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Unions and Churches Win a Bout in Guatemala

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Cooperation between unions and church groups around the world has gotten a healthy boost from the success of about 400 strikers at a Coca-Cola plant in Guatemala.

Their unusual strike, which began in the late 1970s, officially ended last week when the Guatemalan government, run by a military dictatorship that has long repressed unions, finally gave its blessing to the strike victory. When the final labor agreement, reached last year, was formally ratified the other day, even Guatemala’s president, Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores, was on hand.

The dispute has sparked a worldwide campaign by a coalition of church groups and unions to persuade multinational companies like Coca-Cola to avoid such labor problems by adopting codes of minimum labor standards and employee human rights policies.

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The coalition’s first major attempt to get corporate approval of its ambitious plan failed last week when Coca-Cola shareholders, meeting in Wilmington, Del., rejected the idea. Afterward, however, coalition leaders said the plan is far from dead and will be pursued vigorously not just at Coca-Cola but also at hundreds of other companies, such as Unilever, Castle & Cooke and Nestle.

In time, the coalition hopes, most multinational corporations will routinely accept responsibility for imposing stringent controls over franchises and subsidiaries to guarantee workers’ rights in all their facilities.

The coalition had hoped for success with Coca-Cola because of the parent company’s role in solving the dispute.

According to Coca-Cola, the Guatemala City plant was closed because of poor management and heavy debts. But the strikers charged that the real reason was that local managers had looted the company treasury, keeping two sets of books to hide profits. The company would not discuss the strikers’ charge.

After local managers shut down the plant, workers occupied and conscientiously maintained it for about four months.

Sympathetic churches and unions in many Western nations threatened a massive international boycott of Coca-Cola unless the company resolved the dispute. In response, Coca-Cola last year laid down some firm labor guidelines to be followed by owners of a new franchise there. The strikers were paid retroactively for the work they had done while the plant was closed.

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Dan Gallin, general secretary of the Geneva-based International Food and Allied Workers Assn., with more than 2 million members in 67 countries, said the multinational corporations “would have us believe that franchise operations are independent from headquarters. “But we know there are direct financial ties, and, as long as these companies derive profits from such operations, they must be willing to assume social responsibility for their employees,” he said.

The resolution rejected by Coca-Cola last week was sponsored by three U.S. Catholic orders--the Sisters of Providence, St. Mary of the Woods and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

Noting that, during the strike, eight union leaders had disappeared or been killed and many strikers threatened, the union-church resolution simply asked the company “to develop and make public by September, 1985, a company policy required of all subsidiaries and future franchises requiring their observance of their employees’ basic human rights.”

The company said that, to its knowledge, there have been no incidents of violence against Coca-Cola workers in Guatemala since 1980 and that the coalition’s proposal is “unworkable and would constitute an improper and unnecessary intrusion into the business affairs of the independent bottlers (of Coca-Cola).”

Besides, to get an employee rights policy with the bottling firms might mean that Coca-Cola “may have to give concessions to the independent bottlers which may be of greater importance to our shareholders,” company executives told the shareholders at their meeting last week. Clearly, company officials seemed concerned about the effect on profits.

In addition, they said, imposing an employee rights policy could cause the franchised bottlers and subsidiaries “to look to the (parent) company for solutions to (other) local problems rather than work out the problems themselves.”

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The response seemed evasive, particularly because of the innocuous tone of the coalition’s request: that the parent company require franchises and subsidiaries to observe the “basic human rights” of workers. However, such a policy would have great implications in an area where workers’ rights are routinely ignored.

Timothy Smith, executive director of the New York-based Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, said persistence in causes such as the Guatemala City strike does pay off. Smith’s organization represents 210 Roman Catholic orders and dioceses and 17 religious denominations with corporate investments of more than $10 billion.

He noted that longtime efforts have started having an effect when it comes to South Africa. A growing number of banks and other financial institutions--among them Wells Fargo, J. P. Morgan and Manufacturers Hanover--have agreed to stop making any loans to the South African government and to sharply limit loans to private firms there because of the country’s racist laws.

Successful Effort

Efforts by unions and churches to get help from corporations on a variety of issues, including labor disputes, are relatively new. These “corporate campaigns” supplement more traditional forms of pressure, such as strikes and boycotts.

In one of the first uses of the tactic, church groups joined unions to put pressures on financial institutions, including Manufacturers Hanover, in a successful effort to win a much-celebrated settlement five years ago of a long, bitter union dispute with J. P. Stevens & Co.

A recent unsuccessful example was a “corporate campaign” at Manufacturers Hanover’s annual stockholder meeting in New York last Friday, where stockholders who supported the labor/church coalition withheld votes for Phelps-Dodge Chairman George Munroe, who was seeking reelection to the bank’s board. The “corporate campaigners” also challenged the bank’s decision to continue lending money to Phelps-Dodge.

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Those actions were taken to protest Phelps-Dodge policies during a prolonged strike at Arizona copper mines, where the company is now operating with strikebreakers, paying them wages well below those of the rest of the industry.

The campaigners were no more successful in ousting Munroe, or in halting the bank’s loans to Phelps-Dodge, than they were in their campaign for a workers rights resolution at Coca-Cola.

But the world’s corporate leaders should not underestimate the combined strength of activist labor and church groups.

Comparable Worth Gaining Advocates

Organized labor is stepping up its efforts to close the discriminatory wage gap between female-dominated jobs and comparable male-dominated jobs.

Labor’s drive for pay equity, or comparable worth, provisions in union contracts and in laws is seen not only as a worthy cause but also as a way of attracting more women into union ranks. The goal is a pressing one because of unions’ steadily declining membership and the fact that, in the next 10 years, it is estimated that women will be taking as many as two of every three new jobs.

Well over 50% of working women are in female-dominated jobs, most of which pay much less than jobs where males predominate, so that the idea of comparable worth might well be one that could help recruit women to unions that fight hard for it. Already, 46 states are taking some action on comparable worth, ranging from conducting studies of wage scales to actually granting pay increases designed to narrow gaps, according to the Washington-based National Committee on Pay Equity.

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John J. Sweeney, president of the 850,000-member AFL-CIO Service Employees International Union, said last week that “there is no single issue which offers more promise to today’s workers than pay equity, and it’s at the top of our union’s agenda.”

Sweeney was praising a recent vote by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to overrule Mayor Dianne Feinstein’s veto of a $28-million appropriation to be put into a “pay equity fund” to settle a case brought by his union against San Francisco on the basis of sex and race discrimination.

The board had previously adopted a resolution “urging all appropriate action to implement comparable worth.” Feinstein signed the resolution but balked at the appropriation of funds.

Not surprisingly, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly last week argued vehemently against the idea of equal pay for work of comparable value. She urged executives at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast in Washington to resist union leaders or anyone else trying to spread the notion of comparable worth, which she sees as a “tremendous threat to the private enterprise system.”

Schlafly doesn’t see the pay gap between women and men as discriminatory and argues that the theory of comparable worth is based on a “conspiracy notion of our society--that women are oppressed, involuntarily suppressed or ghettoized into certain jobs. There is not a shred of evidence that women have been induced to take these (lower paying) jobs by an oppressive, male-dominated society.”

Outraged Nurses

She told the mostly male Chamber of Commerce audience that “it is terribly important that you put this item on your agenda and stop it. It is time to stop it in its tracks right now.”

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By contrast, the American Nurses Assn. voiced outrage over statements by members of the Reagan Administration protesting comparable worth and over recent administrative and judicial decisions on the issue. The association represents 1.7 million registered nurses, 97% of whom are female.

Eunice Cole, the association’s president, said the April 11 vote by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission to reject the concept of comparable worth “focused public attention on outmoded and untenable arguments that have been used for decades to justify discrimination.” The eight-member commission is dominated by appointees of President Reagan.

She noted that the commission acknowledged the wage gap between men and women but said the commission rationalized the gap by saying it results from, among other things, the desire of women to work in jobs that “accommodate family roles.”

Cole and other leaders of unions and female-dominated organizations all seem galvanized to battle opponents of comparable worth.

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