Strike in SABMiller

The conflict between Honduras’ beverage workers’ union and SABMiller is over much more than just the South African transnational corporation’s violation of the collective bargaining agreement.

This is not the first time that we are forced to report on SABMiller, and every time we do so it is to denounce the company’s double standards. One such case occurred in November 2006, in Peru, when an accident took the life of a worker hired under an outsourcing scheme at the Lima brewery, and simultaneously another worker lost three fingers in a different accident –this time at the Trujillo brewery (see Peru: SABMiller, Criminalizing the market). In March of last year we published an article under the title SABMiller's social irresponsibility where we commented on the notorious case of the raffle for a Fernando Botero painting organized by the brewery in Colombia, and in that article we also examined the shady aspects involved in the purchase of Bavaria by the South African corporation. These examples are enough to bring to mind how SABMiller is not exactly known for providing and generating what the ILO calls decent working conditions, while at the same time it stands out for its fierce antiunion practices.

The transnational corporation is now apparently concerned with cleaning up its image. In the N° 352 edition of the magazine AméricaEconomía, out on January 6, Lucía Valdés Lezaca writes from Bogotá about the company, in a piece entitled A Different Beer. She highlights how well business is going for Bavaria -or SABMiller, which is the same- in Colombia, with a net profit of 106.5 million dollars in the first nine months of last year. This growth (23 percent in operating profits) seems to be the result of the introduction of a number of changes, such as different advertising criteria, new brands and products, and more stylized bottles, among other novelties.

Further on in her article, the reporter mentions how “the executive officers of the South African corporation were very surprised when they learnt that Bavaria had decided to abolish unions in the company,” and adds that “sources close to the company had said that this structure is not seen with favorable eyes by the new shareholders, who prefer to have traditional unionism, and that although employees and management had just signed a new version of the Agreement for 2008, they would try to revive it.”

For the benefit of her readers, Ms. Valdés should have done a bit more research on SABMiller’s opinions and practices towards unions. If she’d done so, she would’ve had to report that a “traditional union” has existed for decades in Honduras, a union called Union of Beverage and Related Industry Workers and known by the acronym STIBYS. And she would’ve had to add that for the past year and a half STIBYS has been demanding that Cervecería Hondureña (a subsidiary of SABMiller) honor the collective bargaining agreement signed in the year 2003; and that as a result of the company’s unyielding attitude the various legal instances of direct negotiation, mediation and conciliation failed, forcing the union to call a strike as of next January 11.

But not everything the reporter says merits criticism. I admit that the journalist contributes some interesting pieces of information. One is that Andrés Peñate, former director of the Administrative Security Department (Colombia’s intelligence agency) is now employed by Bavaria as its Sustainable Development director. We will deal with this character in a future article, for now let’s just say that his background tells us a lot about his responsibilities in the company.

The other piece of information is the implementation in Bavaria of programs that measure workers’ performance, like, for example, one called Performance Management, where employees are forced to set monthly performance targets for themselves, which are then supervised by their immediate bosses. These programs, like the Corporate Social Responsibility program or the Employee Share Ownership Program (ESOP), are actually meant to replace solidarity, which appears to have become obsolete.

For all these reasons, there is much more at stake in the struggle of our fellow workers of STIBYS than the mere compliance of the collective bargaining agreement. That is why their struggle is international in scope and why it is a struggle that involves us all.