Bogotá Statement
The
participating organizations declare:
1. SABMiller, like all other transnational
corporations, sees workers as objects of use and not
individual subjects of the law.
2. SABMiller, in order to gain or maintain markets
and maximize their profit, violates the rights of workers by
implementing extreme schemes of labor flexibilization and
outsourcing, replacing, in a great many cases, permanent
employment contracts with temporary ones.
3. SABMiller does not only produce beer and bottle
soft drinks and water, it also produces workers who are
injured by the repetitive stress and strain caused by long
workdays that exceed what is legally permissible.
4. SABMiller resorts to any means to destroy trade
unions wherever they are organized, using among other
mechanisms the ill-named “Codes of Ethics,” which
turn the workers’ lives both inside and outside the company
into a “state of siege”; it also employs lies, fear
and false cooperatives -such as the so-called “associated
work cooperatives”- as means for outsourcing work.
5. As a general policy, in many of its plants in Latin
America, it prevents free unionization and collective
contracting.
6. In Honduras, the previous owner of Cervecería
Hondureña, the transnational corporation DOLE,
tried to sell the company to SABMiller without the
trade union, but it failed. After SABMiller had
acquired 97 percent of DOLE’s stock, a collective
bargaining agreement was executed with the Union of Beverage
and Related Industry Workers (STIBYS), which
SABMiller is not honoring. With the aim of destroying
the union, in the last few years it has replaced 70 percent
of the workforce, investing several million dollars to
obtain “voluntary resignations.” The new workers, however,
are now part of STIBYS.
7. In Honduras, STIBYS has been negotiating the new
collective bargaining agreement for the last six months
under an atmosphere of absolute intransigence on the part of
SABMiller, who refuses not only to improve living and
working conditions, but also to put a stop to the violations
of the collective agreement that the company has been
systematically breaching.
It now demands that the collective agreement be adjusted to
world class manufacturing indexes, and is trying to cut down
truck crews from three to two workers. There are suits filed
by workers that have been unjustly fired over the last three
years and who the company has refused to see. A s a result
of a victory obtained in court, the company was ordered to
reinstate nine workers, two of which are members of
STIBYS’ board, and for the past seven months the company
has been refusing to reinstate them, ignoring the court
judgment.
