visa only to end up in grueling factory jobs. (The factory packed Hershey's candy, but was operated by a subcontractor.)

Cetusa, the group that the government paid to organize the students' stay in America, responded to the negative attention garnered by the protest by "arranging for students to have a paid week off from the plant and by paying for two trips to historic sites in Pennsylvania," Preston writes. "The Hershey Company hosted a daylong visit to its headquarters so students could learn about its business strategies."

Critics of J-1 visas are using the incident to argue that the exchange program, created during the height of the Cold War to spread American values abroad, is now being exploited by employers who want cheap labor. (Employers save on Social Security and other taxes when they employ temporary foreign workers).

[yahoo! news]