The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [101]
“Now I don’t go alone to the university anymore,” says García, who on the outside looks like your average MTV-watching twentysomething, with a sparkly, midriff-baring shirt and big hoop earrings. Inside, however, she is clearly a chile pepper like her father. “When I’m at the university and a professor starts talking bad about unions, it really makes me angry,” she says, wiping away the tears. “I say, ‘What are you talking about—they defend the rights of workers. How many workers’ rights are violated at his university?’” If there is hope for the union, it clearly lies in the next generation. This one is just struggling to survive. “I started working at the company when I was eighteen—my whole life,” says González. “I was more sane when I was eighteen than I am now. They say, ‘You are just resentful.’ I say, ‘Of course, I am resentful. You threw me in jail.’”
Back in Barranca, Galvis goes out with other union members to a café across the street after being interviewed, downing beer after beer while a regional blend of folk music called vallenato blares on television. Afterward, he asks his bodyguards to take him to the town square. A balmy wind rustles through the trees, as couples and groups of friends lounge at outdoor tables over beers and Cokes. Even the bodyguards seem to relax, one of them talking on a cell phone on the corner while the other stands astride the front wheel of a scooter in the park, flirting with a woman on the seat. An old man with a hunchback stops by to show us little metal bicycles he has fashioned from beer cans. Galvis takes the time to talk with him for several minutes, asking whether he has a family and how he hurt his back. The man explains he injured it falling off a roof, and obligingly lifts up his shirt to show it. Galvis hands him some small change without taking a bicycle.
“We must enjoy our lives,” he sighs. “We can’t just work, work, work. That is what the capitalists do.” The constant pressure of driving around with bodyguards waiting for the next death threat has clearly gotten to him. “We union leaders talk a lot of shit,” he sighs. “It is good to be self-critical. But we must continue to struggle, because there are many who get off the bus.” He leans across the table with a hazy stare. Behind him, a waiter is rolling out a stack of red plastic Coke crates full of empties. “It is tough,” he says, “we are on the brink of death, but we keep surviving. We bring in new members to the union, but the company fires them. If it weren’t for international solidarity, we would have been eliminated long ago. That is the truth.”
As in Mexico, the Colombian activists have responded to their perceived injustices by declaring a boycott of Coke in the country. Unlike Mexico, however, they have also been successful in reaching outside of their country’s border to spread their movement to the United States as well. Starting with a response from the United Steelworkers Union, the movement has snowballed to the point where the Coca-Cola Company could no longer stay silent about the charges.
EIGHT
The Full Force of the Law
It’s not hard to find the United Steelworkers building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Just past the bridge over the Monongahela River, it’s the one covered on the outside by an enormous diamond-hatched truss of steel. Dan Kovalik is sitting at his desk in front of the window, framed inside one of those