***** Published on Monday, May 1, 2000 in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Coke's Alleged Racism: African American Employees Rally, Call For Boycott by Ralph Nader
. . . A lawsuit filed last year by Coke employees charges the company with a pattern and practice of racial discrimination against African American employees.
Last week 30 current and former African American Coke employees took a "justice ride" on a bus from Atlanta, where the company is headquartered, to Wilmington, Del., where the company was holding its annual shareholder meeting.
The Justice Riders traveled to Wilmington to publicize their case and demand that Coke move to a quick and fair settlement of the dispute.
In their lawsuit, the Coke employees marshaled an impressive array of statistical and anecdotal evidence to buttress their claim of discrimination. They allege:
The median salary for African Americans at Coke's headquarters is about a third less than that of whites there. In 1998 the African American mean was $45,215, while the Caucasian mean was $72,045.
A "glass ceiling" blocks African Americans from rising to top positions in the company. Although African Americans make up more than 15 percent of the employees at the headquarters, they are vastly underrepresented at top pay-grade levels - and not one member of the senior management team is African-American.
Coke's evaluation system "permits excessively subjective managerial discretion" that leads to racial discrimination in evaluations. Since salary and raises are based on this performance evaluation system, race-based discrimination in pay scales is a result.
"Since at least 1995, Coca-Cola's senior management and officers, up to and including CEO M. Douglas Invester (who has since been replaced), have known of company-wide discrimination against African-Americans," the lawsuit states.
In one poignant allegation, the Coke employees charge that "in or about 1996 or 1997, one of the few African-American Assistant Vice Presidents attended a meeting in Atlanta with some representatives of bottling companies. He was the only African-American at the meeting, but high-level Caucasian marketing executives from Coca-Cola were present. The head of marketing of the bottling company for the state of Alabama introduced himself as the 'Grand Cyclops' of Alabama. Despite the obvious Ku Klux Klan reference, no Company employee responded to this outrageous comment at the Company meeting." . . .
<http://www.commondreams.org/views/050100-108.htm> *****
***** Racism Costs Corporate America Date posted: 12/07/00
. . . The Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Co. is the most recent example. It has agreed to pay $192.5 million, the largest settlement in a U.S. race-discrimination lawsuit, in order to end litigation brought in 1999 by Black employees. As part of the settlement, Coke agreed to pay $113 million to the aggrieved African American workers, $43.5 million to boost the salaries of Blacks so that they are comparable to those of whites; $36 million for programs to monitor the companies employment practices and $20 million for the plaintiffs' legal fees.
As is always the case in this type of litigation, Coca-Cola never admitted to practicing racial discrimination. Whether Coke admits it or not, everyone knows they are not forking over almost $193 million out of the goodness of their heart. They realize that had the case proceeded to court, they could have been out of much more than $200 million.
After vehemently denying for months that the case had no merit, in the end Coca-Cola officials had to acknowledge the obvious. "Today we are closing a painful chapter in our company's history," said Coca-Cola chairman and CEO Douglas N. Draft in a memo to employees. It is a chapter that never should have been opened. . . .
<http://www.njournalg.com/editorial/2000/12/curry_racism_costs.html> *****
***** The Coca-Cola Killings: Is Plan Colombia funding a bloodbath of union activists? By David Bacon Issue Date: 1.28.02
After the leader of their union was shot down at their plant gate in late 1996, Edgar Paéz and his co-workers at the Coca-Cola bottling factory in Carepa, Colombia, tried for more than four years to get their government to take action against the responsible parties. Instead, some of the workers themselves wound up behind bars, while the murderers went free.
Convinced that Colombian officials were unable or unwilling to bring the perpetrators to justice, they decided to go abroad for help. Accordingly, last July, the Colombian union Sinaltrainal, together with the United Steelworkers of America and the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF), filed a lawsuit in the Florida courts against Coca-Cola, Panamerican Beverages (the largest soft-drink bottler in Latin America), and Bebidas y Alimentos (owned by Richard Kirby of Key Biscayne, Florida), which operates the Carepa plant. The suit charges the three companies with complicity in the assassination of the union leader Isídro Segundo Gil.
The case has become the centerpiece in a new strategy devised by Colombia's labor movement to stop a wave of murders of union activists that's lasted over a decade. International labor cooperation, the unions believe, is the only means left to them to counter the power of the corporations that they think are the instigators and beneficiaries of the repression. . . .
The level of violence against Colombian unionists is staggering: In 2000, assassinations took the lives of 153 of the nation's trade-union leaders. In 2001, the figure had reached 143 by the end of November. According to Héctor Fajardo, general secretary of the United Confederation of Workers (CUT), Colombia's largest union federation, 3,800 trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia since 1986. In the year 2000, three out of every five trade unionists killed in the world were Colombian, according to a recent report by the United Steelworkers. . . .
Unionists and human-rights activists hold Colombia's paramilitary forces responsible for almost all the trade-union assassinations--though those forces aren't working simply for themselves. Robin Kirk, who monitors abuses in Colombia for Human Rights Watch, says that there are strong ties between the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the nation's leading paramilitary grouping, and the Colombian military. "The Colombian military and intelligence apparatus has been virulently anticommunist since the 1950s," she says, "and they look at trade unionists as subversives--as a very real and potential threat." Roberto Molino of the Colombian Commission of Jurists contends that "in the case of the paramilitaries, you cannot underestimate the collaboration of government forces." Those forces, says Samuel Morales of the CUT, "believe it's a crime to try to present any option for social change."
The AUC is also quietly backed by elements of the nation's business and economic elite. "There are powerful economic interests that support the paramilitaries," Kirk says, "and they attack union leaders again and again." Morales concurs: "The paramilitaries are an armed wing of the same military forces and government structures that have historically taken positions against us. In Colombia, they're called the army's 'sixth division.'"
According to the complaint in the Florida case, here's what happened: At 8:30 a.m. on December 5, 1996, a right-wing paramilitary squad of the AUC showed up at the gate of the Coke bottling plant in Carepa. Gil, a member of the union's executive board, went to see what they wanted. The paras opened fire on Gil and he dropped to the ground, mortally wounded. An hour after he was assassinated, paramilitary forces kidnapped another leader of the union at his home; he managed to escape, however, and fled to Bogotá. At 8:00 p.m., paras broke into the union's offices, destroyed the equipment there, and burned down the entire house, destroying all the union's records.
The next day, the heavily armed group went inside the bottling plant, called the workers together, and gave them until 4:00 p.m. to resign from the union. "They said that if they didn't resign, the same thing would happen to them that happened to Gil--they would be killed," recalls Paéz, who visited the United States in November to ask union members here to support the suit. Not surprisingly, union members resigned en masse. A number of workers also quit their jobs outright, undoubtedly fearing that they would be killed simply for showing up. . . .
...[T]he suit charges that plant manager Ariosto Milán Mosquera claimed that "he had given an order to the paramilitaries to carry out the task of destroying the union." Workers believed him because he had a history of partying with the paramilitaries.
Paéz says not only that the plant's managers were responsible for what happened but that Coke clearly benefited from it. "At the time of Gil's death, we were involved in negotiations with the company [Bebidas], presenting proposals to them," he says. "The company never negotiated with the union after that. Twenty-seven workers in 12 departments left the plant and the area. All the workers had to quit the union to save their own lives, and the union was completely destroyed. For two months, the paramilitaries camped just outside the plant gate. Coca-Cola never complained to the authorities." The experienced workers who left the plant, who'd been earning between $380 and $400 a month, were replaced by new employees at minimum wage--$130 a month.
During a subsequent investigation by the Colombian Justice Ministry, the plant's director and production manager were detained, along with a local paramilitary leader. All three were later released, with no charges filed against them.
The assassinations were neither the first nor the last targeted at union leaders in Colombian Coke plants. In 1994, two other union activists, José Davíd and Luís Granado, were also murdered in Carepa, and at that time as well, paramilitaries demanded that workers quit the union. In 1989, unionist José Avelino Chicano was killed in Coca-Cola's Pasto plant. This year, again during negotiations, a union leader at the Bucaramanga plant, Oscar Dario Soto Polo, was murdered. When the union denounced the killings, the plant's chief of security charged its leaders with terrorism and rebellion. Five were arrested and jailed for six months.
The paramilitary war on unionists is escalating at a time when U.S. aid to Colombia's official armed forces has also grown rapidly. Under Plan Colombia, the U.S. effort to reduce the flow of illegal drugs from Colombia, the United States has funneled $1.3 billion into the country, almost entirely in military assistance. Colombia is the third-largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the world. . . .
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