Impressed with Coca-Cola’s ‘awesome’ multicultural Super Bowl ad? Don’t be.
deathandtaxesmag.com
There have been many reactions towards Coca-Cola’s very lovely and pleasant-seeming Super Bowl ad. It’s full of lovely, multicultural people, and even a family with two dads! It’s sung in various languages! Yay! Warm feelings! Unity!
The primary issue has been about idiots freaking out over the fact that it involved singing “America the Beautiful” in various languages, because “This is America! We speak ‘MERICAN here!” and some such. Never mind the fact that English isn’t even our official language, and we don’t even have an official language.
While making fun of sad, xenophobic yokels and Allen West is of course a good time, it’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. If you want the truth, the ad offended me too, but for entirely different reasons. The number-one reason being that I cannot believe that Coke dared to run an ad purporting to be this lovely, progressive, multicultural company when it is in fact a company that willfully oppresses people of color throughout the world–and has been the subject of a major boycott for years over these issues.
Human rights abuses and murder in Colombia and Guatamala
Back in 1996, Isidro Gil, a worker at one of Coke’s bottling plants in Colombia was gunned down by a paramilitary group as he entered work one morning. Why? Because he was a Union organizer. Two days after his murder, the paramilitaries went to the bottling plant and informed the workers there that they could either quit the union by 4pm that day or be killed as well. They were given resignation forms by Coca-Cola’s plant manager, who had been known to be in cahoots with the paramilitary groups for quite some time. The workers quite en masse and fled the country, and were then replaced by new hires working for $130 a month, as compared to the $380 a month the experienced workers had been making.
This situation repeated itself in 2002 when SINALTRAINAL union leader Adolfo de Jesus Munera was murdered under very similar circumstances. There have been a total of 8 murders of union members and one murder of a friendly plant manager at Coca-Cola operations between the years of 1989 and 2002.
In Guatemala, where the situation has been dicey since at least the 1970s, one of the more recent controversies is the 2006 campaign of harassment, violence and intimidation against Union activist Armando Palacios and his family. This involved death threats, the gang rape of his daughter, and the murder of the son of one of his fellow organizers. He and his family now live in the U.S. and filed suit against Coca-Cola in 2010.
youtube.com
In 2004, there was a 10-day independent investigation into the allegations of human rights violations at Coca-Cola’s Colombia plant. Members of the investigation were horrified by stories of intimidation and abuse from management. The investigation determined that there had been ”a total of 179 major human rights violations of Coca-Cola’s workers, including nine murders. Family members of union activists have been abducted and tortured. Union members have been fired for attending union meetings. The company has pressured workers to resign their union membership and contractual rights, and fired workers who refused to do so…Most troubling to the delegation were the persistent allegations that paramilitary violence against workers was done with the knowledge of and likely under the direction of company managers.”
Coca-Cola is not denying these things happened, instead, they merely deny responsibility for them. They argue, instead, that they cannot be held liable for things that happen outside of the United States. They also, very conveniently, technically do not directly own their overseas bottling plants. Instead, they have a system of bottling plants that act as agents for Coca-Cola, and operate under contract. This is a calculated decision that allows them to ignore the human rights violations occurring at their overseas plants.
Pollution in India
One of the 58 Coca-Cola plants in India has been the cause of protest for years due to the fact that it is using up too much groundwater and polluting the soil–including one that lasted for three months and ended in a hunger strike. This is in an area where people don’t have enough water to begin with, so it’s kind of a big deal. Residents also say that the plant is there illegally, as it was built on village council land. As a result of this, officials are planning to have the plant demolished.
A 2006 study discovered that there was a disturbing amount of pesticides in the Coca-Cola sold in India as well.
Discrimination against Black and Latino workers in… America the Beautiful
As you may know, in one of Martin Luther King’s last speeches, he called for a boycott of Coca-Cola due to the fact that the Atlanta plants were discriminating against black workers, who would be kept in menial, harder, lower paying jobs while white workers enjoyed better pay and better work. Which makes this 2007 CocaCola Super Bowl ad celebrating Black History Month feel a tad awkward: youtube.com
But HEY. 2007 is totally different from 1968, right? The times have changed and Coke had gotten with them! Except not!
In 2001, Coke was an integral part of the largest employment discrimination lawsuit in the history of the entire country. The company was ordered to pay out $192 million dollars to over 2,000 Black employees. Why?
Via Find Justice:
Among a long list of allegedly inequitable business practices, the plaintiffs alleged a substantial difference in pay between African-American and white employees; a “glass ceiling” that kept African-Americans from advancing past entry-level management positions; “glass walls” that channeled African-Americans to management in areas like human resources and away from power centers such as marketing and finance; and that senior management had knowledge of these inequities since 1995 and failed to implement policies to remedy them.
The company was then ordered to subject itself to a five-year diversity task force. How did it work? Well, in 2012 they were the subject of yet another discrimination lawsuit from 16 Black and Hispanic workers at two of their New York plants who called the company “a giant cesspool of racial discrimination.”
Via New York Daily News:
Sondra Walker said that when she was hired as a merchandiser at the Maspeth plant, she felt like she “had hit Lotto” because Coca Cola is such a prestigious company.
“I’ve never been called so many names as I have been at Coca-Cola,” Walker told the Daily News, citing “Nappy Head” and “Aunt JaMamma” as examples.
Walker describes in the complaint an incident when a white worker wore a Confederate flag on his head and another in which a white employee complaining about cleaning a sewer allegedly said: “What am I, a n—– or something?”
“I thought this was a fair and honest company, as American as apple pie,” said plaintiff Guillermo Nunez, who says he has suffered emotionally because of the treatment. “I thought I had made it. It was my American Dream.”
Charming!
In addition to all this is their opposition to labeling GMOs while marketing supposedly health-conscious products like Zico Coconut Water and Simply Orange (which turned out to not be “Simply Orange” after all), their H2No campaign encouraging restaurants to push bottled water over tap water, land grabs all over the world, labor violations in China, and a million other things I don’t have room for in this one piece. If you’d like to find out more, check out Killer Coke, a page created by SINALTRAINAL union activists dedicated to detailing each of Coke’s crimes across the world.
So yeah. That’s why I am less than impressed with Coke’s “It’s a Small World After All” posturing in that Super Bowl ad. Feel-good ads do nothing for me when we’re talking about a company that is just straight-up fucking people all around the world.
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