Coca-Cola continues to violate the fundamental rights of workers in Haiti, Indonesia, Ireland and the USA. CLICK HERE to learn more and to send a message to Coca-Cola’s CEO and Chairman James Quincey.
In Haiti Coke’s bottler La Brasserie de la Couronne continues to systematically deny workers their right to form and be represented by a union, SYTBRACOUR (read more here).
Haiti is a dangerous place to live and to work. Companies should, at a minimum, be alert to this situation and exercise maximum due diligence. In July 2019, a Coca-Cola truck driver was shot in his vehicle while at work. The Coca-Cola Company has made no meaningful independent investigation of this killing, choosing instead to rely on a version of events provided by their local bottler, which sought to shift blame onto the driver. Subsequent IUF investigations into this case have exonerated the driver and exposed a callous disregard for the truth on the part of the Coca-Cola bottler and The Coca-Cola Company.
In Indonesia Coca-Cola bottler Amatil pursues its long-running attack on the rights of independent, democratic trade unions (for more read here).
In Ireland, The Coca-Cola Company closed two of its directly owned concentrate plants, both of which were strongly unionized, and shifted production to the remaining plant in Ballina, where it refuses to engage in collective bargaining with the IUF-affiliated SIPTU. Coke’s rejection of collective bargaining rights flies in the face of an Irish Labour Court recommendation that SIPTU should be able to “engage with the Company to negotiate the terms and conditions of employment on behalf of its members.” Coke management in Ballina refuses to accept this recommendation to recognize the union’s collective bargaining rights.
In the U.S.A. the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Northern New England bottler spent more than 330,000.00 US dollars hiring a union-busting consultancy firm to persuade workers at its Greenfield bottling plant not to join the RWDSU/UFCW.
According to The Coca-Cola Company’s human rights report 2016-2017:
“At The Coca-Cola Company, we respect our employees’ right to join, form, or not join a labor union without fear of reprisal, intimidation, or harassment.”
Publicly available Bennett Law Firm documents describe how this works in practice:
“We represented management at employee meetings with the objective of persuading subject group of employees at Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Northern New England in Greenfield, Massachusetts to remain union-free.”
The Coca-Cola Company will only act to remedy these multiple human rights violations when it feels that the brand name is threatened by public exposure of its record.
Please show your support for these workers and the fight for rights in the Coca-Cola system.
CLICK HERE to send a message to Coca-Cola’s CEO and Chairman James Quincey, expressing your outrage over these ongoing human rights violations and demanding the Company act to remedy them. Your name will also be added to a petition that will be delivered to The Coca-Cola Company.
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