City councilors demand ‘Coca-Cola-free’ Boston

Trade union and community activists joined City Councilor Chuck Turner and staff members from the offices of “Team Unity” Councilors Turner, Charles Yancey and Sam Yoon at Boston City Hall’s Piemonte Room on July 23, where they took concrete action-steps in solidarity with trade unionists in Colombia, declaring the City of Boston off limits to Coca-Cola.

The solidarity meeting was organized to coincide with the People’s Permanent Tribunal, which took place July 21-23 in Bogotá, Colombia. The PPT examined testimony on the crimes of multinational corporations like Coca-Cola, Chiquita Brands and others in the assassination of trade union leaders in Colombia. The PPT jury panel found the corporations guilty.

The meeting supported a resolution Turner introduced to make Boston a “Coke-Free” city. Turner’s resolution recognizes the international boycott of Coca-Cola called for by the Sinaltrainal food and beverage workers union of Colombia and the United Steelworkers International, as well as the support of that boycott by local unions, including District Council 35 of the Painters and Allied Trades and the Boston School Bus Drivers, USW Local 8751.

The Painters union has removed Coke vending machines from its buildings, and the Bus Drivers have had Coke vending machines removed from all school bus yards in Boston.

The resolution concludes: “The Boston City Council ... does hereby declare that Boston, Massachusetts is a ‘Coke-Free’ city and asks the city administration to not serve Coca-Cola products or stock them in any vending machines that are located on city property; and the Boston City Council encourages all businesses to immediately cease and desist from the stocking and selling of all Coca-Cola products until the international boycott has been resolved.”

Bishop Filipe Teixeira, OFSJC, opened the meeting by calling for worldwide solidarity of workers and poor. USW Local 8751 President Frantz Mendes and Grievance Committee Chair Stevan Kirschbaum chaired the meeting. Kirschbaum described his socially active union’s fact-finding solidarity mission to Colombia, where the bus-driver unionists witnessed the armored barricades at the Sinaltrainal union hall and the armored cars and bullet-proof vests required just to attend union meetings.

With the 8,000-delegate convention of the Letter Carriers union in Boston starting July 18, three NALC officials—Dave Welsh of San Francisco, Kenneth Lerch of Rockville, Md., and Richard Coritz from North Carolina—all addressed the City Hall meeting and expressed their solidarity. These delegates had handed out leaflets to the entire NALC convention calling for support for the solidarity meeting at City Hall, and worked to bring a resolution in support of the Coke boycott and removal of Coke vending machines to the convention.

The meeting, organized by the Community Labor Solidarity Committee of the Boston International Action Center and USW Local 8751, also heard from Colombian activist Dario Zapata, Painters’ organizer Tony Hernandez and Richard Krushnik of the Greater Boston Latin American and Caribbean Coalition about a fact-finding trip exposing Colombian strip mining.