Name: Arlo Scherr

Social Justice Group: 2021-2022, International Workers Rights

Date of Fieldwork: February 24, 2022

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Ayn Riggs, founder of Slave Free Chocolate

Type of Fieldwork: Interview

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork?[:: :

On February 24th, our group met with Ayn Riggs the Founder and Director of Slave Free Chocolate. Slave Free Chocolate brings awareness to labor issues and child slavery in the chocolate industry, Slave Free Chocolate also lists chocolate companies that treat their workers ethically and releases them publicly for companies and consumers to use.

Ayn talked with us about the way companies exploit laws and loopholes in order to keep using child laborers while technically keeping inside the bounds of the law. She specifically talked about the self-monitoring system that chocolate companies were supposed to follow in order to make sure there wasn´t any child labor in their companies. Companies often abused this system and reported false facts and hid the labor issues in their company. Major organizations like Nestle and Hershey were the main false claimers though there are many other chocolate companies responsible for this. In our previous Interview with Lauren Jackson, she mentioned that we should interview a representative for Tony Chocoloney.

Tony Chocoloney is a Dutch chocolate company that claims to be 100% percent slave-free, but Ayn revealed to us that Tony Chocoloney did in fact use child and forced laborers, and also worked with major chocolate companies who abused their workers. Even the actual chocolate they produced was actually from Barry Callebeaut a major chocolate company which was known to mistreat their workers. This was very shocking to me and it helped me open my eyes and not trust all of the information I was given.