Free Belching Out the Devil by Mark Thomas Page B

dismissive, it was both. Coke
increasingly described the lawsuit brought by Sinaltrainal as an ‘out of date’ allegation 6 or ‘an old story’. 7 But this is not the full picture and behind the scenes the Company was involved in negotiations with the union to settle the case.
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    Timing is everything - from boiling an egg to having sex to deciding it is time to talk with the trade union taking your company to court. The US lawsuit was going nowhere fast but that all changed when District Court Judge Martinez dismissed the case against Coke’s bottlers on 4 October 2006. It might have looked as if the Coca-Cola system had been exonerated in court but the judge had opened up a world of potential pain for the Company. Crucially the court decision was not the hearing of the case itself, instead it was to decide if the US courts were the correct venue for the trial. And once District Court Judge Martinez decreed the US courts did not have jurisdiction this left the union lawyers free to launch their appeal, bringing The Coca-Cola Company back into the dock to face the whole thing one more time.
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    If the union lawyers were successful in their appeal then the case would go to full trial and The Coca-Cola Company would face the legal procedure of disclosure, forcing them to hand over internal documents detailing their relationship with the bottlers. I can’t speak for the company but I would imagine this prospect was about as appealing as syphilis. Timing is everything - and six weeks before Judge Martinez cleared the way for the union to get the Company back into court The Coca-Cola Company began to negotiate with Sinaltrainal on 19 August 2006.
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    When I asked The Coca-Cola Company about these talks they portrayed them as ‘fruitful and informative’ 8 as if remembering the biscuits served. They went on to describe the negotiations
as ‘warm and buttery’, ‘sweet and moist’ and ‘chocolaty on the top’.
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    The purpose of the talks the Company said was ‘to assess whether a mediated resolution of the parties’ differences could be achieved.’ 9 In short they were looking to settle out of court and with a settlement like this comes money…a lot of money. How much money? A barrow full. Although I can not disclose the exact sum offered to Sinaltrainal and the plaintiffs in the lawsuit it is my understanding that it had six noughts at the end of a dollar sign and a couple of digits in between. For those working in the British coin of the realm it would the same number of noughts but a single digit in front of the pound sign. For those working in the Zimbabwean Dollars, I am afraid the world has run out of noughts.
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    If the Company was offering money what were the conditions attached to it? I spoke to Ed Potter, The Coca-Cola Company’s Global Workplace Rights Director, a man with intimate knowledge of these negotiations. I said to him that the company had history in this department, ‘financial settlements are reached, but part of that financial settlement is that you don’t criticise us again, you shut up, you go away.’
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    Ed Potter replied, ‘All I will say as a general matter is we’ve had several different resolutions…you’ve described one of them.’ 10
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    Whereas Coke describe the talks as ‘fruitful and informative’, Sinaltrainal use an altogether different set of words. ‘We were in a process that lasted almost a year and a half where we talk and talk and talk with them in order to find a solution to the conflict...and it didn’t give us any result at all,’ said Edgar Paez, the union’s International Officer. He is sitting in his office, by the same table Giraldo and Manco gave their testimonies from. Edgar, is a man prone to smiling, with a
touch of a South American George Michael to his unshaven appearance, but throughout our conversation he remains grim-faced.