To quote Ohio State's Mission-Vision Statement, "As a 21st century land-grant university, The Ohio State University will set the standard for the creation and dissemination of knowledge in service to its communities, state, nation and the world. Our faculty, students and staff will be among the best in the nation." How then are we, OSU students, faculty and staff, able to allow a contract with corporations, such as Coca-Cola, whose business practices are unethical and immoral? The Coca-Cola Corporation has a laundry list of human rights and worker's rights violations extending around the world. The countries of India and Columbia are most affected by Coca-Cola's actions. This article is to inform the OSU community about the dangers of re-signing the contract between the university and the Coca-Cola Corporation.
In India, Coca-Cola is continually polluting villages, where their bottling plants are located, with toxic waste. This excerpt from indiaresearchcenter.org shows results taken by a fact-finding team of Indians in these villages explains the state of Coca-Cola's pollution in India: "From our experience in confronting Coca-Cola bottling plants in the past about the indiscriminate dumping of their solid waste, we recognized the solid waste to be the sludge from the (currently non-operational) effluent treatment plant. This sludge has been declared to be hazardous by the Indian government authorities. The British Broadcasting Corporation has also found such waste to be toxic in other plants." These are not isolated incidents either - Coca-Cola is continually dumping its toxic waste off to sides of roads, into India's freshwater sources, as well as mistreatment of their workers in Colombia.
In Colombia, Coca-Cola has been repeatedly charged with lawsuits pertaining to the rights of their workers. "In 2001, a lawsuit charged that Coca-Cola Bottlers in Colombia contracted with or otherwise directed paramilitary security forces that utilized extreme violence and murdered, tortured, unlawfully detained or otherwise silenced trade union leaders." Union leader Isidro Gil was killed on Dec. 5, 1996, inside the entrance of the Coke plant in Columbia by paramilitary soldiers. Two days after Gil's death, the paramilitary soldiers returned to the plant and ordered the resignation of the other union leaders or they too would be killed. Fearing for their lives, the union leaders resigned and Coke ended contract negotiations with the union. The experienced workers who made $380 dollars a month were replaced by workers making $130 dollars a month, according to killercoke.org. Do we really want a corporation affiliated with our great university having lawsuits associated with paramilitaries and murders of its workers?
More than 160 universities worldwide have or are in the process of expelling their contracts with Coca-Cola for the same reasons I have listed above. OSU students, faculty and staff have a responsibility to uphold the values and morals OSU was founded on. I am challenging each Ohio State Buckeye to stand up to corporations such as Coca-Cola and announce to them, "We at OSU will not sign contracts with corporations who do not share the same values as stated by the university's Mission-Vision statement."
Eddie Klatka is a junior in human nutrition. He can be reached at klatka.2@osu.edu.
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