Coke’s International War on Workers
December 12th, 2009
The Coca-Cola Company has been engaged in a war on its employees since at least the early 1980s. It uses outsourcing to drive wages down, shuts down plants for unionizing, fires (and sometimes murders) workers for joining unions, and pays poverty wages wherever it can get away with it. Coke is so hostile to workers, in 2007 Haitian workers had to go on strike to force Coke to merely pay the legal minimum wage and provide clean toilets in its facilities.
Coke engages in extensive world-wide union busting wherever workers try organize. In 2005 Coke fired 105 workers at unionized plants in Turkey (non-union plants in Turkey did not experience any firings). Coke then persuaded riot police to violently assault a demonstration against the firings and arrest 92 people, including the president of the union. When workers at PT United Can Company, one of Coke's subsidiaries in Indonesia, decided to form a union Coke responded by launching an anti-union campaign, including ordering workers to resign from the union, offering bribes to workers who quit the union, firing union 12 union leaders, and interrogating not only workers employed by Coke but also their spouses and children.
In 2008 graduate students at Beijing's Central University of Nationalities and the Zhejiang University of Technology decided to investigate working conditions at Coca-Cola, expecting that its treatment of workers was better than average because of Coke's prestige and high profits. They found the opposite. In China Coke makes its workers work long hours for low pay, including required consecutive 12 hour shifts and poor workplace safety. In Shanxi Province Coke decided to delay payment of wages to their workers and, when the workers complained to the local press, managers told their employees to get their wages from the media.
In China, rather than directly hiring workers itself, Coke pays labor agencies to provide workers and those labor agencies pays the workers it provides very badly. This outsourcing allows Coke to maintain the fiction that its not mistreating workers, since its many of its workers are not directly employed by Coke. For example, in 2008 at one of its Guizhou factories Coke told its workers that all of their jobs were being outsourced to the labor contracting company Rongcheng. The workers would do the exact same job in factories owned by Coke, but Rongcheng would pay them half of what they made working directly for Coke.
China isn't the only place Coca Cola tries uses subcontracting and outsourcing to undermine working conditions. This past summer Coke attempted to outsource its unionized delivery crews in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (Canada) to a non-unionized company that paid its employees less. Workers struck, and forced Coke to scrap the plan. In Ireland Coke decided to outsource 130 jobs at five distribution plants to non-union third party providers. Irish workers struck but, unlike in Canada, were unable to force Coke to end the plan, extracting a generous severance package instead.
Coke's war on workers is most intense in Columbia. The company fires workers for joining unions and uses video surveillance cameras to monitor its workforce in order to spot any sign of unionism. The UN International Labor Organization's investigation of Coca Cola in Columbia, an investigation started at the request of Coke, found that the company has engaged in mass firings of unionists and that it outsources and subcontracts work which was previously unionized, thereby undermining unionization and resulting in worse working conditions for the subcontracted workers.
Between 1990 and 2002 right-wing paramilitaries allied with Coke murdered eight workers for their involvement in the National Union of Food Industry Workers. In 2001 paramilitaries came to Coke's Carepa plant gate, with management's blessing, and shot union activist Isidro Segundo Gil. That evening they set the union's office on fire. The next day the paramilitaries returned to the plant and the workers were informed that if they didn't quit the union they would also be killed. The plant manager, a supporter of Columbia's right-wing paramilitaries, had resignation forms prepared and ready to go before the paramilitaries even showed up. The paramilitaries camped outside the factory for two months, and the union in the plant was effectively broken.
In order to limit its legal liability and exposure to debt, Coke practices a policy of maintaining a large enough stake in its subsidiaries to maintain control over them, but less than half so that it can't be held legally liable for their subsidiaries’ crimes or debts. For example, a lawsuit brought in American courts against Coke for its murder of Columbian unionists was dismissed because Coke only owned 46.4% of Coca-Cola FEMSA's (its Columbian subsidiary) capital voting stock. That is enough for Coke to effectively control FEMSA, but just short of the 50% needed for American courts to hold Coke liable for FEMSA's campaign of terror.