Middlesex University students vote to boycott Coca-Cola:

Given the concerns that prompted students at Middlesex University to hold a referendum on whether their union’s shops and bars should stop selling Coca-Cola products, it was fitting that the results were announced on December 10th, internationally recognised as Human Rights Day. Their verdict was a clear rejection of Coca-Cola, allowing Middlesex to join the growing union revolt against a company fast losing its cherished ‘youth appeal’.

Student activists had brought the referendum in response to Coca-Cola’s shocking disregard for local communities and workers in their single-minded pursuit of profit. In particular, students were angered by the corporation’s recklessness in India, where their water-intensive production process has allegedly caused droughts in surrounding rural areas. The Indian government had to intervene to stop the Coke plant in Plachimada, Kerala, from continuing production, and the local government has since refused to reissue the license to operate. However, several other Coke plants continue to drain the groundwater in other parts of the country. Coca-Cola have also bizarrely sold their production waste to Indian farmers as ‘soil enricher’, which several independent researchers have demonstrated has left the soil enriched with two toxic heavy metals, lead and cadmium. The corporation refuses to clean up, nor to compensate the devastated communities.

Students were also alarmed by the company’s appalling anti-trade-union activity in Colombia, including allegations that bottling plant managers had been involved in using paramilitaries to murder eight members of Sinaltrainal, the union representing Coke workers. Coke’s irresponsibility in failing to take any measures to protect workers and their families living under death threat also shocked students, as did their strategy of reducing the Colombian workforce to just 10% on permanent contracts, leaving the vast majority with few rights and no economic security.

Many other issues came up in the campaign: should Coke act to improve the supply chain they use in El Salvador, at the bottom of which children labour to harvest sugar cane that eventually ends up in their carbonated drinks? Has the company really changed its policies towards non-white employees in the U.S, where only four years ago they were forced by the courts to pay almost $200 million in a class action lawsuit demonstrating systematic discrimination? There was even time to mull on the history of the company’s intimate relations with the German government from 1933 to 1945.

The students are now planning to bring a motion to the AGM of NUSSL (the NUS purchasing consortium) in April to allow these issues to be more widely debated, with the aim of bringing the national monopoly contract with Coke to an end. A host of universities right across the UK are making plans in the meantime to limit their Coke supplies to the extent possible while they remain tied to the national contract. Meanwhile, the Indian communities and Colombian trade unionists that have called for the boycott continue their relentless struggle for justice, a fight that is made just a little easier with every blow struck in solidarity against the corporation.


If you're a student and want to join the campaign e-mail:  ukstudentsagainstcoke@yahoogroups.com
All other enquiries welcomed at  proudhon999@yahoo.com