The ballroom at the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware, is the
picture of opulence. Paintings of Greek gods and goddesses peer down
from the walls, lit by two crystal chandeliers the size of Mini Coopers.
It's here in April that the Coca-Cola Company will hold its
stockholders' meeting, an annual exercise designed to boost the
confidence of investors. If the meeting is anything like last year's,
however, it may do the opposite.
As stockholders filed into the room in April 2005, news hadn't been good
for Coke, which has steadily lost market share to rivals. Investors were
eager for reassurance from CEO Neville Isdell, a
patrician Irishman who had recently assumed the top job. Few
in the room, however, were prepared for what happened next. As Isdell
stood at the podium, two long lines formed at the microphones. When he
opened the floor, the first to speak was Ray Rogers, a veteran union
organizer and head of the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke. "I want to know
what [Coke is] going to do to regain the trust and credibility in order
to stop the growing movement worldwide...banning Coke products," boomed
the 62-year-old.
That was just the beginning of a ninety-minute slugfest that the
Financial Times later said "felt more like a student protest rally" than
a stockholders' meeting. One after another, students, labor activists
and environmentalists blasted Coke's international human rights record.
Many focused on Colombia, where Coke has been accused of conspiring with
paramilitary death squads to torture and kill union activists. Others
highlighted India, where Coke has allegedly polluted and depleted
water supplies. Still others called the company to task for causing
obesity through aggressive marketing to children.
In the past two years the Coke campaign has grown into the largest
anticorporate movement since the campaign against Nike for sweatshop
abuses. Around the world, dozens of unions and more than twenty
universities have banned Coke from their facilities, while activists
have dogged the company from World Cup events in London to the Winter
Olympics in Torino. More than just the re-emergence of the corporate
boycott, however, the fight against Coke is a leap forward in
international cooperation. Coke, with its red-and-white swoosh
recognizable everywhere from Beijing to Baghdad, is perhaps the
quintessential symbol of the US-dominated global economy. The fight to
hold it accountable has, in turn, broadly connected issues across
continents to become a truly globalized grassroots movement.
Coke shrugs off the protests as coming from a "small segment of the
student population," says Ed Potter, the company's director of global
labor relations. "What I see are largely well-meaning attempts
to put a spotlight on some reprehensible things--but which are unrelated
to our workplaces." Nevertheless, Coke has fought back with
ads on TV and in student newspapers, part of a mammoth advertising
budget that has increased 30 percent in the past two
years, to a staggering $2.4 billion. However, as evidence against
the company mounts ahead of this year's annual stockholders' meeting, so
does the pressure for Coke to address its growing international image of
exploitation and brutality.
On the morning of December 5, 1996, union leader Isidro Segundo Gil was
standing at the gate of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa,
Colombia, when two paramilitaries drove up on a motorcycle and
shot him dead. A week later, unionists say, paramilitaries
lined up all the workers inside the plant and forced them to
sign a letter resigning from the beverage union SINALTRAINAL, spelling
the end of the union at the plant.
Violence against union members is a fact of life in Colombia, where
nearly 4,000 have been killed by paramilitaries in the past two decades.
But Gil's murder was different, say his union brothers; two months
earlier, they observed the plant manager meeting with a paramilitary
commander in the company cafeteria. And just a week before he was killed
Gil had been negotiating with the company over a new contract. Workers
see these events as an example of the collusion of bottling executives
with the paramilitaries. "From the beginning, Coca-Cola took a stand to
not only eliminate the union but to destroy its workers," said
SINALTRAINAL president Javier Correa in a recent speaking appearance in
the United States.
Nor was Gil's murder a unique occurrence, says Correa. In all, eight
union members and a friendly plant manager were killed between 1989 and
2002. Even today, union leaders routinely receive death threats and
attempts on their lives. In 2003 paramilitaries kidnapped and tortured
the 15-year-old son of one union leader and killed the brother-in-law of
SINALTRAINAL's vice president. This past January, says Correa, managers
at the Coca-Cola plant in Bogotá attempted to get workers to sign
a statement saying Coke did not violate human rights; a week later the
leader of the union received a death threat against himself and his
family.
"Coke has a long history of being a virulently antiunion company,"
says Lesley Gill, an anthropology professor at American University
who has twice been to Colombia to document the violence. "It has been
calculated and targeted, and it usually takes place during periods of
contract negotiations." A 2004 investigation directed by New York City
Councilman Hiram Monserrate documented 179 "major human rights
violations" against Coke workers, along with numerous allegations
that "paramilitary violence against workers was done with the knowledge
of and likely under the direction of company managers." The
violence has taken a toll on the union. In the past decade,
SINALTRAINAL's Coke membership has fallen from about 1,400 to less than
400.
Coca-Cola representatives deny involvement of the company or its
bottling partners, contending that the murders are a byproduct
of the country's civil war. In response, the company touts the security
measures it offers union leaders, including loans for home security
systems and reassignment for those in danger. Furthermore, Coke points
out that it has been exonerated in several cases in Colombian courts.
However, charging those courts as ineffective--only five
paramilitaries have been found guilty of murder, despite 4,000
killings--SINALTRAINAL reached out in 2001 to the International
Labor Rights Fund, a Washington-based solidarity organization. Using a
US law called the Alien Tort Claims Act, the ILRF and the United
Steelworkers filed suit against Coke and its bottlers in
Miami later that year. In 2003 a judge ruled that Coca-Cola
couldn't be held responsible for the actions of its bottlers and dropped
it from the case, even while allowing the case against the bottlers to
go forward. ILRF lawyer Terry Collingsworth finds that decision
preposterous, noting that Coke has ownership shares in its
Colombian bottlers and highly detailed bottling
agreements. "I'm 100 percent sure that if Coca-Cola in Atlanta
ordered them to change their uniform color from red to blue, they would
do it," says Collingsworth. "They could stop these activities
in a minute."
While the ILRF has appealed the decision, procedural rules require it to
wait until the case against the bottlers is over before the case against
Coke can be taken up again--a process that could take years. "We needed
to figure out a way that Coke sees delay as bad," says Collingsworth. In
2003 SINALTRAINAL put out a call for an international boycott of
Coke products. At the same time, the ILRF contacted Ray Rogers, head of
Corporate Campaign, Inc., an organization that consults with unions to
win contracts through unorthodox methods. Over the past three decades,
Rogers has forced concessions from a dozen companies--including American
Airlines, Campbell's Soup and New York's Metropolitan
Transportation Authority--not through strikes or negotiations but
through an aggressive strategy of publicly embarrassing anyone
associated with his targets.
Rogers immediately saw Coke's weakness: its brand. "They are right at
the top of the worst companies in the world, and yet they've created an
image like they are American pie," he says. "When people think of
Coca-Cola, they should think about great hardship and despair for people
and communities around the world." From the beginning, Rogers
appropriated Coke's trademark red script to make the Killer
Coke logo, and tweaked its advertising campaign with slogans like "The
Drink That Represses" and "Murder--It's the Real Thing." He
made a dramatic first appearance at a Coke annual meeting two years ago,
when police wrestled Rogers away from the mike and forcibly dragged him
out of the hall.
Early on, Rogers rejected SINALTRAINAL's call for a consumer boycott of
Coke products, fearing it would be ineffective and might
alienate unions working with Coke. He focused on "cutting out markets"
by going after larger institutional ties. He convinced several unions,
including the American Postal Workers, several large locals of the
Service Employees International, and UNISON, the largest
union in Britain, to ban Coke from their facilities and functions, and
he induced pension-fund managers, including the City of New York, to
pass resolutions threatening to withdraw hundreds of millions in Coke
stock investments unless Coke investigated the Colombia abuses. He
persuaded not only the SEIU but the largest US union of Coke's own
employees, the Teamsters, to pass a resolution in support of the
Campaign to Stop Killer Coke and to speak out at last year's annual
meeting (the Teamsters stopped short of banning Coke from their own
facilities). "It's horrendous what we're hearing," says David Laughton,
secretary-treasurer of the union's beverage division. "The company's
lack of action is having a ripple effect all over the country in school
and college, and that means reductions in jobs for us. It's time for
them to wake up and admit their errors."
The campaign's greatest success has come at colleges and universities.
Rogers set up a website with a step-by-step guide for students looking
to convince their institutions to cut multimillion-dollar Coke
contracts, and he's traveled to schools to hold rallies and advise
students. One by one, more than a dozen schools in the United States, as
well as a handful more in Ireland, Italy and Canada, have decided to cut
lucrative beverage contracts or otherwise ban Coke from campuses. The
effort accelerated after it was joined by United Students Against
Sweatshops--one of the main groups behind the Nike boycott of the
1990s--which helped organize its own chapters. Anti-Coke campaigns are
now active at some 130 campuses worldwide. "This campaign against Coke
has politicized a new generation of students," says Camilo Romero, a
national organizer with USAS. "It's something that students feel
personally connected to, because it's something they can hold in their
hand," says Aviva Chomsky, a professor at Salem State College in
Massachusetts, which severed ties two years ago. "It's too easy to say,
'There are so many bad things in the world, I'm just going to
concentrate on my own life.' It's the concreteness of this that's
appealing."
While student campaigns have mostly focused on the abuses in Colombia,
some have included demands from other countries as well. Few companies
have the kind of global reach of Coca-Cola, which has set up a network
of bottling partners around the world that allows it to maximize profits
by keeping distribution costs down and exploiting lax environmental and
labor laws abroad. The first rumblings came from India, where villagers
near several Coke bottling plants reported that their wells were
dropping, sometimes more than fifty feet; meanwhile, the water they were
able to get was tainted by foul-smelling chemicals. Starting in
2002 villagers near Plachimada, in the southern state of Kerala, began a
permanent vigil outside the local plant. They finally won an indefinite
closure in March 2004, although the case remains an issue in the Kerala
High Court.
Villagers started another vigil, at Mehdiganj in central India, this
past March. Escalating protests there and at a third plant, in the
desert state of Rajasthan, have ended in police attacks on villagers
employing Gandhian tactics of nonviolence, which Amit Srivastava of the
India Resource Center (IRC) lays at Coke's feet. "We know the company
has the power to stop the police from resorting to violence," he says,
"but it has let this go on without saying a word."
The IRC has been joined in its mission by Corporate Accountability
International (CAI), which has attacked Coke on its aggressive push to
sell bottled water. "If water becomes a branded product, it's clearly
going to undermine the demand and support for publicly managed
water systems," says CAI executive director Kathryn Mulvey. "The
people who lose out are those who don't have the means to pay top dollar
for their water." As a veteran anticorporate campaigner,
Mulvey sees the Coke campaign as a new model. "People are
taking these abuses that are happening all over the world and bringing
them to Coke's headquarters," she says. "Transnational corporations
are really surpassing the nation-state as the dominant economic and
political institutions. Social change movements need to find ways to
come together across borders and strategize."
The broad attack against the company has been a strength for the
campaign, allowing diverse groups to share information and recruit
greater numbers at protests, as well as making a more difficult target
for counterattacks. "The company can't control it," says Rogers. "They
realize they can't get rid of one person or group and hope the thing
will die." At the same time, the sheer number of charges against Coke
raises the question of how and when the campaign can declare victory. On
that score, the different groups are clear about their specific goals.
The Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, for example, has adopted seven
demands by SINALTRAINAL, which include a human rights
policy for bottling companies and compensation for families of
slain workers. The campaign in India calls for closure of certain
plants, cleanup of others and compensation for affected villagers.
Many student campaigns have made their top demand an
independent investigation into the Colombia abuses. At last
year's annual meeting, Coke tried to mollify critics by releasing the
results of a company-funded study, which was rejected by students
as woefully biased. Still facing the prospect of boycotts at several
universities--among them Rutgers, NYU and Michigan--Coke put together a
commission of students, school administrators and labor leaders to come
up with a protocol for an independent inquiry. "I was
honestly hopeful, perhaps naïvely," says USAS's Romero. "It seemed
like they were putting this new investment into making things work."
From the beginning, however, the company insisted it had a
right to be on the commission; even after Coke was booted by the
students, it kept putting strictures on the investigation, such as a
moratorium on investigating past abuses. The final straw was Coke's
insistence that anything uncovered be inadmissible in the court case in
Miami, which Collingsworth says is against legal ethics. "We cannot
prejudice our clients by agreeing to bury evidence that would
support their claims," he wrote in an angry letter to Coke's Ed Potter.
At around the same time, new evidence of Coke's antilabor tactics
emerged in Indonesia, where, according to USAS, workers were intimidated
when they attempted to unionize; and in Turkey, where more than 100
union members were fired and then clubbed and tear-gassed by police
during a protest. This past November the ILRF filed another lawsuit
against Coca-Cola, based on the claims of the Turkish workers. By that
point, students had had enough; all but one left the commission.
With the failure of the investigation commission,
administrators at some schools ran out of excuses to keep the
Coke contracts. Both NYU and Michigan suspended contracts in
December. NYU's status as the country's largest
private university earned the campaign national and international press.
"We knew if we were to ban Coca-Cola, our statement would
resound around the world," says Crystal Yakacki, a recent NYU
graduate who helped lead the campaign while she was a student.
As this year's annual meeting nears, Coke has gone on the
offensive, announcing a plan to draft a new set of workplace
standards. At the same time, the company has asked the UN's
International Labor Organization to perform a workplace
evaluation of the Colombia bottling plants. Rogers and
Collingsworth have already cried foul, pointing out that Potter has been
the US employer representative to the ILO for the past fifteen years.
"Either they know something we don't know," says Collingsworth, "or they
believe the ILO moves so slowly and bureaucratically that they
can delay." In response, Potter claims the organization is so large that
no one person can influence it. Regardless, the gambit is
having some effect: In April Michigan, citing "the
reputation and track record of ILO," rescinded its ban.
At the Hotel du Pont on April 19, organizers hope to stage a repeat of
last year's grilling, with an even larger contingent of activists in
attendance. Schools debating Coke contracts this spring include Michigan
State, UCLA, the University of Illinois, DePaul and several campuses of
the City University of New York. In Britain, the campaign lost a close
vote in April to convince the National Union of Students--which
represents 750 campuses--to cut a multimillion-pound contract. Many
British universities, however, are continuing individual boycotts, as
are campuses in Italy, Ireland, Germany and Canada. "This is a
moment in history that is very rare, where students have the
power to change one of the largest corporations in the world," says
Romero. After recent campus victories, momentum seems to be on the side
of the campaign. "Coke has a contracting market; we have an expanding
market," says Rogers. "I want Coke to come to the realization that there
is a lot more for them to lose by continuing to do what they do. They
have to be made to do the right thing for the wrong reason."
Until they do, say activists, the violence against Coke's workers will
continue. "It's very difficult for me to convince my family that they
have to live with the worries, and that they will one day maybe have to
receive bad news," says SINALTRAINAL's Correa. "My kids say that walking
with Dad is like walking with a time bomb. But I can't leave this
struggle seeing these violations happening all around me. The reality of
the situation is that it's better being with a union than without one."
© 2006 The Nation
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