Jerry Greenfield, co-founder of the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream brand, has stepped down from the company he started 47 years ago citing a retreat from its campaigning spirit under parent company Unilever.
Greenfield wrote in an open letter late Tuesday night — shared on X by his co-founder Ben Cohen — that he could no longer “in good conscience” remain an employee of the company and said the company had been “silenced.”
He said the company’s values and campaigning work on “peace, justice, and human rights” allowed it to be “more than just an ice cream company” and said the independence to pursue this was guaranteed when Anglo-Dutch packaged food giant Unilever bought the brand in 2000 for $326 million.
Cohen’s statement didn’t mention Israel’s ongoing military operation in Gaza, but Ben & Jerry’s has been outspoken on the treatment of Palestinians for years and in 2021 withdrew sales from Israeli settlements in what it called “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
Sort of… The workers got paid already. Sure they could gift the business to the workers I guess.
The workers were not paid what they generated in value, they were paid just enough to make them do the work reliably without leaving. The excess value they made went into growing the business and employing yet more workers, which increased the value of the business tremendously. At the end, all of that extra value went to Ben & Jerry at the sale, not the workers who made that transfer of wealth possible.
Ben & Jerry did not personally contribute 325 million dollars worth of labor into the company, they decided to take that excess value for themselves.
If hypothetically Ben & Jerry’s had been a worker owned coop from the start, if they had decided to sell it in 2000 for 325 million, that money would’ve been split amongst all of the workers fairly evenly, and all of them would’ve been made very wealthy from their collective labor, instead of only two people.