Business and the Public Affairs of Slavery: A Discursive Approach of an Ethical Public Issue Nicolas M. Dahan Milton Gittens ABSTRACT. This article aims at understanding how ‘‘ethical public issues’’ are created, and dealt within a public arena. Here, we view ethical public issues as social constructs, which are the results of issue framing contests. Such an approach will enable us to understand how ethical public issues emerge and are shaped by strategizing actors (including firms, NGOs, the media, and govern- ments), in an attempt to impose their own definition and preferred solution to the issue. We also propose key factors which explain the success of a framing attempt, and evidence of such success. The empirical case of the labor conditions in West Africa’s cocoa industry is used to illustrate this theoretical framework and methodological approach. KEY WORDS: slavery, labor, discursive strategies, issue framing, ethical public issue, public affairs ABBREVIATIONS: CAOBISCO: European trade asso- ciation of chocolate, biscuit, and confectionary manufac- turers; CMA: US Chocolate Manufacturers Association; IITA: International Institute of Tropical Agriculture; ILO: International Labor Organization; ILRF: International Labor Rights Fund Introduction In 1901, the British chocolate manufacturer Cad- bury became aware of the use of slaves in the Por- tuguese-owned cocoa-supplying plantations on the island of Sao Tome, off West Africa. Satre (2005) described recently the 1909 libel trial in which Cadbury sued the London Standard. The newspaper had publicly criticized the firm for its hypocrisy as it continued to use slave-grown cocoa while pre- tending to deal with the issue. Fast forward to the 2000s: in 2001, the Financial Times reported that ‘‘Chocolate manufacturers such as Nestle ´ and Cad- bury were accused of turning a blind eye to child slavery in the cocoa industry’’ (April 23, 2001, p. 24). These accusations culminated in a California lawsuit, against US chocolate manufacturers in 2005 for their involvement in the use of forced labor to produce chocolate: It is unquestionable that Nestle ´, ADM and Cargill have ignored repeated and well documented warnings over the past several years that the farms they were using to grow cocoa employed child slave laborers. They could have put a stop to it years ago, but chose to look the other way. We had to go to court as a last resort, (July 14, 2005) said Natacha Thys, the International Labor Rights Fund’s attorney in a press release, who filed suit on behalf of a class of Malian children who were forced to work in Ivory Coast plantations. In parallel, Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights group, filed suit against the same firms under California’s unfair business practice law for false or misleading statements (Isern, 2006). Exactly one hundred years later, how could chocolate manufac- turers be back on the same spot, publicly accused of one of the worst instances of unethical behavior? We view this situation as an example of a com- mon phenomenon: public debates grounded in ethical reasoning and rhetoric. A rather similar per- spective was adopted by Radin and Calkins (2006), Everett et al. (2006) as well as Mark-Ungericht and Weiskopf (2007). Radin and Calkins studied the contested notion of ‘‘sweatshops,’’ finding that its definition was highly diverse and debated. Everett, Neu, and Rahaman analyzed the public debate over the practice and notion of corruption, showing that Journal of Business Ethics (2010) 92:227–249 Ó Springer 2009 DOI 10.1007/s10551-009-0151-8