Belching Out the Devil (12 page)

‘Yes, two years ago they told me to sack someone.'

‘Who told you?'

‘The Coke Supervisor.' Mimicking the supervisor, Pemberton says, ‘“This guy is useless, get rid”.' Shrugging he adds, ‘What can I do? If they ask me to do it I have no choice.'

‘What about joining a union?'

He laughs and shakes his head with a mild contempt. Joining a union is simply not an option.

 

It was not always like this, Chile says the Coca-Cola deliverymen - like the
fleteros
used to be unionised, ‘In 1992 80 per cent of the distribution workers were fixed contract workers and unionised. Today in Bucaramanga there are only two workers in distribution who are on fixed contracts,' himself and his driver Domingo Flores. For Chile, subcontracting is one of the main causes for the decrease in Sinaltrainal membership, ‘In 1992 there were 282 Bucaramanga workers in Sinaltrainal, and in Bucaramanga today you will only find sixteen.'

 

Meanwhile The Coca-Cola Company proudly boast of their good employee relations, ‘In Colombia, a country where 4 per cent of workers are unionised, 31 per cent of the employees of Coca-Cola Colombian bottling partners belong to unions.'
⁸
So why are the
fleteros
telling such a different story? The answer lies in the statistic…oh yes, my friends, statistics: the thinking man's lie. Calculating a statistic is similar to normal counting but with different rules and when dealing with an entity like a transnational corporation it is important to remember that statistics are facts that have been shaped to fit the story. So, is the Coca-Cola statistic accurate? Let us suppose for a moment it is and consider the implications. The rest of Colombia has only 4 per cent union membership, yet the Coca-Cola bottlers have created such an employee positive environment that
union membership is up nearly 800 per cent on the national average. If true the appropriate response has to be
Viva Coca-Cola! La Lucha Continua Hasta La Victoria Siempre con Coca-Cola!

 

Meanwhile, back on my planet, logic dictates that this surely cannot be the case, how can Coke bottlers be so pro-union in such an anti-union environment? The answer is they are not. Coke's calculations are based on the number of
permanent
employees they have working for them, and as for the casual labour, or the sub-contracted workers - they are simply not included in the figures. Neither Carlos, Ivan, nor any of the other
fleteros
I spoke to are counted as employees.

 

A few days earlier in Bogota I had spoken with Sinaltrainal's researcher Carlos Olaya, who told me that since the Nineties Coke bottlers have taken full advantage of a change in the law,
⁹
which enabled them to remove swathes of workers from their books as direct employees and push them into casual contracts. Huge sections of the bottlers' operations were sub-contracted out - hirings, delivery, maintenance services (like canteens), security, accountancy; all of it was outsourced. ‘Now the Coca-Cola bottlers have about 9,000 workers but only about 1,850 are directly or permanently employed, of that figure about 600 are in a union - about 32 per cent.' Which is close enough to the company figures of 31 per cent. ‘However, when you include the other 7,150 workers, the true figure is about 6.5 per cent of the workforce are unionised, higher than the national average, true, but still ridiculously low.'

 

So Coke can say, 31 per cent belong to a union , because the rules they use only count every fifth worker employed under the Coca-Cola logo. Now I am not saying that this special counting method is necessarily bad; there are times when it would be nice to count five as only one,
Die Hard
movies for example.

 

The
fletero
testimonies raise some serious issues. If the
Coca-Cola bottlers do not employ these workers, why do they keep insisting that these workers cannot join a trade union? Answering this question TCCC's global workplace rights director responded by saying, ‘Colombia has unique labour laws in that contract workers are not allowed under Colombian law to belong to industrial unions…it's a unique law in the world...'
¹⁰
Implying quite clearly that the ‘Coca-Cola system' was just obeying the law on the issue. This is somewhat disingenuous.

 

Colombian law, according to the Colombian Trade Union Federation ‘recognises the right of association only to the workers who have a labour contract [permanent employment]'.
¹¹
This means temporary or casual workers are being denied one of their basic human rights - the right to freedom of association.

 

So is Coke merely an innocent party here? Is the Pope a lesbian? According to Sinaltrainal, in 1990 75 per cent of workers under the Coca-Cola system in Colombia had permanent employment and 25 per cent casual employment. Today that figure is basically reversed, 80 per cent of workers in the ‘Coca-Cola system' in Colombia are casual labour. The ‘Coca-Cola system' has subcontracted its workforce at an incredible rate thus denying them the right to join a union and keeping wages low and work hours high.
¹²

I wake up the next morning at Chile's house to find that the family rush hour has just kicked in. Amidst the washing and dressing, shouting and shushing, beating and stirring, sweeping and feeding, homework and cleaning, Esmeralda is showing me how to make
arepas
, a flat round griddled cornmeal patty stuffed with cheese. Frankly, this is the last
thing she needs and after tasting my efforts it is the last thing the family need too. Laura is finishing her homework while glancing urgently for her breakfast. Mayela feeds the baby while trying to ignore the smoke from the griddle tray. The baby's attention is caught by the smoke and so hangs open-mouthed over the bottle. Esmeralda is making dough balls, coaching me, doing up a child's shirt while serving as a human clock by periodically shouting out someone's name and the time. Jess leans over the table to snap the scene with an enormous camera, Laura's college friend is eating eggs and ducking to miss Jess's lens. Someone is in the shower upstairs shouting ‘What's burning!' Emilio stands blankly in his underwear and Luis Eduardo frantically searches for the latest batch of death threats he has received.

‘Luis Eduardo aka Chile' is what the paramilitaries call him in their death threats, that and ‘you trade unionist son of a bitch.' Luis Eduardo collects death threats like my mum collects parking tickets.

 

It's a trivial point, but considering the nature of death squads and their primary purpose, namely killing people, they rarely come up with catchy names for themselves. The old Colombian paramilitaries were called the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) which translates as The United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia. The new paras, both nationally and in Bucaramanaga, have opted for the Águilas Negras - The Black Eagles, which doesn't sound that threatening, evoking as it does, the name of a Goth Folk band.

 

What isn't so trivial is that they regularly send death threats to prominent Sinaltrainal members. This one was sent to Chile in February 2007: ‘The Paramilitiaries of Magdalena Medio, The Black Eagles, call on the terrorist Coca-Cola trade unionists to stop bad mouthing the Coca-Cola Corporation
given that they have caused enough damage already. If there is no response we declare them military targets of the Black Eagles, and they will be dealt with as they prefer: death, torture, cut into pieces, coup de grace. No more protests!'

 

There are a number of significant points about this threat:

This particular threat came shortly after the vice-president of Colombia, Francisco Santos, made some particularly unhelpful remarks. In a thinly veiled reference to Sinaltrainal, Vice-President Santos called on those agitating against ‘Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and other private companies' to stop their campaign, adding that this was fuelled by interference from ‘sectors of the extreme left, radicals infiltrated into trade union sectors that are generating absolutely absurd campaigns against the corporations.'
¹³

‘It was after the State's version of the events that the threats started coming through to the trade union leaders…the security situation became much worse in 2007,' says Chile.

‘How many death threats have you received in a year?' I ask, expecting a rough estimate.

‘Eight threats,' he says precisely, as it dawns on me that death threats by their very nature are not likely to be forgotten. Death threats rarely illicit the response of, ‘Oh Lord, I've been that busy I've lost count of them.'

 

Alongside the eight threats came a visit to the family home. Two men got past the security hut, crossed the wide courtyard
in the middle of the blocks, passed the grocery shop with a tray of eggs on the counter, then turned left through an archway that goes under an apartment, emerging quickly into the cool shaded walkway that nips and tucks between the homes. Small iron fences balance on top of low brick walls where little front patios are littered with clutter - kids' plastic toys, spades, garden chairs and lots of pots sprouting firs, ferns, palms and red-leaved lilies. At the end of this is a home with bigger railings, with proper locks on them. Laura, the youngest daughter says, ‘I was inside, on my own…I came down when they knocked on the gate.' She curls up on the chair. ‘They said they wanted my father.'

‘It's really bad and we're really scared,' says Esmeralda.

 

While Coca-Cola might call this an ‘old story' it is a crucially current one for the family and the familiar chaos of breakfast belies the strain. A couple of years ago their eldest child Alexander had to jump from a moving bus to escape two men who clearly knew who he was and seriously threatened him. Alexander has moved well away with his wife and child and now manages a restaurant. Esmeralda spends most of her week working for him there and returns home when she can. Laura is receiving counselling as the recent visit by the paras has triggered memories of her childhood exclusion from school while her father was in jail.

 

The Coca-Cola Company says that the bottler, Coca-Cola FEMSA, has given assistance to workers threatened by the Black Eagles, including:

Which sounds reasonable, but let us balance the books - what is in the credit column and what is in the debit column? In the debit column we have The Coca-Cola Company whose bottlers have been accused of collaborating with paramilitaries and they themselves have been accused of making little or no effort to redress the situation despite an employee being killed in the bottlers' own plant. In the debit column the bottlers' security manager falsely accused union members of terrorism, for which they are wrongfully imprisoned for six months, while their families have to beg to survive. Those bottlers have made no effort to redress that wrong. In the debit column Coke wanted rid of the union, which was the logical outcome should a settlement have been reached. In the debit column the bottlers have subcontracted workers so they do not have to give them permanent employment and refused to let them join a union. The bottlers are accused of undermining Sinaltrainal while The Coca-Cola Company claims to respect their rights.

 

And so on to the credit column. This entry in the balance books is not quite as long as the previous column. In the credit column is: when workers receive death threats the company lends them some money for a camera, gives them some time off and provides them with a lift to work. It is a list you could sum up as: a day off, a taxi and a loan…

 

Luis Eduardo has by most standards led an eventful life. There was an attempt on his life, when a para appeared with a gun while he was delivering Coca-Cola. He was saved by a shopkeeper pulling him into the store. On top of the false imprisonment on trumped-up terror charges, he has been on
hunger strike for better conditions at work. Paramilitaries visit his house and his children have been threatened. His friends are either dead or carry pistols, tucked inside their shirts. Yet paradoxically I feel totally safe in his home. Perhaps my sense of security is the result of rationalisation, namely: the paramilitaries are more likely to kill Luis Eduardo than they are to do anything to me and it is a reasonably good bet that they are not going to kill Luis in front of a foreigner with a press card. Ergo, as long as I stay with Luis Eduardo, everything will be fine…it is when I leave that the problems will start. I reckon Jackie Kennedy had similar feelings, figuring that ‘no one is going to bother shooting at me when they can shoot at John.'