Coca-Cola: Classic Union Buster..... still

[Omaha Steve]

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http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/3698/1/195/

By Joel Wendland

6-26-06, 11:30 am

The "Coke side of life" is not paradise for thousands of Coke workers or the many communities forced to give up land and water resources to the multinational giant. Anger at the company’s practices have led to an international campaign to decrease Coca-Cola’s market share to punish the company for ongoing complicity in human, environmental and workers’ rights abuses in Colombia, India, Peru, Nicaragua, Chile and numerous other countries. One major organizer of this campaign, the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, is working with labor and students around the country to block Coke’s access to college campuses, public schools, union halls and other venues and to publicize Coke’s role in human rights abuses.

Ray Rogers, director of the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, described the origins of this broad campaign in a recent telephone interview with Political Affairs. The main impetus for the current international campaign against Coke was the assassination and intimidation of members of the SINALTRAINAL union that organized workers at Coke-controlled FEMSA bottling plants in Colombia. Paramilitaries have assassinated a number of union members and leaders since 1990. It is widely understood that the killers are friendly with the bottling plant managers who want to rid the plant of the union in order to boost their power over workers and their bottom line.

Between 1990 and 2002, seven SINALTRAINAL leaders were assassinated, and in 2005, three members of the families of hunger strikers were murdered for protesting workers’ rights violations and human rights abuses. In addition, one plant manager who expressed sympathy for the workers was also killed. Indeed, a fact-finding mission led by New York City council member Hiram Monserrat in January 2004 to Colombia found that Coke managers are responsible for at least 179 incidents of human rights violations. This mission also described collusion by paramilitary groups listed on the State Department’s "terrorist" list and Coke plant managers and those of other corporations as "an open secret in Colombia" that have led to the murders of about 4,000 union members since 1986.

These killings and the subsequent failure of the company to investigate or even address the problem, Rogers stated, led to a 2001 USW and International Labor Rights Fund organized lawsuit under the Alien Tort Claims Act in conjunction with SINALTRAINAL against Coca-Cola for "complicity" in these anti-union attacks on SINALTRAINAL members. Absent any agreement on Coke’s part to use its power to stop the violence and in the face of evidence that Coke ignored pleas by SINALTRAINAL leaders to intervene to stop the actions of the plant managers in the facilities they partially own and hold enormous power over, the call for a boycott arose.

Labor’s Role in the Campaign

Rogers expressed the need to be sensitive to concerns of the 18,000 workers who earn their livings by driving trucks that carry Killer Coke products that a boycott would harm them. Still, Rogers added, large sections of labor have sided with the campaign to stop Killer Coke. Some Teamsters locals, the men and women who drive the trucks that carry Coke products, have endorsed the objectives of the campaign to force Coke to address it role in human and workers’ rights violations in plants under its control. Members of the Teamsters joined a protest called by the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke at the company’s annual meeting in Wilmington, Delaware last April.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) endorsed the campaign at its recent national convention. Several SEIU locals in California, New York and other states have gotten rid of the Coke machines in their local union halls. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the United Steel Workers have endorsed the boycott.

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