Belching Out the Devil (9 page)

 

 

N
eville Isdell, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of The Coca-Cola Company from 2004-2008 and current chairman of the Board of Directors, is a tall balding man whose hair leans to ginger and is cropped short in the way soldiers and men of a certain age prefer. His body is trim but his face is baggy and craggy; its shape is that of Charlie Brown, the Peanuts cartoon character, but with the muscle tone of Keith Richards. In short, he looks like a typical upper management man - and I mean that in a pejorative sense. At the 2005 Annual Meeting of shareholders, Isdell stated, ‘there are no threats or attempts by management to attack or intimidate workers for being affiliated with a union or for being a union organiser or for being a union official.' He went on to say that, ‘the people employed by our Colombian bottling partners work in facilities where their labor and human rights
are respected and protected.' It was a noteworthy event, as the CEO of the world's most popular brand felt compelled to defend the company but the true significance of his robust public pronouncements can only be measured by what the company was doing in private.

 

In Colombia the pressure on Sinaltrainal was immense: the intimidation of workers by the paras was relentless, and the company's drive to casualise the workforce was driving down union membership. ‘Every time we recruit new workers and members they get sacked,' said Carlos Olaya, the union's researcher. Indeed Councilman Monserrate's delegation claimed that Coca-Cola FEMSA, ‘continually pressured workers to resign their union membership and their contractual guarantees. Since September 2003, they have pressured over 500 workers to give up their union contracts in exchange for a lump-sum payment.'
²

 

Across the world the boycott met with mixed results. In Ireland Trinity College and the University of Dublin voted to ‘Kick Coke off Campus' and refused to stock their products in student-run facilities. They were joined in the UK by Sussex, Manchester, Middlesex and the School of Oriental and African Studies, and in the USA by New York University and Michigan University. Even though the contracts with US universities are usually worth millions, kicking Coca-Cola off campuses is unlikely to dent the balance sheet of a company that made $5.98 billion profit last year.
³
But the accompanying media attention and headlines like ‘Is Coke the new McDonald's'
⁴
in the
Guardian
, and
The Nation
calling Coke ‘the new Nike'
⁵
must surely be part of the reason Coca-Cola has lost billions from their ‘brand value'. Something had to be done.

 

Publicly the company's attitude to the Colombian issue was not hostile nor was it dismissive, it was both. Coke
increasingly described the lawsuit brought by Sinaltrainal as an ‘out of date' allegation
⁶
or ‘an old story'.
⁷
But this is not the full picture and behind the scenes the Company was involved in negotiations with the union to settle the case.

 

Timing is everything - from boiling an egg to having sex to deciding it is time to talk with the trade union taking your company to court. The US lawsuit was going nowhere fast but that all changed when District Court Judge Martinez dismissed the case against Coke's bottlers on 4 October 2006. It might have looked as if the Coca-Cola system had been exonerated in court but the judge had opened up a world of potential pain for the Company. Crucially the court decision was
not
the hearing of the case itself, instead it was to decide if the US courts were the correct venue for the trial. And once District Court Judge Martinez decreed the US courts did not have jurisdiction this left the union lawyers free to launch their appeal, bringing The Coca-Cola Company back into the dock to face the whole thing one more time.

 

If the union lawyers were successful in their appeal then the case would go to full trial and The Coca-Cola Company would face the legal procedure of disclosure, forcing them to hand over internal documents detailing their relationship with the bottlers. I can't speak for the company but I would imagine this prospect was about as appealing as syphilis. Timing is everything - and six weeks before Judge Martinez cleared the way for the union to get the Company back into court The Coca-Cola Company began to negotiate with Sinaltrainal on 19 August 2006.

 

When I asked The Coca-Cola Company about these talks they portrayed them as ‘fruitful and informative'
⁸
as if remembering the biscuits served. They went on to describe the negotiations
as ‘warm and buttery', ‘sweet and moist' and ‘chocolaty on the top'.

 

The purpose of the talks the Company said was ‘to assess whether a mediated resolution of the parties' differences could be achieved.'
⁹
In short they were looking to settle out of court and with a settlement like this comes money…a lot of money. How much money? A barrow full. Although I can not disclose the exact sum offered to Sinaltrainal and the plaintiffs in the lawsuit it is my understanding that it had six noughts at the end of a dollar sign and a couple of digits in between. For those working in the British coin of the realm it would the same number of noughts but a single digit in front of the pound sign. For those working in the Zimbabwean Dollars, I am afraid the world has run out of noughts.

 

If the Company was offering money what were the conditions attached to it? I spoke to Ed Potter, The Coca-Cola Company's Global Workplace Rights Director, a man with intimate knowledge of these negotiations. I said to him that the company had history in this department, ‘financial settlements are reached, but part of that financial settlement is that you don't criticise us again, you shut up, you go away.'

 

Ed Potter replied, ‘All I will say as a general matter is we've had several different resolutions…you've described one of them.'
¹⁰

 

Whereas Coke describe the talks as ‘fruitful and informative', Sinaltrainal use an altogether different set of words. ‘We were in a process that lasted almost a year and a half where we talk and talk and talk with them in order to find a solution to the conflict...and it didn't give us any result at all,' said Edgar Paez, the union's International Officer. He is sitting in his office, by the same table Giraldo and Manco gave their testimonies from. Edgar, is a man prone to smiling, with a
touch of a South American George Michael to his unshaven appearance, but throughout our conversation he remains grim-faced. The only reason Coca-Cola negotiated according to him was, ‘because they don't want us to keep reporting them [campaigning]…What the Company wanted was to buy the silence of the people involved. They give some money to the victims in order not to denounce the problem.'

 

The negotiations broke down in early 2008. Coke said ‘ no final resolution was possible. An impasse was reached and no further discussions are anticipated at this time.'
¹¹
Arguably, the impasse was the conditions of the settlement - Coke would pay millions of dollars but anyone working for Coca-Cola FEMSA and involved in the lawsuit had to leave their jobs, they could no longer work at Coke. But more than this they would be legally bound never to criticise Coca-Cola ever again. According to Edgar Paez this would apply ‘not only in Colombia but everywhere in the whole world. They wanted us to sign an agreement that no one would denounce Coca-Cola any more, for the rest of their lives.' In effect, the agreement, if signed, would prevent them from campaigning against any multinational that Coca-Cola had business with. From the moment they signed until they day they died.

 

The end result of key members of the union leaving Coke and unable to criticise or organise against the company from the outside would effectively mean the union would be finished. Sinaltrainal would cease to exist in the Coca-Cola plants. That is, after all, what is meant by my phrase ‘you shut up, you go away'.

 

The money was on the table and all Sinaltrainal had to do was agree and take it. So the men and women who had fought for the right to be in a trade union would become
silent. Their right to free speech and freedom of association would be gone for ever. All they had to do was take the money and sign the paper. For men like Giraldo and Manco the prospect of compensation was money they literally could only dream of.

 

The union refused to sign. They refused to be silent. Leaving The Coca-Cola Company with an ‘old story' that would not go away.

 

 

T
his is the story of the first time I stayed with a man called Chile, a Sinaltrainal member who lives inin the Bucaramanga, to the north of Bogota. The city sits in the basin of a plateau ringed by hills, a packed urban island sprawling over its convex foundations and is surrounded by terracotta soil and the ripe light green of the trees. It's the seventh biggest city in Colombia - the English equivalent would be Leicester or Coventry.

Given that most Catholic countries draw the line at evoking cooking spices at christenings it should come as no surprise that Chile is a nickname. Though the name derives from the spice, here folk spell it after the country. His real name is Luis Eduardo García, and he earned his moniker after a particularly heated argument with a manager at the local Coca-Cola bottling plant. I met Chile in 2004 on a fact-finding mission, which is how I came to be on a bus travelling through Bucaramanga with a crowd of trade unionists, leftists, Christians and human rights' campaigners. Each day we would set off to visit displaced people, families of murder victims, NGOs and lawyers, listen to their stories and then head off to our next destination - a sort of human rights coach trip.

 

The bus is knackered. Very knackered. You may be familiar with the type of American bus that Evel Knievel used to jump over on his motorbike. Well, our bus looks like the one that he accidentally landed on. Inside it is incredibly hot: were we to be parked in England, someone would be checking the back seat to see if the dog was still alive. There is little respite from the heat. The windows come down only a few centimetres at the top of the frames. In the absence of a breeze to force the air around a little I am trying not to come into contact with the seat's back, lest I stick there - though given the lack of suspension on this vehicle it is unlikely that any of us are going to sit anywhere for long.

 

On board we divide up into our various gangs. Near the front are Pax Christi, a Christian peace outfit, made up of elderly Germans who have traipsed around the fact-finding trip with grim faces and even grimmer clothes. They have an air of concerted concentration and gloom, giving them the appearance of someone trying to digest an espadrille. Everywhere we go they appear with notebooks and pencils
ready to catch every misfortune. They are the stenographers of the apocalypse.

 

Just a few seats back are the two male Swiss trade unionists, who never sweat and have duty-free breath mints in their rucksacks. They gently nudge, natter, whisper and giggle together: I wouldn't be surprised if they had a password and a tree-house in their garden back home. Around them are the Americans, who subdivide into those from Brooklyn and those not. Those ‘from' are loud, brash and, despite the fact that they have never been to Bucaramanga in their life, are prone to shouting directions at the bus driver. He in turn ignores this advice.

 

Chile has a square build. His black hair is receding, his T-shirt bulges around his gut and no one save a Krankie could call him a tall man. But he has a confident and determined presence and must have been quite a catch 25 years ago. He stands by the driver, hanging on to the rail up by the front door, and gives a running commentary as we drive past sites of local oppression. It is essentially a historical battlefield tour, except the history is recent and the tour guide personally knows the dead.

 

As we pass a large prison, one of the Colombians shouts out. ‘Here!' he points at the building we can see through the window. ‘Here! This is where they put Chile!'