Why the Coke Coca Boycott is wrong

This article is highlights two important questions raised against the present call for a boycott against Coke Cola in support of workers rights in Venezuela. This is not a criticism of workers rights and I automatically boycott Coke Cola for a number of reasons already. However, with in the wider context of the anti-globalisation movement there would appear to be a conflict with the stated aims of this boycott.

The problem is that the core of this boycott is a demand for the rights of workers to WORK IN ACOKE COLA FACTORY. This implies that Coke Cola factories are actually acceptable in the first place! How different is this to asking people to support workers rights in an armaments factory? It ignores the fact that there is a large question mark over whether Coke Cola factories are a good thing in the first place, something farmers in South India having their land destroyed by the water extraction by their local Coke Cola factory are in a good position to disagree with.

Coke Cola are a company of dubious ethical value from an environmental, globalisation or animal rights perspective, which leads us to the heart of the dilemma – it is important to support workers rights, but what happens if this leads us to compromise our other ethics? There are many other workers rights abuses that need to be tackled, but don’t actually involve supporting a nasty multinational in some manner.

Consider also this aspect; say Coke Cola does give in on the Venezuelan workers rights issue. The result is that Coke Cola is handed a PR victory as people will believe that it is okay to drink Coke Cola once again since they have thus acquired a sheen of ethical responsibility when the very opposite remains true.

There are those who will disagree with me on the grounds that workers rights are more important than the other issues. That is a debate for elsewhere. Here I simply wish to point out that those coming from perspectives with a pro-environment or anti-globalisation bias need to evaluate just how well the demands of this boycott fit in with their other aims.

Secondly, there is the notion of fashionable campaigns, flash-in-the-pan issues that raise a lot of interest but do not sustain themselves. It has been recognized that this is a problem, as people leap from one campaign to the next seeking out the latest issue without actually seeing the previous ones to a close.

It seems that this Coke Cola boycott already falls into this pattern. It is being pushed heavily in grassroots media and a buzz is being generated around it, but will it be still there in a few months? Will people do it for a while and then move onto the next thing?

Given the recent history of campaigning in the UK, the desire to be working on ‘fashionable’ campaigns appears to be increasingly the norm, as we are, in turn, increasingly led by our own media as opposed to that media following our agenda. The Coke Cola boycott is heavily pushed at the moment; in a while it will be something new – what affect will that have on the Coke Cola campaign? Will the people planning to do stuff in support of it now, still be doing it in a few months if the boycott is still in place? If you think me cynical, consider these campaigns – Nestle Baby Milk, Shell, Baku pipeline, Papua New Guinea, hardwood deforestation. These issues still exist but are now forgotten by most activists. Briefly fashionable, people did them for a while before moving onto the next big thing.

Yes, activist movements have sustained campaigns and won them, but they are a minority really. If we don’t have victories then it is hard to have credibility among those we target. All we ultimately achieve is teaching them that they can resist us. That is a terrible thing as it is a great waste of resources and energy. It is better to stick to what we have started, and ensure it won before moving on.