Hear Edgar Paez of the National Food Industry Workers' Union in Colombia

Sunday, March 23, 7pm
Brewing Grounds for Change Coffee shop
(Milwaukee's only 100% fair-trade coffee shop)
2008 North Farwell, Milwaukee

In recent years, hundreds of workers at Coca-Cola bottling plants have
been tortured, kidnapped, illegally detained, and even assassinated by
violent right-wing paramilitary groups who work closely with plant
management.

Edgar Paez is part of the international mission of the National Food
Industry Workers Union in Colombia, known as SINALTRAINAL. Paez has
dedicated his entire life to organizing workers and has worked
actively in connecting social struggles both in Colombia and the world
over. He is a member of the Operating Committee for the Social
Observatory of transnational businesses, megaprojects, human rights
and the Permanent Tribunal of the Pueblos Sesión, Colombia.

Free and open to the public

Sponsored by Progressive Students of Milwaukee and the Latin America
Solidarity Committee,
[email protected]

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***article from Businessweek included below: "Inside Coke's Labor
Struggles," (1-23-06)

Inside Coke's Labor Struggles

*BusinessWeek* travels to Colombia to speak with labor leaders, politicians,
workers and others who can shed light on the controversy
January 23, 2006
*To shed more light on the conflicting claims in the Colombia Coca-Cola
controversy,* BusinessWeek *sent Mexico City-based Latin America
Correspondent Geri Smith to Colombia for a week in late October. She
interviewed more than a dozen people, including labor unionists, academics,
diplomats, economists, current and former Coke workers, and the country's
vice-president in an effort to get to the bottom of the dispute.

She didn't expect to find a "smoking gun" -- many of the killings of Coke
workers took place a decade or more ago, and Colombia's justice system is
slow to investigate and prosecute crimes. But as these excerpts from her
interviews indicate, Colombia's political violence makes it not only a
dangerous place to be a union organizer but a complicated place to do
business.*

The national headquarters for SINALTRAINAL, a union representing Colombian
food-industry workers, is in an old two-story house in Bogota. Its worn,
creaking stairs reflect the ramshackle condition of the country's labor
unions. Walls are plastered with photos of Che Guevara and international
Coke boycott posters in several languages, including one showing the
wrinkled feet of a cadaver with a morgue toe tag reading "Union Leader" and
a headline saying "Killer Coke can't hide its crimes in Colombia."

"ENCOURAGING IMPUNITY." Edgar Paez, the union's international relations
director, says the union tried for years to get Coke to admit some
responsibility for the killings of at least eight workers employed by its
Colombian bottlers or to pay indemnization to their families. Only when the
union filed a U.S. lawsuit in 2001 and began an international boycott in
2003, he says, did Coke pay more attention to the problem.

"If, when the first of our colleagues was killed, Coca-Cola had issued a
statement condemning the paramilitaries or the criminals and demanding that
they stay out of worker-employer relations, we would definitely say that the
company had distanced itself from what happened," says Paez. "But Coca-Cola
doesn't say anything! We believe that if they don't condemn these killings,
a multinational is encouraging impunity." A Coke spokesman told *
BusinessWeek* that its bottlers had taken out advertisements in local
newspapers protesting the killings.

Although SINALTRAINAL is making waves with its boycott in the U.S. and
Europe, in Colombia it's a mere shadow of its former self. Today, it
represents just 2,300 workers nationwide -- 314 of them from Coke, with the
rest from other food companies, including Nestlé. That's down from 5,400
workers a decade ago, because many companies, like Coke, have restructured,
replacing full-time employees with short-term contractors.

POINTING FINGERS. One reason Coke's problems in Colombia seem so
intractable is because the dialogue with SINALTRAINAL is nearly nonexistent.
Union leaders are openly hostile: In an interview, Paez ticked off 27
demands including reparations to victims' families and promotion of fruit
juices to replace consumption of carbonated beverages such as Coke.

While Paez places the blame for the deaths squarely on Coke, he acknowledges
that lax law enforcement and a weak justice system, along with government
hostility toward unions and the country's four-decade-old civil war, created
the perfect environment for the killings to occur.

"If the Colombian government had not allowed this impunity from the
beginning," he says, "all these crimes wouldn't have happened."

"POLITICAL FIGHT." Colombian Vice-President Francisco Santos knows
something about the country's violence: The former editor of *El
Tiempo*newspaper, Santos was kidnapped in 1990 by drug traffickers and
held for
eight months, along with 10 other journalists.

Santos is in charge of improving the government's human-rights record,
including investigating cases of violence against unionists. In an interview
with *BusinessWeek*, Santos didn't hide his disdain for SINALTRAINAL's
boycott. "This [SINALTRAINAL vs. Coke] is not a labor union fight, it's a
political fight. You can't justify the death of a union leader. [But] they
took a myth and built a campaign out of it. They found a model that works,
and they've been very successful at [promoting] it. They've been able to
build this [martyrdom] image."

He says the government is making a good-faith effort to investigate killings
of labor leaders. "We know there are problems, we're trying to solve them,"
he said. "It's not as easy to get away with killing a labor leader as it was
five years ago. But we're [still] not satisfied at all with the results."

On Oct. 24-29, an International Labor Organization mission visited Colombia
to assess the current state of labor rights. While the ILO applauded the
government's efforts to improve investigation of labor-related crimes, it
noted that "impunity prevails." Fewer than 1% of cases are ever resolved.

MAKING HEADLINES. Luis Alejandro Pedraza is the representative in Bogotá of
the Geneva-based International Union of Foodworkers (IUF). After violence
forced SINALTRAINAL to abandon Coke's Carepa plant a decade ago, Pedraza
helped organize a new union there. Some labor observers dismiss the IUF as
pro-company, but many unionists in Colombia believe veteran unionist Pedraza
is a straight shooter. Coke workers are represented by around a half-dozen
unions nationwide.

At least 30 union leaders are killed in Colombia each year, making it the
most violent country for union organizers. SINALTRAINAL is not the
hardest-hit group. Many more union leaders in the teaching, farming, and
health professions have fallen prey to violence. Yet, SINALTRAINAL has been
more successful drawing attention to its plight. "The union sees
multinationals as key vehicles for airing their point of view to the world,"
says Pedraza. "They want to engage Coke in a permanent debate because it
gives them notoriety and recognition."

Pedraza says the IUF refused to join the boycott "because SINALTRAINAL did
not present us with proof that Coke had ordered the killing of unionists."
Of course, he acknowledges, "in this kind of thing there is never any
written evidence" pointing to who may have ordered the killings.

He believes, however, that Coke could do more to lay the conflict to rest.
"We have always maintained that Coke has a political responsibility...to
seek peaceful labor relations and that it should sign an international
agreement guaranteeing labor rights. Coke hasn't said yes yet, but it has
been open to dialogue," he says. A model for that would be an agreement that
the IUF signed with Chiquita Brands in 2002 to guarantee Colombian banana
workers' rights, he says. After Chiquita signed that agreement, labor
conflicts diminished significantly.

LABOR WEAKENING. Héctor Fajardo, a former top leader of Colombia's main
labor confederation, the CUT, now is an academic and adviser to a Spanish
labor confederation. Colombia, he says, "has always had a profound
anti-union culture." Massacres of striking banana and cement workers in 1928
and 1965 set the tone decades ago. Most killings take place during strikes
or when a union has just presented a list of demands in the collective
bargaining process.

In the 1990s, labor laws were reformed to allow companies to replace
full-time contract workers with part-time laborers or subcontractors, which
further weakened the labor union movement. Today, only 4.8% of Colombia's 17
million workers belong to unions -- down from 9% in the 1960s.

Even though he thinks SINALTRAINAL should have pursued constructive dialogue
rather than a boycott, he believes Coke hasn't handled the issue well
either. "International campaigns are the Achilles' heel of the
multinationals," he says. "I don't think that Coca-Cola has been able to
prove that it was not responsible."

DANGEROUS CLIMATE. Carlos Rodríguez, CUT's current president, is one of
eight CUT officials who has government protection because of death threats.
Yet he isn't satisfied. He says the government has failed to carry out
serious, thorough investigations and rarely prosecutes anyone for the
killings.

Unionists are caught in the middle of a country in extreme conflict. "If
you're a union activist in an area where the paramilitaries are in charge,
they say you're a guerrilla. If you're a union activist in an area
controlled by the guerrillas, they'll say you're a paramilitary. And the
army says you're one of the two, and goes after you," he says.

Still, CUT does not back the Coke boycott. "We respect what our colleagues
think, but we don't share their views," says Rodríguez. "In today's
globalized world we can't pretend that a boycott against multinationals is
the solution."

He does, however, think labor unions must join together to ensure that
multinationals follow worldwide codes of behavior. "A multinational should
behave the same in a country where it invests as it does in its home
country."

LIVING IN FEAR. Luis Hernán Manco, 59, was president of the local
SINALTRAINAL union in Carepa when union board member Isidro Segundo Gil was
gunned down on the premises of the Coke bottling facility there in 1996.
Manco was working just a few yards away when the killing occurred. "When I
heard the gunshot, I turned and saw him fall," he recalls. "Two men standing
over him shot Gil several more times, and then they very calmly got on their
motorcycle and rode off."

After paramilitaries warned him that he would be killed if he stayed in
town, Manco fled to Bogotá, where he has lived in hiding for nearly a
decade, leaving behind his three children with his ex-wife. Working
sporadically as a night watchman, he had to borrow bus fare to come to an
interview at SINALTRAINAL's headquarters.

Although Coke says its bottlers have compensated workers who were forced to
flee their jobs, Manco says he never received any severance pay. The
company, he says, paid for his bus ticket to Bogotá but refused any other
compensation, arguing that he "abandoned" his job, where he earned about
$160 a month. "God willing, I am still hoping the company will pay what they
owe me," he says. He's still afraid to return to Carepa. "The people who
killed Gil are still there."