UCD Student's Union Council call Referendum to repeal Coca Cola Boycott

dublin | rights, freedoms and repression | press release Monday February 22, 2010 21:46 by Morbeg - Boycott Killer Coke from UCDSU conallodufaigh at hotmail dot com

Press release from campaign to continue the boycott

UCD Student Union Council has called for a referendum in an attempt to repeal the boycott of Coca Cola products in SU outlets, which was put in place by referendum in 2003. When this referendum was passed it made UCDSU the first students union in the world to support the call for a boycott made by SINALTRAINAL a Columbian trade union whose members have been threatened and killed as part of a brutal campaign to stifle trade union activity in their bottling plants in Columbia since the beginning of the1990s.

The most famous victim of this repression was a worker named Isidro Gil, a member of SINALTRAINAL who opposed the plant management’s efforts to replace permanent staff with temp workers, who would earn drastically lower wages. On the fifth of December 1996 he was murdered at his workplace. He had been shot ten times by right wing paramilitaries who had been allowed to enter the plant. That evening, a building which housed the union’s offices, records and equipment was set ablaze.
The next day, a heavily armed group returned to the plant, called the workers together and told them if they didn’t quit the union by 4pm, they too would be killed. Resignation forms were prepared in advance by Coca Cola’s plant manager, who had a history of socialising with the paramilitaries and reportedly “given [them] an order to carry out the task of destroying the union”. Within weeks another trade unionist in the same plant was killed. A total of eight Coca Cola workers were killed between 1990 and 2004. Coca Cola have not yet accepted responsibility for this or any of the 179 human rights abuses they have committed in Colombia.

The company has also encountered widespread popular opposition in India where communities living around Coca Cola’s bottling plants are experiencing severe water shortages- directly as a result of Coca Cola’s over extraction of groundwater. A government study in the desert state of Rajasthan found that the groundwater levels had dropped 10 meters in the 5 years since Coca Cola had started operations.
In 2003 and again in 2006, studies found that Coca Cola Products in India contain dangerously high levels of pesticides, including DDT, lindane and malathion. On an average, the pesticide residues were 24 times higher than EU standards.

Last summer, around 130 workers in Dublin, Galway, Waterford, Tipperary and Cork were sacked after they refused to accept new terms which could have seen their pay reduced by up to 60 per cent. Coca-Cola TM HBC refuses to recognise the recommendations of the Labour Court with respect to these workers’ rights. Instead, the company which made €200 million in profit in Ireland in the first half of 2009 has outsourced their jobs to lower paid workers with less favourable working conditions. In addition to this, Coca Cola have also met with controversy in Turkey and South Africa in recent months.

Despite it’s the length of its existence, the boycott has proven to be a powerful asset in challenging one of the world’s largest corporations. Coca Cola prides its brand name and has gone to considerable lengths to whitewash its record, in 2005 it donated 10 million dollars to a Columbian charity, and attempted to pay SINALTRAINAL members large sums of money to drop their international campaign. They also claimed that they had invited the International Labour Organisation (ILO) to conduct an investigation into possible human rights abuses in Columbia in the 1990s and subsequently been found inculpable, this claim is simply not true. The ILO had been asked to go to Columbia by the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers' Associations (IUF). According to the ILO, they conducted an “assessment of current working conditions at enterprises in Colombia” and not an investigation into human rights abuses. According to Ron Oswald of the IUF; “There are still calls for Coke to agree to an independent investigation of those incidents and that's something we thought Coke should have agreed to many years ago."

Since UCD students instituted a boycott of Coca Cola, Student Unions across the globe have followed the example with many Universities in the United States, Italy, Britain, France and Canada following suit. Conall o Dufaigh of the campaign to continue the Boycott says that “The importance of us being the first Students Union to actively support SINALTRAINAL’s struggle for workers’ and human rights cannot be dismissed lightly. This is why we ask the students of UCD to continue to support the boycott and to vote no in this referendum”.