Coca-Cola workers go on hunger strike

by: Julie-ann Davies

Colombia: On 15 March, union workers at eight Colombian Coca-Cola bottling plants began a hunger strike. Juan Carlos Galvis, vice-president of the local union in Barrancabermeja said: “If we lose the fight against Coca-Cola, we will first lose our union, next our jobs and then our lives.”

Coca-Cola’s largest Colombian bottler, Coca-Cola FEMSA, closed the production lines at 11 of their 16 plants in September 2003. Since then 500 workers have resigned their contracts in exchange for lump-sum payments. Most union leaders have refused to resign. In February, Colombia’s Ministry of Social Protection authorised Coca-Cola FEMSA’s plans to dismiss 91 workers – 70 per cent of whom are union leaders.

Campaign group Stop Killer Coke is supporting the union’s call to move workers into alternative positions or relocate them to other plants. In January, a Colombian judge ordered Coca-Cola FEMSA to do this for workers at their Barrancabermeja and Cucuta plants.

During the past decade seven Colombian trade union negotiators working for organisations associated with Coca-Cola have been killed, others have been threatened and union meetings have been broken up. Coca-Cola denies any association with these events and point out their Colombian operations have suffered from the killing of employees, burning of trucks and extortion by left-wing armed groups. (See PN 2449 http://www.peacenews.info/issues/2449/244921.html )

A February report by In These Times says Coca-Cola representatives told a fact-finding delegation their employees may have collaborated with paramilitaries in the torture and deaths of union members.

In a response to the delegation Coca-Cola wrote that it “does not anticipate supporting in anyway any form of independent fact-finding delegation to Colombia.” A Coca-Cola spokeswoman has said she is unaware of any admission of complicity in the killings and says the allegations are false.

Source: Stop Killer Coke