SIPTU Sleaze and Coca Cola workers

national | worker & community struggles and protests | opinion/analysis

Friday September 18, 2009 01:33

by Marc Spring

Jack O'Connor and SIPTU leaders are making some noises about the outrageous treatment of Irish Coca Cola workers these days, but does anyone remember that they vitriolically attacked a campaign of solidarity with Colombian Coca Cola workers whose lives were threatened, a short few years ago?

When a small group of people in Ireland organised a campaign of solidarity with workers from the SINALTRAINAL trade union in Colombia a few years ago, SIPTU were approached for their solidarity. Some of the workers had been killed, many more threatened, by paramilitaries who explicitly told them to desist from their Coca Cola trade union activities. In one instance the Coca Cola manager had openly boasted of his close links with the paramilitaries, and that he would use them to 'sort out' union activists. Workers had visited Ireland to ask for trade union solidarity.

While many SIPTU workers expressed solidarity, the leadership actively opposed the campaign. When UCD students voted to boycott Coke products on-campus, a symbolic boycott which could never have cost Coke a significant loss of market share or revenues, SIPTU actually organised a small number of Coca Cola workers to leaflet on-campus against the boycott. Worse, Jack O'Connor and Anne Speed carried out a personalised campaign of character assassination against the most active member of the campaign, and attempted to intimidate the organisation he worked with into distancing itself from him.

Worst of all, in a meeting with SINALTRAINAL in Colombia, SIPTU threatened to organise an international campaign against SINALTRAINAL unless they agreed immediately to end their call for a boycott. Shocked SINALTRAINAL activists contacted Dublin activists to advise them of this bizarre behaviour. Details of this episode can still be seen here: http://www.indymedia.ie/article/67840

Some years prior to that, when we were considering which campaign we would take up, I happened to meet a senior SIPTU member who, as he put it, 'looked after' the SIPTU workers at a Coca Cola plant. In the course of an otherwise pleasant conversation I asked him did he think Coca Cola workers would be interested in organising a one-day or a one-hour stoppage in solidarity with their Colombian comrades. His answer has remained with me. 'You don't understand, Marc. It's not like that any more. It's not workers against management. It's workers and management here, against workers and management in other countries."

That really told me all I needed to know about modern mainstream trade unionism in Ireland.

Some might think it's unfair to single out Jack O'Connor from the morass of corrupt trade union leaders in Ireland today, but I read the intimidating, lying, pompous and self-righteous letters he signed back then and it sickens me to see him almost daily in the media, posing as the defender of the workers.

Truth will out Jack and co, and it won't go away!

'The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting' – Milan Kundera