San Francisco-based human rights organization Global Exchange and Harrington Investments, today presented a resolution to create a board-level human rights committee at the Hershey's Corporation.

In response to media exposes and the resulting public outcry starting eight years ago, in 2000, the House of Representatives passed legislation that would require slave-free labels on all chocolate products. In lieu of this legislation, Hershey's and other major chocolate manufacturers signed the voluntary Harkin-Engel Protocol, in which they committed to certifying cocoa as free of the worst forms of child labor by July 2005. When industry missed this deadline, it extended the deadline to July, 2008 and is set to miss the deadline once again. The resolution seeks to create a forum for the board to address these issues.

"As shareholders, we were quite surprised to see Hershey's board recommend against a resolution that would help them protect children," said Adrienne Fitch-Frankel, Economic Justice Campaigner for Global Exchange.

As part of making shareholders aware of the importance of this resolution, Global Exchange distributed Hershey's kisses with an extension to the iconic white tag with blue print. The extensions, which resemble the Hershey's tags, featured quotes from government and media reports documenting child slavery, such as "Twenty-nine percent of the child workers surveyed in [Ivory Coast] reported that they were not free to leave their place of employment should they so wish. (Report by International Labor Organization, 2002)" and "We left our country only because of money...We have become slaves because of cocoa. --Slavery: A Global Investigation (UK Channel 4)." The kisses were created by Boston-based visual artist/teacher Kassandra Derby. "It's so innocent just to have a small Hershey's kiss. It is hard to imagine that something so small and tasty could have such a huge impact on the lives of so many children who are at risk of abusive child labor in producing countries. Voting on Global Exchange's shareholders resolution also seems like a small choice, but it can have a big impact on ending suffering for hundreds of thousands of children," said Derby.