'Just Say No to PepsiCo': So Say 101 Indian workers.

By Vijay Prashad

One hundred million people and sixty million cattle in India are in the
midst of a crippling drought. The states of Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya
Pradesh, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh have been hit with poor monsoon rain.
According to the Union Minister of State for Heavy Industries and Public
Enterprises, the onus for the drought, however, falls on 'administrative
failure.' Although the government anticipated the drought in September 1999,
it did not procure fodder for the people and livestock, nor did it construct
pipelines to draw water to the region. The impact has been colossal.
Sureshwar Sinha of Pani Morcha (Water Front) concluded that 'we owe the
drought to the government's disastrous policy during the past 50 years, when
100 dams and canals were built. There is evidence to show that as much as 55
percent of this water goes waste through evaporation and other means.'
Strong words. If the people cannot get water, they can at least ogle Pepsi
and Coke bottles. Government water tankers visit the villages once in a
fortnight, and distribute a few liters of water per head. But the bottles of
these soft drinks sit before the parched. In most parts of India, Pepsi can
be procured for Rs. 9 (23 cents), but here each bottle costs Rs. 16 (30
cents), a price unaffordable for the people. The government relief works
project currently pays Rs 23 (53 cents) per day, enough for one bottle of
the good stuff. Let them drink Pepsi.

Meanwhile, in the outskirts of Kanpur, far from the drought, 101 workers at
a Pepsi bottling plant (50,000 crates/month, with 24 bottles per crate)
learnt the real meaning of April Fool's Day. Since 1995, these workers
belonged to a rightist union, Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS) who secured for
them wages to the tune of Rs. 2300-Rs. 3000 ($76) per month, just about
above the minimum wage. These are not uneducated workers who have no
recourse to some forms of cultural capital. The young people who hold jobs
at the plant are highly educated (B. Sc.), and many come from Dalit
(socially oppressed) communities who yearn to lift themselves from poverty.
But the wages are far too low for that aspiration. So what does a work force
do when confronted by a rapacious multinational empire and a reluctant
rightist trade union? Well, scuttle their ties to the Right and join the
Communist union, the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU). This is just what
the workers did in January of this year. On 2 February, the management of
the Pepsi plant fired the Union president R. P. Singh and its Joint
Secretary Chauhan on the grounds of sabotage. At the time of the alleged
sabotage, Singh was not on duty and Chauhan was in another part of the
factory. But who worries about details. An inquiry began which was to end in
mid-March. By late March, the union was tired of the management's silence,
so it threatened a one-day token strike on 30 March. Caught in deadlock, the
management chose April Fool's Day to lock out the workers from the plant.

I'm not sure about you, but I felt a sense of d vu when I heard this story.
My clippings are reasonably good, so I went and located my notes on a
September 1997 action taken by a Pepsi bottling plant in Guatemala City
which fired 28 unionists when the union submitted a contract that management
did not want to stomach. The Embotelladora Mariposa, S. A., illegally went
after its three-year-old union, SITRAEMSA who represented 360 of the 1300
employees at the plant. Shortly after the firing, the management hired 75
new workers on a temporary basis, eager to ward off the possibility of
strong bargaining by the workers.

Pepsico is a giant concern. In 1998, its revenues totaled $22,348 million,
with profits of $1,993 million. Coca-Cola is reasonably smaller, with
revenues of $18,813 million and profits of $3,533 (according to the US
Business Reporter). Pepsi is much larger not because itUs a better drink,
but because the empire includes the Frito-Lay company (Lay's, Ruffles,
Tostitos, Doritos, Cheetos, Rold Gold, and Sunchips), Pepsi/Lipton and a
vast number of fast food delivery services (like KFC). With stagnation in
the domestic market and with the possibilities opened up by IMF/WTO
imperialism, firms like Pepsico are on the lookout to make the bulk of their
profits in the international market. Soft drugs of all kinds (tobacco,
candy, and soft drinks) are to flood those markets that have hitherto been
saved from the advance guard of the dentist.

India, which had expelled Coke in the 1970s, welcomed the soft drinks into
the country when it signed onto the Structural Adjustment 'reforms' in 1991.
The priorities of countries like India are now topsy-turvy: the regimes are
now more eager to pander to the wiles of the multinational empires than to
the basic needs of their populace. A drought for the masses is better than a
drought of foreign exchange. In the former disgruntled voters die, but in
the latter one cannot have the funds to buy all the military hardware
necessary to become a 'credible' nuclear force. By the way, French aircraft
that is so coveted by the hawks within the Indian Defense Ministry is called
the Mirage.

In the past decade, Pepsi has been in the media for all manners of abuses.
The fracas over Pepsi's role in Myanmar is not over yet. Their halfway
pullout in April 1996 (prior to a shareholder meeting) was a sham. At the
same time, Pepsi was obdurate about buying sweeteners from the Staley plant
within the war-zone of Decatur, this despite a boycott urged by the workers
of the sugar plant. The role of the soft drink giants in educational
institutions began in the early 1990s and continues into our decade. At Penn
State Pepsi signed a $14 million contract in 1993 to be the campus monopoly.
The Monty Python Society held a Coke-In with such great lines as 'don't let
a man in a suit tell you what to drink!' Meanwhile, Cynthia Peters noted
that Pepsi has entered a war with Coke over school turf, wanting to pay
public schools for exclusive rights to market their product (ZNET Daily
Commentary, 23 August 1999). Billboards on the yellow school bus, screen
savers on the library computers. Welcome to Pepsi, USA.

On May Day, the Pepsi plant in the outskirts of Kanpur sent a letter to each
worker asking them to sign an undertaking against the union or else they
shall not see their February wages or the inside of the factory again. 'The
management has refused to attend any further talks called by the Labour
Department,' said Subhashini Ali of CITU. 'They are bent on breaking the
union and forcing the workers to crawl back to work.' With the newspapers
enthralled by Pepsi's advertising power, there is little being reported
about this struggle -- a small struggle by Indian standards, but large for
those who are in the midst of it. Well I suppose it isn't small if one
consider that one of the participants is Pepsi -- mammon by any other name.

Donations towards the union struggle (and toward a common strike kitchen for
the workers and their families) can be sent directly to Subhashini Ali, who
can be contacted at subhashini_ali@yahoo.com, or to me, at gherao@yahoo.com.