Hershey’s Chocolate Workers in Virginia Are Unionizing
Some 1,300 workers at Hershey’s Virginia candy manufacturing plant are voting on whether to unionize. It’s the latest chapter in nearly a century of vicious anti-union skulduggery — and workers’ determined efforts to organize — at the chocolate giant.
Workers at the Hershey’s candy manufacturing plant in Stuarts Drafts, Virginia, recently described the factory as “Hershey prison.” (Mjimages / Pixabay)
Around 100 years ago, Ignazio Romanucci, a machine operator at Milton Hershey’s chocolate plant in Pennsylvania, was fed up. Pay was too low and the conditions were “terrible,” with machinery producing deafening noise and temperatures in the roasting rooms reaching “well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit,” writes Michael D’Antonio in his biography of Hershey.
Even more grating than the physical strains of the job was the disrespect workers endured from management, which in a company town like Hershey, Pennsylvania, governed almost every aspect of a worker’s life.
“We were considered part of the machinery while we were working,” said Romanucci. “Just labor, that’s what we were, dumbos.”
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