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On July 9, Colombia’s
United Workers Federation (CUT) addressed a letter to the IUF where it once
again denounced the antiunion and anti-worker policy of SABMiller, a
transnational corporation that gains increasingly greater shares of the global
market while becoming more and more arrogant and hostile towards its workers.
In the letter, CUT
informs that a large group of workers was able to unionize, overcoming all the
obstacles placed by the company, and on July 5 it presented management with a
list of demands. SABMiller’s response came immediately: it rejected the
list of demands and requested that SINALTRAINBEC - a union with more than
20 years of activity and over 40 collective bargaining agreements signed - be
stripped of its legal capacity as an organization.
CUT
rightly notes that this is a flagrant violation of trade union and labor rights.
And it further states that ever since “the transnational corporation
SABMiller purchased Bavaria in 2005 it has imposed a terrible collective pact
that ignores labor rights, segregates workers and disregards the union. It
is a serious violation of national laws and ILO conventions, which
reflects SABMiller’s profound antiunion behavior in Colombia”.
In a recent interview
conducted by IUF Latin America’s Carlos Amorín, CUT
national officer Fabio Arias said that, ignoring the existence of the
union “(…) the company’s highest authorities are going from plant to plant in
every city telling workers that SABMiller-Bavaria is ‘one big family’
governed by the collective pact, and that if anyone does not agree with the
family, they can just leave (…)”.
SABMiller’s
peculiar notion of family is typical of an authoritarian organization and of the
social degeneration that characterizes capitalism.
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SABMiller’s peculiar
notion of family is typical of an authoritarian organization and of the social
degeneration that characterizes capitalism. |
Moreover, trade union
discrimination is part of this South African transnational corporation’s DNA,
a fact that can be verified in several countries.
A few months before
SABMiller arrived in Colombia, Luis Alejandro Pedraza, a
member of CUT’s governing committee and the IUF’s International
Executive Committee, wrote: “[SABMiller] came to implement a ‘labor
ghetto’ system, joining the efforts by Colombia’s last administration to wipe
out unions and eradicate collective bargaining. It closed down a significant
number of factories and malt plants that it claimed were ‘unproductive,’ leaving
thousands of workers out of a job, some through ‘voluntary retirement’ and
others through simple dismissal, targeting in particular those who were
unionized, until it was finally able to impose a collective pact to its liking.”
Bavaria
had 5,600 workers employed directly and that workforce was reduced significantly
by SABMiller. Workers’ wages plummeted as a result of outsourcing schemes
implemented through associated work cooperatives or through the company’s own
employment system.
“In
SABMiller-Bavaria,” Pedraza continues, “if a worker even utters the
word union he’s as good as fired. Still fresh in the minds of long-time workers
who survived the company’s union extermination and unilateral layoff offensive
is the memory of nights of terror when they were shut up by the company in
its cellars to evade the trade union and labor authorities. That was how they
pressured workers into ‘choosing’ between signing the collective pact or
quitting the company.”
In Panama, on the night
of May 4 last, security guards locked the electric gates of the plant and held
the workers hostage. SABMiller wanted to force them into signing their own
dismissal.
The workers were only let go two hours later when the police intervened. The
security guards escorted them out onto the street, treating them like criminals.
SABMiller,
the most antiunion and anti-worker company in the world of beer production,
has now unleashed its policy in the most at-risk country for unionism: six
out of every ten unionists murdered in the world are Colombian.
It is in
Colombia, also, that SABMiller proposes this strange family model,
which includes mandatory incest.
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