The progressive ice cream maker makes a profit over false claims to be ethically sourced.
By World Israel News Staff
Woke ice cream giant Ben & Jerry’s is being sued for its use of child labor, which runs counter to its “pompous virtue-signaling” and wholly misrepresents its ethical commitments to consumers, the lawsuit claimed.
Ben & Jerry’s involvement with child labor comes on the heels of a settlement with its parent company, Unilever, over the sale of the ice cream’s distribution rights in Israel, which the pro-Palestinian ice cream maker had hoped to scuttle.
While the chair of its board, Anuradha Mittal, continued to slam Israel relentlessly on Twitter, she remained silent about the child labor issue.
A New York Times expose published last month found that Ben & Jerry’s dairy facilities exploit migrant child laborers, often for dangerous factory jobs that has even led to the loss of limbs, despite the ice cream company’s declared mission to “honor and stand with” migrants.
The children “described jobs that were grinding them into exhaustion, and fears that they had become trapped in circumstances they never could have imagined,” the report said.
Plaintiff Dovid Tyrnauer filed a federal class action lawsuit against Ben & Jerry’s in New York, saying the company sets itself apart from its competitors with the claim that its ice cream is driven by ethics and not only profit.
“While Ben & Jerry’s purports to use ethical supply chains and professes concern about farmworker welfare, the reality could not be further from the truth. Migrant child labor is used in Ben & Jerry’s supply chains,” the lawsuit claimed according to The Times of Israel. “Ben & Jerry’s wishes to have its ice cream and eat it too. It wishes to sell premium priced products with pompous virtue-signaling representations regarding its supposedly ethical sourcing, all the while migrant child labor is used in its supply chains. Put simply, this is a case about greed run amok.”
“The premiums that consumers pay for allegedly ethically-sourced products, in this instance, are not justified and constitute a breach of consumer trust through the misrepresentations,” the lawsuit said.
The social justice warriors at the helm of the ice cream giant have a long record of leveraging the brand for their political activism, with the release of new flavors for a range of causes du jour from climate change, same sex marriage, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter.
Ben & Jerry’s announcement that it would no longer offer its products “in occupied Palestinian territory” was hailed as a victory for the BDS movement.
The move prompted Unilever’s stock prices to plunge, with losses estimated at around $26 billion, and several U.S. states divesting their pension funds from Unilever in line with anti-BDS laws — totaling an additional $1 billion.
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