The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink by Michael Blanding

Author:Michael Blanding
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Industries, Soft drink industry, Social Science, Corporate & Business History, Bottled water industry, General, International business enterprises, International, Business & Economics, Economic History
ISBN: 9781583334065
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2010-09-16T23:14:56.173345+00:00

Whether the company colluded with the violence against the union or just benefited from it, the union has been decimated by the constant threats and attacks. In 1993, when Panamco began buying up bottling plants, SINALTRAINAL had 1,880 workers at the company. By 2009, according to SINALTRAINAL researcher Carlos Olaya, that number was 350. Much of the decline has been due to outsourcing of the workforce to contract or temporary workers, he says; from 10,000 full-time workers in 1993, the company now employs only 2,000. Most of the other workers are so-called cooperative workers who are responsible for their own health insurance and other benefits, and of course excluded from collective bargaining.

Even the direct workers have seen wages decline from a high of $800 a month to near $500. For nonunionized workers, wages are even worse—only $150 a month. In addition, workers have lost overtime and holiday bonuses. All of the consolidation and downsizing, however, has been tremendously successful for the company; Coca-Cola now controls 60 percent of the nonalcoholic beverages market in the country; with the acquisition of Panamco by Coca-Cola FEMSA in 2003, the country has been one of the new anchor bottlers’ primary growth markets.

Despite the supposed demobilization of the paramilitaries in Colombia, however, the threats against SINALTRAINAL continue, sent from a new generation of “successor groups” to the AUC, which have picked up where they left off. In Barranca, there is a new paramilitary boss who is rumored to be the brother of Urabá’s El Alemán. Death threats appear regularly at the union hall, slipped under the door or even e-mailed. “DEATH TO ALL LEFTIST COMMUNISTS—TOTAL EXTERMINATION TO THESE DOGS!” read one e-mail received in November 2008. “WE GIVE A DECLARATION OF DEATH TO ALL . . . TRADE UNIONISTS OF OUR BELOVED BARRANCA.”

In Bucaramanga, paramilitaries kidnapped Flores’s son as he was leaving his high school in November 2007, throwing him in a black SUV and pistol-whipping him before dumping him on the side of the road. Chile’s daughter Laura Milena García was targeted in the summer of 2008, she says, when she was walking home from her university and noticed two men following her. One caught up and hissed, “Don’t scream,” pressing a gun to her side. Luckily she was close enough to her home to recognize a groundskeeper and greeted him loudly, scaring her assailant away. It’s suddenly clear why Chile has brought his daughter and granddaughter to hear him speak—they need to know what has happened to their father because they are targets themselves.

“Now I don’t go alone to the university anymore,” says García, who on the outside looks like your average MTV-watching twentysomething, with a sparkly, midriff-baring shirt and big hoop earrings. Inside, however, she is clearly a chile pepper like her father. “When I’m at the university and a professor starts talking bad about unions, it really makes me angry,” she says, wiping away the tears. “I say, ‘What are you talking about—they defend the rights of workers. How many workers’

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