Coca-Cola Responds to SINALTRAINAL

No business is immune to public opinion. Without people to buy their products businesses would serve no purpose, and therefore it is in a company’s best interest to meet their consumer’s expectation for practice and production quality. The Coca-Cola Company is aware of the accusations made against them by SINALTRAINAL, and have responded by investigating the accusations themselves as a basis for policy change.
In terms of public image alone, Coke’s most famous attempt to win back their appeal was with livepositively.com, a website that summarizes and promotes their humanitarian and environmental efforts around the world. For more information on this program see http://www.livepositively.com/#/home
A program like livepositively.com can easily be seen as an attempt to spin criticism away from the company with fancy marketing, however. Knowing that it would take more than just a website to win back a positive public image, the Coca-Cola Company requested an investigation by the United Nations labor panel of their Colombian bottling plants in April, 2006. As a third party, humanitarian organization, the United Nations (at first glance) is the perfect group to conduct this investigation in an unbiased, objective manner. Upon closer examination, however, the investigation does not hold up under scrutiny.
A link to the official report from this labor panel is provided at the bottom of this post. The first thing that you will likely notice as you read it is the neutrality of the language used. In my opinion this is paramount to providing good evidence in a case such as this without inspiring bias in the reader. There are not many other positive things to be said about this report, at least as far as addressing the primary issue is concerned. All things considered, this is a direct report of the working conditions within the plant that ignores any possibility of the violence towards trade and union leaders that has been reported since 1991. Since this is what initiated the first SINALTRAINAL lawsuit and spurred the killercoke movement, the failure to acknowledge its existence is a suspicious aspect of the report.
The significance of this failure was not lost on other evaluators of the SINALTRAINAL v. Coca-Cola lawsuit. The primary criticism of the report’s neutrality has been that the labor panel’s United States delegate was Ed Potter, who is also the director of global relations for the Coca-Cola Company. To make matters worse, this report was filed late due to a delay in the final investigation. Though there are many reasons why this could be the case, one possibility is that extra time was needed to make the report appear neutral, either because the evidence itself appeared biased or because members of the panel were not able to reach agreement on the issues.
I am not satisfied by Coca-Cola’s efforts to investigate the allegations made against them. The bottom line is that third party organizations do not answer to any authority other than the person who is hiring them. They are able to set their own quality and ethical restrictions on their service. In order for me to be convinced that Coca-Cola had nothing to do with the violence occurring in Colombia there must to be an investigation conducted by a US government organization.

http://www.laborrights.org/sites/default/files/publications-and-resources/evaluation%20mission%20Coca-cola%20bottling%20plants%20in%20Colombia%20(2).pdf

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