Child slavery is a huge problem in the chocolate industry: they are unpaid, uneducated, stolen from their homes, used by their families, beaten, abused, starved...the list goes on. But what about those that depend on working on cocoa plantations for a living? Many who work on the cocoa bean plantations make much less money than they deserve. Because the Fair Trade regulation is not implemented in the majority of plantations in Africa, most laborers do not earn a sufficient amount of money to make a living and support a family. In the United States, the minimum wage law is set in place to ensure that all working citizens are paid a fair and decent amount of money by the hour. Not having a system like the minimum wage law and Fair Trade regulation allows employers and officials in charge of the cocoa plantations to exploit their employees and treat them unfairly. Without a government law set in place forcing people to treat their workers a certain way, it is highly unlikely that officials/employers do the ethical thing by doing what's right even if there isn't someone on the side telling them to.
It is because of this reason that most families end up taking their children out of school to help work on the cocoa plantations, depriving their kids of education. At its worst, parents end up selling their children to slave traffickers for $50-$100 because they cannot support themselves, let alone an entire family.
