The Coca-Cola Company is scared. New York University, Rutgers University and the University of Michigan have ended contracts with Coca-Cola because of the corporation's egregious labor practices in Colombia, and students around the country are urging other universities to follow suit. Fearing yet another defeat at AU, Edward Potter, the director of Global Labor Relations, defends the corporation's battered reputation in an open letter to AU students in the Feb. 27 edition of The Eagle. His misleading and false assertions also appeared in other student newspapers.
Potter asserts that the violence of Colombia's prolonged civil war is deterring the unionization of Coca-Cola workers. Yet the deaths of eight workers and the harassment and intimidation of dozens of others are not the products of indiscriminate, chaotic violence, nor are they the collateral damage of civilians caught between warring groups. They are the result of a calculated and selective strategy on the part of the Colombia state, the Coca-Cola Company and right-wing paramilitaries to destroy SINALTRAINAL, an independent union with the largest number of Coca-Cola members. Most of the rights violations are connected to specific labor conflicts, such as strikes, protests, and contract negotiations in which selective assassination, arbitrary arrests, unlawful searches and anonymous threats serve as tools of labor discipline.
Potter misrepresents the percentage of unionized workers in Colombia. Scarcely 7 percent of Colombian Coca-Cola workers belong to a union. The vast majority are hired through a variety of subcontracting firms and make a quarter of the wages earned by a dwindling number of unionists. Subcontracted workers labor up to sixteen hours a day. They have little control over tasks and assignments, and the company does not provide them with health or pension benefits. Potter apparently arrives at the figure of 30 percent by counting individuals who belong to multiple unions-some of which exist only on paper-more than once. Colombian labor law permits the formation of multiple unions within a single enterprise, but Coca-Cola has taken advantage of the law to promote company union alternatives to independent worker organizations and to exaggerate the actual number of unionized employees.
Finally, Potter also claims that the company places no impediments on the unionization of workers in its Colombian bottling plants. Yet the leaders of SINALTRAINAL, tell a different story. They describe how the company responds to workers' demands for additional security and better working conditions by filing slander charges against them in Colombian court, by threatening to revoke SINALTRAINAL's legal status, and by forcing workers to listen to managers read statements that characterize SINALTRAINAL's charges of abuse as reckless. Only last week a Colombian judge threw out a lawsuit filed by the Coca-Cola Company that charged SINALTRAINAL leaders with "damaging the morale' of the corporation. Coca-Cola profits from the reduced effectiveness of trade unions. Weak unions pose less resistance to the low wages, reduced benefits, and "flexible" contracts that are promoted by it.
Mr. Potter and the Coca-Cola Company must understand that a public relations stunt, like the one-thousand-dollar advertisement placed in The Eagle, is not the best way to deal with the problem. Coca-Cola must do more to ensure the safety of its workers in Colombia, and we look forward to genuine good-faith efforts by the company to protect laborers, bargain fairly with SINALTRAINAL, and pay reparations to the victims and families of survivors. Until evidence of these efforts is forthcoming, however, we support SINALTRAINAL's call for a boycott of all Coca-Cola products, including Minute Maid, Sprite, Powerade, and Odwalla, as previous appeals to the multinational's sense of social responsibility have fallen on deaf ears. It is now time to threaten Coca-Cola's bottom line.
Travis McArthur is a sophomore in the School of International Service, and a member of AU Solidarity. Lesley Gill is a professor of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences.
