Coke, Violence and Corporate Responsibility by risa
“One of the most famous international labor solidarity campaigns focused on Coca Cola in Guatemala in the 1980s when U.S. and European groups pressured Coca-Cola to take responsibility for ending violence against trade union leaders at a bottling plant. Several of the union’s executive committee members were murdered during a violent labor conflict that included an occupation of the factory. The violence ended and the labor conflict was settled when Coca-Cola finally brought in a new franchise operator who then negotiated a settlement with the union.” US/Leap
“Since 1989, eight union leaders have been assassinated at Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia. According to a statement from the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke in New York: “Hundreds of other Coke workers have been tortured, kidnapped and/or illegally detained by violent paramilitaries, often working closely with plant managements.” As more light is shed on these incidents, a coalition of students and labour
activists seeking to end the violence is growing in both numbers and influence. To challenge the bloody repression of union activists in Colombia, this movement is hitting the Atlanta-based beverage company
where it hurts: right on the profit margin.”
“Student governments on college campuses in the United States and abroad have passed resolutions urging their administrations to divest from Coca-Cola; schools such as Bard College (New York), Lake Forest College (Illinois), and Oberlin College (Ohio), among many others, have campus-wide bans on Coke products, meaning that no function of the school can enter into a contract with the company or sell the product on campus. There are already rumblings about bans in the works at the nation’s largest schools, such as the University of Michigan, New York University, and Rutgers University (New Jersey). One of Italy’s largest universities and three Irish colleges are onboard.”
(…)
“It really caught people by surprise,” said Andrea Coronil of The Coke Coalition at the University of Michigan. “I think the fact that, independent of any student organisations, there are thousands of people mobilising in Colombia, putting their lives on the line. I think that kind of visibility has inspired students.”
The student government, highlighting Michigan’s Code of Conduct which stipulates that the university has the duty to cut contracts with companies guilty of human rights crimes voted to urge the school to respect the ban. But the administration is stalling, Coronil said.
(…)
US involvement in Colombia is deep-rooted. Since the US started building up the frontlines in the “war on drugs” during Ronald Reagan’s administration in the 1980s, Colombia has become a primary focus of US
Latin American foreign and security policy and for the US crusade against the global narcotics trade.
In the summer of 2000, President Bill Clinton signed a $1.3 billion aid package called “Plan Colombia” into law. Colombia now receives more annual US military aid than any other nation, except for Israel and
Egypt.
(…)
The US maintains 800 troops and 300 civilian contractors in the country to fight the drug trade. The Colombian military also sends one of Latin America’s largest batches of soldiers to the notorious US army
training facility, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (Whisc – formerly the School of the Americas SOA) at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia.
Declassified Pentagon materials show that the Whisc/Soa has a long history of training Latin American officers in the art of torturing and assassinating non-violent, leftwing activists during the cold war. So this history of intervention affects labour unions in Colombia acutely.
Peter Clark of the US Office on Colombia has noted that Colombia has the highest rate of assassination of trade unionists in the world and that the bulk of them have been carried out by the rightwing paramilitaries. The 2003 report on Colombia published by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) notes: “The State not only fails to prevent such crimes, but also fails to ensure that the perpetrators are brought to justice.”
Coca-Cola has long recognised the violence that has taken place at its Colombian facilities over the last sixteen years. However, it maintains that the crimes are being perpetrated by the paramilitaries
independently and that bottling-plant managers have not been involved.The company, they maintain, is thereby not guilty.
“Colombia is a dangerous place because of its violent internal conflict, which affects union activists and other civilians from all walks of life,” Lori Billingsley, a company spokesperson, told Bloomberg News in March 2005. She noted that the company “has publicly condemned violence in Colombia on multiple occasions,” and is beefing up security at its Colombia bottling plants, according to the news service. The company has maintained that managers and non-union workers at Coca-Cola plants have also been targeted by the paramilitaries, ostensibly indicating that union activists are not being targeted exclusively.
(…)
But the company claims it actively fights the violence. “In addition to publicly condemning violence, our business system actively works with local unions and the Colombian government to provide safety benefits to union members including transportation to and from work, loans for secure housing, loans to improve security of union offices, paid cellular phones for emergency use, shift and job changes, and legal aid and support,” Billingsley said.
Perhaps Coca-Cola falls under particular suspicion because of its record on trades union activity in Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s.
A booklet published by the London-based Latin American Bureau in England says:
“For nine years the 450 workers at the Coca-Cola bottling plant in
Guatemala City fought a battle with their employers for their jobs,
their trade union and their lives. Three times they occupied the plant
- on the last occasion for thirteen months. Three General Secretaries
of their union were murdered and five other workers killed. Four more
were kidnapped and have disappeared.”
A series of international boycotts and protests followed, in which the trade unions were able to secure real advances in their demands of the company, part of a continuous struggle.
(…)
In the particular case of Isidro Segundo Gil, who was killed at his workplace in Carepa by paramilitary forces in December 1996, both Gil’s union (Sinaltrainal) and the United Steelworkers of America (Uswa)
allege that a plant manager directly ordered the murder. The Uswa and the International Labour Rights Fund (ILRF) filed a lawsuit in a US district court in 2001 on Gil and Sinaltrainal’s behalf that seeks to
hold Coca-Cola accountable for any violence directed towards its employees at bottling facilities. The lawsuit states that the company “contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilize extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders.”
(…)
The company continues to stress its innocence, but Rogers claims that Coca-Cola has yet to agree on an independent investigation. While attending a meeting on an impending campus-wide boycott on Coke products with student representatives at Carleton College, a company representative told the group that the company had been exonerated in an independent investigation. The auditor of the case was, however, a
law firm called White and Case, a firm that acts as Coca-Cola’s legal representatives. One of White and Case’s executive partners is on the corporate board of the largest Colombian Coca-Cola bottler and is a defendant in the Uswa/ILRF lawsuit, Rogers said.
Rogers has requested that the White and Case investigation be made public, but Coca-Cola has yet to disclose the findings.
The Uswa/ILRF lawsuit could set an important precedent. If the unions emerge from this case victorious in the US Court, there will be more pressure on companies like Coca-Cola to take more substantial security
measures at their bottling plants in Colombia. It could also prompt companies to pressure the US and Colombian governments to contain paramilitary activity more aggressively. Such pressure from the
influential corporate community might lead to a more substantial review and possible reform of US policy in Colombia.
Rogers is confident that the college campus boycotts will grow. Many individual union locals in the US and abroad recognise the boycott, but now he hopes that the AFL-CIO, the umbrella group for most American
unions, will pull all labour union investments out of the company. And since the Union Theological Seminary in New York may also join the boycott, the possibility arises of bringing the religious community
into the fight against Coca-Cola’s alleged practices in Colombia. “Our campaign is very strong,” he said proudly.
Should the company be concerned about the prospect of more student-led boycotts? Probably. The 18-30 year old demographic is a primary moneymaker for soft-drink companies, according to industry experts.
Coca-Cola’s financial performance has faltered over the last few years. It has lost significant market share to its competitors, it has failed to capitalise on its rival Pepsi’s model of venturing into other industries, and its share price has dropped significantly since 1998.
If boycotts among students and union activists continue, and Coke loses its presence on more college campuses, it could yield devastating numbers for its shareholders, in turn applying further pressure on the
company. A new era of student and citizen activism may have decisive effects in the United States and Colombia alike.
read the full text of this article where it was orginally poseted, on openDemocracy.net
And let’s also think about how these kinds of corporate practices play out in the pursuit of other products: Oil Company Bankrolled Niger Delta Massacres
How does the push for profit and the fragmentation of moral responsibility across a corporate bureaucracy facilitate these strategic attempts to obfuscate real, human violence and suffering? Is there a way this could be otherwise?
September 6th, 2005 at 9:39 pm
I keep hearing about this issue at Berkeley, and no matter what newsletter I’m pointed to, or what concerned student I talk to, no one can give me anything close to solid evidence that Coke’s involved in this stuff.
September 7th, 2005 at 10:59 am
Hey- yeah, it’s tough to know what’s angry rhetoric and what’s real. I found the article on OpenDemocracy quite well researched- although I only quoted the stuff that seemed most solid. Here is another piece of evidence:
“A lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Florida accuses the Coca-Cola Company, its Colombian subsidiary and business affiliates of using paramilitary death squads to murder, torture, kidnap and threaten union leaders at the multinational soft drink manufacturer’s Colombian bottling plants. The suit was filed on July 20 by the United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund on behalf of SINALTRAINAL, the Colombian union that represents workers at Coca-Cola’s Colombian bottling plants; the estate of a murdered union leader; and five other unionists who worked for Coca-Cola and were threatened, kidnapped or tortured by paramilitaries.”
The article goes on, and it’s good- there are claims being made on both sides, and the real evidence will have to be presented in court. But a few pieces stand out:
“According to Terry Collingsworth of the Washington DC-based International Labor Rights Fund and co-counsel for the plaintiffs, “There is no question that Coke knew about, and benefits from, the systematic repression of trade union rights at its bottling plants in Colombia, and this case will make the company accountable.” The plaintiffs are seeking compensation and an end to the human rights abuses committed against Coca-Cola’s employees and union members.”
Among the suit’s many claims is a 1996 incident in which Ariosto Milan Mosquera, plant manager at Bebidas y Alimentos’ bottling facility in Carepa, Colombia, made public pronouncements that “he had given an order to the paramilitaries to carry out the task of destroying the union.” Union members claim that Mosquera often socialized with paramilitary fighters and even provided them with Coca-Cola products for their fiestas. Shortly after Mosquera’s pronouncement, local members of SINALTRAINAL began receiving threats from the paramilitaries.
On September 27, 1996, SINALTRAINAL sent a letter to the Colombian headquarters of both Bebidas y Alimentos and Coca-Cola Colombia informing them of Mosquera’s threats against the union and requesting that they intervene to prevent further human rights abuses against employees and union leaders.
Two and a half months later, on the morning of December 5, 1996, Bebidas y Alimentos employee and local SINALTRAINAL executive board member Isidro Segundo Gil was killed by paramilitaries inside the Carepa bottling plant. The remaining union board members were also threatened with death if they did not leave town. And then, on December 7, the paramilitaries entered the plant and told employees they had three choices: resign from the union, leave Carepa, or be killed. The suit claims the workers were then led into the manager’s office to sign union resignation forms prepared by the company. The union had been successfully busted. ”
and
“the targeting of labor leaders was not limited to the Carepa plant. According to the complaint, union officials at several other Coca-Cola bottling plants were also being threatened and harassed. In 1996, at Panamco’s Bucaramanga plant, local members of SINALTRAINAL went on a 120-hour strike to protest the company’s elimination of employee medical insurance.
After the strike ended, the suit claims, “the chief of security for the Bucaramanga plant, Jose Alejo Aponte, told authorities that he found a bomb in the plant.” He then accused five members of the local SINALTRAINAL executive board of planting the bomb. The five union leaders, three of whom are plaintiffs in this case, were then imprisoned for six months based on charges brought by, according to official documents, “COCA COLA EMBOTELLADORA SANTANDER.”
The union leaders were released six months later when, according to the suit, the regional prosecutor “concluded not only that the Plaintiffs had nothing to do with placing a bomb in the plant as charged, but that there in fact was never a bomb in the plant as the company had claimed.”
http://www.colombiajournal.org/colombia73.htm
I guess I wonder whether a company which is seriously benifiting financially from the political situation in a “foreign’ country might find it easier to turn a blind eye, or to throw up their hands and claim helplessness rather then to do what’s hard but obviously right.
I don’t know what people have been saying around Berkeley, but I think it’s cool that people are talking about this and getting angry on behalf of the murdered workers whether coke employees were directly responsible or not. Both Coke and the murderous paramilitaries deserve to be publicly shamed for this brutal and inhamune chain of behaviors and practices, and drawing them into the public eye with campus-wide boycotts seems a good way to start.
September 7th, 2005 at 11:16 am
Also- Coke in India:
Coca-Cola had sound reasons in zoning in on Plachimada. A rain-shadow region in the heart of Kerala’s water belt, it has large underground water deposits. The site Coca-Cola picked was set between two large reservoirs and ten meters south of an irrigation canal. The ground water reserves had apparently showed up on satellite surveys done by the company’s prospectors. The Coke site is surrounded by colonies where several hundred poor people live in crowded conditions, with an average holding of four-tenths of an acre. Virtually the sole source of employment is wage labor, usually for no more than 100 to 120 days in the year.
Ushered in by Kerala’s present “reform”-minded government, the plant duly got a license from the local council, known as the Perumatty Grama panchayat. Under India’s constitution the panchayats have total discretion in such matters. Coca-Cola bought a property of some 40 acres held by a couple of large landowners, built a plant, sank six bore wells, and commenced operations.
Within six months the villagers saw the level of their water drop sharply, even run dry. The water they did draw was awful. It gave some people diarrhea and bouts of dizziness. To wash in it was to get skin rashes,a burning feel on the skin. It left their hair greasy and sticky. The women found that rice and dal did not get cooked but became hard. A thousand families have been directly affected, and well water affected up to a three or four kilometers from the plant.
The locals, mostly indigenous adivasis and dalits had never had much, after allocation of a bit of land from the true, earth-shaking reforms of Kerala’s Communist government, democratically elected in 1956. And they had had plenty of good water. On April 22, 2002 the locals commenced peaceful agitation and shut the plant down. Responding to popular pressure, the panchayat rescinded its license to Coca-Cola on August 7,2003. Four days later the local Medical Officer ruled that water in wells near the plant was unfit for human use, a judgement reached by various testing labs months earlier.
Today, in a region known as the rice bowl of Kerala, women in Plachimada have to walk a 4-kilometer round trip to get drinkable water, toting the big vessels on hip or their head. Even better-off folk face ruin. One man said he’d been farming eight acres of rice paddy, hiring 20 workers, but now, with no water for the paddy, he survives on the charity of his son-in-law.
The old village wells had formerly gone down to 150 to 200 feet. The company’s bore wells go down to 750 to 1000 feet. As the water table dropped, all manner of toxic matter began to rise too, leaching up to higher levels as the soil dried out.
When the plant was running at full tilt 85 truck loads rolled out of the plant gates, each load consisting of 550 to 600 cases, 24 bottles to the case, all containing Plachimada’s prime asset, water, now enhanced in cash value by Cola’s infusions of its syrups.
Also trundling through the gates came 36 lorries a day, each with six 50-gallon drums of sludge from the plant’s filtering and bottle cleaning processes, said sludge resembling buff-colored puke in its visual aspect, a white-to-yellow granular sauce blended with a darker garnish of blended fabric, insulating material and other fibrous matter, plus a sulphuric acid smell very unpleasing to the nostrils.
Coca Cola was “giving back” to Plachimada, the give-back taking the form of the toxic sludge, along with profuse daily donations of foul wastewater.
The company told the locals the sludge was good for the land and dumped loads of it in the surrounding fields and on the banks of the irrigation canal, heralding it as free fertilizer. Aside from stinking so badly it made old folk and children sick, people coming in contact with it got rashes and kindred infections and the crops which it was supposed to nourish died.
Lab analysis by the Kerala State Pollution Control Board has shown dangerous levels of cadmium in the sludge. Another report done at Exeter University in England at the request of the BBC Radio 4 (whose reporter John Waite visited Plachimada and broadcast his report in July of 2003) found in water in a well near the plant not only impermissible amounts of cadmium but lead at levels that “could have devastating consequences”, particularly for pregnant women. The Exeter lab also found the sludge useless as fertiliser, a finding which did not faze Coca-Cola’s Indian vice-president Sunil Gupta who swore the sludge was “absolutely safe” and “good for crops”.
“What is the use of the Coca-Cola Company,” cried Phulwanti Mhase of Kudus village, in Maharashtra state, where women wash clothes in dirty puddles after Hindustan Coca-Cola built a plant there. “These are outsiders. They take our water, filter it and then resell it to us at a price.”
Phulwanti is cited (in a very useful pamphlet put out by the All India Democratic Women’s Association) as issuing this brisk précis of Marx’s Capital from the vantage point of her teashop from which can be descried the outlines of the plant, which churns out sodas including a mineral water called Kinley. Phulwanti has one bottle of Kinley in her store for people passing through, remarking, “I get angry. This is our water and they sell it to us for 12 rupees, which is what a tribal woman would make for eight hours’ work.”
Taking a leaf out of the self-realization catechism, Coca-Cola flaunts its slogan in Hindi, “Jo chahe ho jahe”, meaning “Whatever you want, happens” , translated by the local women as “Jo Coke chahe ho jahe”, “Whatever Coke wants, happens.”
But not in Plachimada.”
So- peaceful resistance against coke can be minimally effective, but only after your water is ruined, and only if there isn’t already a bustling trade in murder to take advantage of.
That’s my summary based on the things I’ve read and quoted here- obviously not all the facts or opinions involved. I personally don’t imagine a gang of creul, coniving Mr.Burns puppeting paramilitaries and governments around the world. But it does seem very clear that very bad decisions have been made in india, colombia and nicaragua that put the companies bottom line, and the cultural priorities of the wealthy, above the health, safety and well-being of other, equally valuable, human beings and economies.