By Elce Redmond

The campaign in Chicago to save Brach’s Candy Company was a fight that began on the shop floor but quickly became something much larger. That struggle eventually led me all the way to Côte d’Ivoire, where I investigated child slave labor in the cocoa fields supplying the candy industry.

What started as a battle to defend union jobs in one neighborhood became part of a global fight against corporate exploitation. And that’s the lesson: local campaigns can ignite international resistance.

That fight and others like it have taken me far beyond my home in Chicago, across six of the seven continents, chasing the roots of injustice, exposing how far corporate greed reaches, and standing shoulder to shoulder with workers rising up across borders.

Crushing middle-class jobs

It started in a cramped neighborhood meeting hall when I was a community organizer and a group of Brach’s workers walked in and dropped the bomb: the century-old candy maker planned to outsource 3,500 union jobs to Mexico. For the West Side of Chicago, where Brach’s had been a steady engine of living-wage jobs and a rare path to the middle class, the announcement was a gut punch.

A company that sweetened childhoods and kept mortgages paid was now threatening to turn whole blocks into economic rubble.

The decision came from far away and high above, made by Klaus Jacobs, a Swiss billionaire with the power to gut a community with a single press release. His bet: that one neighborhood couldn’t touch him. We decided to prove him wrong.

Building a local storm

The first move was classic street-level organizing. We called Teamsters Local 738 the same night we found out. Within days, an alliance of unions, neighborhood groups, clergy, researchers, and sympathetic academics was hammering out a plan. We staged rallies that filled streets, packed city council chambers with resolutions, and put Brach’s on the defensive.

Brach’s was part of a sprawling multinational corporation, and the threat didn’t end at the factory fence. To confront Klaus Jacobs’s global reach, we had to lift the struggle off the shop floor and turn it into an international campaign.

Following the chocolate trail

Research became a weapon. We traced Jacobs’s empire and found he owned Barry Callebaut, the world’s dominant cocoa processor controlling 60 percent of the market quietly sitting in his portfolio. That discovery opened a third front: international pressure.

Teamster allies abroad joined the fight. When Jacobs moved to buy a candy company in Argentina, I flew there with the president of the Chicago Federation of Labor and the strategic campaign director of the Teamsters to meet local unions and owners. Solidarity travels faster than capital expected, and the deal collapsed.

Then came a darker revelation. One Barry Callebaut contractor in Côte d’Ivoire relied on child slave labor: Malian kids as young as 10, sold or lured with false promises, were being forced to harvest cocoa in brutal conditions. I went there on my own dime to hear their stories. Heartbreaking doesn’t cover it. Their testimonies ripped the sugarcoating off Jacobs’s brand.

Corporate counterpunch and the bitter end

There were other human rights and anti-slavery groups in the trenches with me, and together we pooled our investigations into one blistering report aimed at the entire chocolate candy industry. Yet all that collective effort ran headlong into the Harkin–Engel Protocol, a slick Washington bill that effectively legalized slavery by allowing the candy giants to police themselves and effectively buried any push for real reform, a pretty devastating defeat after a lot of hard work.

Jacobs also turned to lawfare, slapping our coalition with a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) to bleed us dry and scare us silent. It dragged on for years, shaking families and finances. We won in the end, but Brach’s still closed. Other companies copied Brach’s playbook. The West Side bled jobs and despair.

Lessons that outlasted the factory

We lost the plant, but not the fight’s meaning. A neighborhood defense morphed into a global campaign that exposed child slavery, blocked corporate expansion, and proved that workers and communities can punch far above their ZIP codes.

The Brach’s battle is a warning and a map. It shows how local deindustrialization links to global exploitation, and how research, international solidarity, and street-level grit can rattle even billionaires.

The next struggle whether over logistics warehouses or AI data mines will need the same mix of relentless ground game and worldwide alliances. Candy may have been the product, but the real commodity was power. And every ounce of pressure we brought still echoes, a reminder that communities don’t have to swallow the bitter taste of capital without a fight.

Local pressure, global impact

When you organize at the local level, you’re not just pushing back against one company or institution; you’re confronting a global system.

EWOC helps workers understand something fundamental: our fights aren’t just local skirmishes. They’re part of a global resistance against a system that thrives on exploitation everywhere.

When you fight for paid time-off, fair schedules, or basic dignity at work, you’re not pleading for benevolence from the boss, you’re confronting a global system that runs on keeping you overworked, underpaid, and unheard.

If capitalists don’t care about genocide in the Congo, where millions have died so they can control the minerals powering our phones and Zoom meetings, why would they care about giving you a living wage or health care you can actually use?

They don’t. Not unless we organize, fight, and force them to.

The fight begins at home

The same system that trafficks children for cocoa in West Africa, fuels war for tech minerals, and crushes labor rights here at home is one machine.

Whether you work in logistics, tech, retail, or health care, you’re in that fight.

Our power lies in knowing that, organizing around it, and refusing to be divided.