Cross-posted at the Writing on the Wal.
Over the weekend, I saw an NYT article that I found very interesting:
When students at the University of Michigan return to campus next week after the holiday break, they will find the Coke machines and fountain dispensers empty.
The university, which has 50,000 students on three campuses, on Thursday became the 10th college to stop selling Coca-Cola products because of concerns arising from accusations about the company's treatment of workers in bottling plants in Colombia and environmental problems in India.
Concerned, I decided to look into this. Here's the Latin American situation according to
KillerCoke.org:
Listed below are [8] union leaders at Coca-Cola's Colombian bottling plants who have been murdered. Hundreds of other Coke workers have been tortured, kidnapped and/or illegally detained by violent paramilitaries, often working closely with plant managements.
Here's the situation in India, according to an article at the Common Dreams news center:
In the end it was the 'generosity' of Coca-Cola in distributing cadmium-laden waste sludge as 'free fertilizer' to the tribal aborigines who live near the beverage giant's bottling plant in this remote Kerala village that proved to be its undoing.
On Friday, the Kerala State Pollution Control Board (KSPCB) ordered the plant shut down to the jubilation of tribal leaders and green activists who had focused more on the 'water mining' activities of the plant rather than its production of toxic cadmium sludge.
Women from near Plachimada begin their milelong trek in search of water in a region suffering from three years of scant rainfall.
''One way or another, this plant should be shut down and the management made to pay compensation for destroying our paddy fields, fooling us with fake fertilizer and drying out our wells,'' Paru Amma, an aboriginal woman who lives in this once lush, water-abundant area, told IPS.
This stuff is horrible. If you're looking for other reasons to boycott Coke, there's the fact that they market to children in schools and they rot teeth worldwide. So don't get me wrong here, I am completely sympathetic to this cause.
But seriously, don't you think Coke is practically a model corporate citizen compared to Wal-Mart?
You want labor union problems: How about closing a whole store in Canada to avoid a union or firing every meatcutter in America for the same reason. Furthermore, according to a Democratic House panel, the United States government has been forced to issue 60 complaints against Wal-Mart between 1995 and 2004. Those violations range from illegally firing workers to threats and intimidation.
Wal-Mart hasn't killed anybody (at least to my knowledge), but here's testimony from Masuma, a worker at a garment plant in Bangladesh that supplies Wal-Mart:
The supervisor was standing over me. Then he violently kicked me, hard, in the stomach and I fell to the floor. I fainted. My co-workers picked me up. I was crying. My co-workers went to the production manager and told him what had happened, and he let me go home that afternoon, but I had to come back the next morning.
After the supervisor knocked me down, I felt my baby shift. This happened two years ago. My daughter is now almost two years old. To this day, she has a bruise on her head and we have to be very gentle with her. If you touch it, she cries. The doctor says that eventually it will heal.
You want envirnmental problems? How about a federal criminal investigation on how Wal-Mart handles hazardous waste? How about that story about Wal-Mart fertilizer running into that river in North Carolina, covered so nicely in Robert Greenwald's movie? The group that discovered that problem, Catawba Rivereepers, reminds us:
In 2001, the Justice Department & the EPA brought enforcement action against Wal-Mart for Clean Water Act violations at 17 locations in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma & Massachusetts. Wal-Mart was fined $1 million in civil penalties as a result of this case.
The State of Connecticut & the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection have also taken legal action against Wal-Mart for water quality violations. Richard J. Blumenthal, the Connecticut Attorney General prosecuting the water quality violations at Wal-Mart stores across Connecticut issued a statement saying,
"To be a serious statewide polluter at 11 stores gives Wal-Mart a very dubious distinction as an environmental lawbreaker. Stormwater contamination at every one of these sites creates a serious threat to water quality & public health. These contaminants may include fertilizer, pesticides, oil, & other dangerous pollutants that flow across Wal-Mart's parking lots into public water supplies. Creating this clear & present environmental danger is legally irresponsible & reprehensible."
Notice how I haven't even gotten to complaints that aren't comparable to Coke's such as being the target of the largest gender discrimination suit in American history, refusing to sell emergency contraception, paying workers poverty wages or not covering their health care?
In short, why isn't there a Wal-Mart boycott in place on campuses across America? Students could make sure that their administrations don't have accounts at Sam's or that they aren't sent there to spend university money. And, of course, there's no reason to stop at college campuses. High school students should be old enough to understand the problems with Wal-Mart too.
In the end, it's not about whether a campaign like this would make a dent in Wal-Mart's bottom line. It's all about educating people to what Wal-Mart is really all about, and isn't education what students are supposed to be getting?
JR