RESOLUTION REGARDING A BOYCOTT OF COCA-COLA PRODUCTS
Dear members,
The SANA board has voted to support a resolution calling for SANA and the AAA
to boycott Coca-Cola products because of the company's participation in violent
anti-union activity in Colombia.
To provide detailed information about the situation in Colombia, we share
with you here an article by anthropologist Lesley Gill that appeared recently in
Transforming Anthropology.
Gill has also organized a panel discussion on Coca-Cola's anti-union
activities with presentations by William Mendoza (President, SINALTRAINAL,
Barracabermeja, Colombia), Camilo Romero (National Coordinator, United Students
Against Sweatshops), Ray Rogers (Corporate Campaign, Inc.) and Terry
Collingsworth (International Labor Rights Fund). This discussion will take place
on the morning of Friday, April 21st at the Baruch College Conference Center
during the upcoming SANA conference.
A special SANA membership forum will follow the panel discussion.
Please take a few minutes out of your busy schedules to read and give us
feedback on the resolution below.
Sincerely,
Jeff Maskovsky President, Society for the Anthropology of North America
RESOLUTION REGARDING A BOYCOTT OF COCA-COLA PRODUCTS
WHEREAS, trade unionists at Coca-Cola plants in Colombia have been
assassinated, harassed, and intimidated by right-wing paramilitaries, and
WHEREAS, the wives, children, and relatives of SINALTRAINAL leaders have been
targeted by these paramilitaries, and
WHEREAS, eyewitness accounts and other evidence support the conclusion that
company personnel have organized the murder and intimidation of Coca-Cola
workers, and
WHEREAS, paramilitary groups operate unhindered, and often in collusion, with
the government and foreign corporations as an anti-union force, and
WHEREAS, the U.S. government provides billions of dollars to the Colombian
government in mostly military aid, and
WHEREAS, these actions deprive Colombian workers of their internationally
recognized rights to organize into unions and bargain collectively, and
WHEREAS, no professional organization of social scientists concerned with
labor and human rights should offer its credibility to the Coca-Cola Company by
distributing its products,
BE IT RESOLVED THAT the Society for the Anthropology of North America (SANA)
will: 1) ban all Coca-Cola products from its functions and annual meetings and
calls upon the American Anthropological Association to do the same,
2) communicate to the Coca-Cola Company that until the situation involving
SINALTRAINAL is resolved and the safety and rights of workers in its bottling
plants are protected, SANA will support SINALTRAINAL’s boycott of the Coca-Cola
Company and do all it can to publicize the boycott, and
3) demand that the Coca-Cola Company a) make a public declaration in Colombia
that paramilitary violence against unionists must stop, b) create a company
policy against collaboration with paramilitaries, c) establish a human rights
ombudsman in every plant, and d) provide compensation to the victims, and
4) call upon the United States government to stop military aid to the
Colombian government until the perpetrators of human rights crimes are held
accountable.
- Date:
- 14 Feb 2006
- Time:
- 19:25:03
- Remote User:
CommentsI agree with Sam that SANA and other progressive sections can and should take a stance on the wider issues he raises. I think this was the idea behind JANA and it would be good to see an effort to move the Halifax proposals forward.
At the same time, if we can take specific, concrete actions to support (or foster) efforts to address corporate culture and irresponsibility – as we are doing with convention hotels and Coke – we put ethical commitments into practice.
If I’m not mistaken, JANA also sought to address the media issues that Sam raises. There were some great ideas for this – including using the media savvy many of us have brought from activism, journalism, etc. to get out front on central issues. Press releases and using existing media contacts to get stories outside of The Nation and Democracy Now is going to be important with Coke and other issues. Getting stories in Convention News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and even the Chronicle of Higher Ed have had a huge impact on other associations and the SF hotel boycott.
It’s going to be hard for “the left” or anyone else to take us seriously if we’re not getting press to our conferences and to cover actions like this resolution. As anthropologists we strive to bring all the complexities of local and global contexts to our work. This is crucial for thinking through long-term policy issues and activist campaigns. But, as the right has demonstrated in the US, targeted short-term goals can have broad long-term consequences (see America's Right Turn: How Conservatives Used New and Alternative Media to Take Power). The Mid-West Training Academy, Alinsky, Friere and others have made similar arguments.
Rob O'Brien
- Date:
- 14 Feb 2006
- Time:
- 21:39:11
- Remote User:
CommentsWe should support unionizing efforts wherever around the globe.
- Date:
- 14 Feb 2006
- Time:
- 22:35:09
- Remote User:
CommentsAgreed!
Antonio Lauria-Perricelli
- Date:
- 15 Feb 2006
- Time:
- 15:19:07
- Remote User:
CommentsI agree. Judy Whitehead
- Date:
- 16 Feb 2006
- Time:
- 05:39:54
- Remote User:
Commentsi concur with the resolution as it reads. can an item be added in section (3) that SANA will also demand coca cola's public declaration in the US of the company's wrongdoing in colombia and/or make public its remedial actions?
- Date:
- 16 Feb 2006
- Time:
- 15:17:36
- Remote User:
CommentsI support this resolution and thank the SANA board for its activities on this issue. Jennifer Alvey
- Date:
- 17 Feb 2006
- Time:
- 05:08:14
- Remote User:
CommentsI agree wholeheartedly with the resolution and will urge others to do so.
John Clarke
- Date:
- 18 Feb 2006
- Time:
- 09:54:13
- Remote User:
CommentsIf there are to be signatures on this, I will be glad to sign, and also contribute to the costs.
John H. Moore, Research Professor of Anthropology
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL
- Date:
- 20 Feb 2006
- Time:
- 06:10:30
- Remote User:
Commentsgreat site
- Date:
- 20 Feb 2006
- Time:
- 06:11:19
- Remote User:
Commentsvery interesting web site, keep up the good work
- Date:
- 05 Mar 2006
- Time:
- 19:28:32
- Remote User:
CommentsI agree
- Date:
- 11 Apr 2006
- Time:
- 11:11:27
- Remote User:
CommentsI am increasingly concerned with the growing political nature of the AAA and its associated groups. While the situation in Columbia may be dire and the involvement of Coca-Cola outrageous, I believe we loose creditability as a scientific organization and erode the (perceptual) legitimacy of our work if it is perceived that our actions maybe understood as motivated or interested in a specific social agenda. We risk not only the (further) fractionation of the discipline, as is common enough with the indirect political games we play everyday, but possibly any real chance of contributing to real change by providing “clean” data (or as clean as we can make it given our humanity) that may be persuasive because it is considered free of overt politically interested positions of authorship.
Further, while our supposedly collective actions, like supporting the strike in S.F., or our well-intentioned befuddlement of the El Dorado business, may serve legitimate and worthy causes, the practice establishes a precedent that may decline into a slippery slope. I have no doubt that some resolution will develop within the AAA membership supporting certain positions on immigration, which is certainly a complex and important issue. But it also has the capacity to make some feel less than free to express their views on particular subjects that may be perceived as illegitimate or stigmatized, thus limiting the free exchange of ideas. How, for example, would the discipline receive an ethnography that supports the actions of Coca-Cola?
Our jobs are not to issue resolutions, but to document and attempt to understand—and explain--how and why people live with one another, in all their various ways. Would our society and our organization not be better served if we applied ourselves to continuing to document the experience of immigration, to produce knowledge instead of resolutions?
Thomas M. Bongiorno
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