by Mark Thomas
Mrs Pomba in her big dark housecoat puts a plate on the table. It’s the best china. A perfect ring of royal blue on each plate’s border is overlaid with golden threads of vines and leaves.
‘After you were dismissed did you go to the protests outside the plant?’
‘Every day. I was going on a daily basis. As if I was going to work.’ He clears his throat softly, ‘I was going there at 8am and was leaving at 6pm’ He motions to his daughter Ebru and she comes and sits on the chair next to him. Her face flushes as she looks up and places her folded hands on her lap. She was on the demonstration with her father and two younger sisters. ‘I wanted to get my father’s job back,’ she says tucking her chin into her chest.
‘We had a lot of hope, expectation of getting our jobs back,’ Mr Pomba explains, ‘we were very joyful when we went there.’
Silently, neatly folded triangular serviettes and tiny dessert forks are put on each plate, just as Mr Pomba reflects on how close they were to getting reinstated when the police attacked. ‘The head of the union was just about to get a deal with the company. We probably needed another ten minutes and we would have got a resolution.’
He smiles and offers his hand to table indicating I should take some food. There are plain puff pastries on serving plate. I have been given the best food in the house. I unfold my serviette and slowly pick apart the layers with the dessert fork.
Hot black tea is poured into my glass and two cut-glass sugar bowls added to the table, the sugar in each one piled into a perfect mound. Opposite me Mr Pomba continues. ‘Then they start spraying gas at us and attacked us…they were beating us and putting whoever they caught inside the police vehicles. My youngest child’s eyes have been affected by the gas….she had to have an operation.’
Ebru was there when this happened, she too was gassed and so I say, ‘How did you feel when all of this happened?’
‘Don’t even remind her,’ says Mr Pomba, shaking his head. Ebru cannot look up, ‘I am upset even now, with my father just talking about it…’
She stops and silence takes over and I notice the steam rising gently from our glasses. Alpkan stirs some sugar making a small sound with his spoon. Ebru’s head stays firmly down. Her father looks to her. Then her mother, the nigh invisible tea lady suddenly screams across the living room, ‘I would kill those police!’ She explodes with unrestrained rage. ‘I’d shoot them now if they were here!’ We’re staring as her fists beat the sky, declaiming to the heavens. ‘The dogs sprayed gas in my people’s eyes! Like you see on TV - the Israeli police and the way they treat people! They are like them!’
And then she catches herself and with a flutter of her hands to fidget herself calm, she is quiet. Her voice is gone as quickly as it came. She shakes her head, collects herself, Mr Pomba clears his throat and his wife pours another glass of black tea.
For this family there is no doubt, ‘Coke is responsible. They are responsible for the whole thing. They made the police attack us.’
I genuinely don’t know if they did or did not, but I ask ‘Do you really think Coca-Cola could have stopped the police attacking you?’
‘Yes, they could have if they had wanted to,’ he sighs and forces a smile on to his reddened face.
Some things did change after the great Coke Resistance, here is a list of them: 1. Mr Pomba and Fahrettin Taciki both got new jobs as drivers with different companies, though on lower wages.
2. Erol Turedi now is a salesman for Nestlé.
3. Ahmet Gakmak has not worked since being dismissed for unionising, he insists this is because he has been blacklisted.
4. Mor Ve Otesi came seventh in the final of the Eurovision Song Contest with the song ‘Deli’. They scored 138 points, receiving one maximum 12 points from Azerbaijan. Legendary broadcasting phenomena Sir Terry Wogan was very encouraging of them. The UK song came last in 25th place, receiving only 14 points.
5. To the best of my knowledge no book has come out on Coca-Cola in Turkey.
6. President K recently won the world glowering competition.
7. After the mass sackings, the campaigns, the protest shelter, the gassings and the settlement, the Turkish government, sensing the need for reform and change, grasped the nettle and acted decisively. The erection of protest shelters without permission is now illegal.
8. Coke has allowed the trade union Oz-Gira-Is back into the plant. Eagle-eyed readers will remember this is the union that workers were forced to resign from in 2000. So it is nice of Coke to let them back…
9. The Nakliyat-Is court case brought in the USA against The Coca-Cola Company and Coca-Cola Icecek is ongoing. The case is currently pending in the 11th Circuit USA.
6
MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF CHILD LABOUR
El Salvador
‘Any child labour allegation is a very serious issue that we fully investigate.’
The Coca-Cola Company1
It’s early morning and it’s hot. Long palm leaves lollop over the country lane, dark and shiny in the warm coastal mist. Few appear to be about at this hour, save the odd delivery van for the hotels or night watchman finishing a shift. But along one otherwise deserted stretch of road, a small gaggle of elderly Miami joggers wearily pounds its way up the incline. They comprise mainly of women, with one gasping male in their company. Their lungs are greedy for air, their heartbeat races, though they do not. You can practically see Death on their shoulder, taunting cynically, ‘Whoa there, this one’s a quick one!’ You may well ask how I know they are from Miami? Well, it’s a series of deductions. Firstly when Salvadorean women get old, they don’t jog, they sit. They sit on benches, on rugs in the streets, in doorways, by churches and always in the shade. But jogging, no. Clue number two is the brightly coloured wrist and headbands, which just seem to scream the words ‘Florida Retirement Community’. However, the final give away is their security guard. Striding lightly behind them is a Salvadorean man in his mid thirties, wearing a brown company shirt and matching baseball hat. He has a massive pump action shotgun, hanging from a strap around his neck while one hand holds the handle and his forefinger rests over the trigger guard. There can’t be many people in this area other than Miami tourists who’d have armed security accompany them for a jog. Though in all honesty I’m not sure if he was there to protect them or to step in at the first sign of a coronary and administer the mercy shot.
I pass them in a van driving from a place called La Libertad on the El Salvador coast. It’s a popular holiday haunt where the waves pull in large groups of surfers and the beaches are big enough for everyone else to avoid them. My destination is north to the Department of Sonsonate and its eponymous main city. This city is essentially one long high street packed with car-repair workshops, fast-food bars and strip joints. However, it is the journey to the city that takes us through sugar cane country. The place is packed with plantations. The sugar is why I am here - sugar and children.
Sugar comes second to water as the main ingredient in a can of Coca-Cola, and with nearly eight teaspoons in each 330ml can,2 the sugar gives the water a good run for its money. It is sugar that has left a bitter aftertaste for the company in El Salvador, as the sugar Coke uses is tainted with child labour.
In 2004 Human Rights Watch (HRW), an NGO with considerable experience documenting and campaigning in the area of child soldiers and child labour produced a report criticising Coca-Cola for not doing enough to prevent child labour in its supply chain. The report, ‘Turning a Blind Eye, Hazardous Child Labor in El Salvador’s Sugarcane Cultivation’ said:• ‘The Coca-Cola Company buys sugar refined at the Central Izalco mill.’
• ‘At least nine of the twelve children Human Rights Watch interviewed in the Department of Sonsonate worked on four plantations that supply sugarcane to Central Izalco. These children ranged in age from 12 to 16. Their testimonies and the accounts of adult workers on those plantations confirmed that those plantations regularly use child labor.’
• ‘Coca-Cola’s guiding prin
ciples apply only to its direct suppliers, who must not ‘employ’ or ‘use’ child labor…. Coca-Cola can itself turn a blind eye to evidence of human rights abuses in its supply chain as long as its direct suppliers do not themselves use child labor.’
• ‘In Coca-Cola’s case, child labor helped produce a key ingredient in its beverages bottled in El Salvador. In that sense, Coca-Cola indirectly benefits from child labor.’3
Not surprisingly Coca-Cola was not pleased to have such practices associated with its products. They get in enough trouble over their drinks being too sugary for kids, without the public finding out that children are helping to supply the sugar in the first place.
Surely for Coke there are two essential questions: if there is child labour in the supply chain for our drinks, are we content for that to be the case or are we not? And if we are not, what are we going to do about it?
Coke says ‘any child labour allegation is a very serious issue that we fully investigate’.4 But they were less adamant when they said to the Washington Post that their ability ‘to assist in addressing these fundamental issues of tradition and norm that surround rural poverty is limited.’5 It is an interesting use of the word ‘tradition’ in relation to child labour. To my mind traditions should be warm and pleasant things - brass bands and summer fetes, rather than stuffing kids up chimneys. It is also historically and morally flimsy to defer to tradition, tradition is subject to change. After all, slavery was traditional, as was burning witches, indeed child labour in America was traditional; some even eulogised its beneficial nature, like Coca-Cola’s first proprietor Asa Chandler who said, ‘The most beautiful sight that we see is the child at labour. As early as he may get at labour, the more beautiful, the more useful does his life get to be.’6
‘BEAUTIFUL’ CHILD LABOUR IN EL SALVADOR
There are approximately 5,000 children harvesting and a further 25,000 children ‘helping’ their parents on the harvest in El Salvador.
Some children will get up at 4.30 in the morning in order to walk to the cane fields. Harvesting is hazardous and classified as one of the worst forms of child labour by the UN. Children are vulnerable to injuries from the machetes used for cutting, the cane sap can cause rashes and irritations, a significant proportion develop respiratory problems and a working day from 4.30am to 1pm leaves no time for school.7
On a more positive note The Coca-Cola Company inspected the sugar mill Central Izalco, stating that ‘we again verified that it [the refinery] and its supplying mill had sound policies against employing underage youth.’8 Laudable as this inspection is, there was never any allegation that the mill employed child labour, HRW doesn’t say the problem lies in the sugar refinery, but rather it says child labour is rampant in the harvesting on the plantations. It often helps in an investigation to look in the right place and the right place in this instance is in the fields.
It can’t be that difficult to check for child labour, all you have to do find the fields, turn up and look. And that is exactly what I am going to try and do: turn up and look for child labour. I’m making a programme for Channel 4 and I want to find out if, three years after the report, child labour is still in Coke’s supply chain and if it is, how commonplace is it?
The crew is international, coming from the States, New Zealand and El Salvador and we have to gain entry to the plantations, film what is going on and hope the gang masters don’t get too angry when we arrive unannounced. The challenge to find a way on to the fields proves to be more difficult than we thought as most of the plantations lie behind a curtain of trees and villages unseen from the road. Which is why Armando, our Salvadorean translator and driver, has taken to stopping at roadside stalls and quizzing locals as to where the crops are being harvested. The first attempt is unsuccessful, as is the second and the third too. Asking folk at random if they can help us in our search yields but one fact, which is this: the phrase, ‘We’re looking for working children’ just sounds bad in any language.
David the American cameraman curtly says, ‘Someone has got to know what the score is. Pull up and ask again.’
‘I’ll ask we need to be more direct.’ I’m worried that Armando might just be a tad too polite to his fellow countrymen and women.
So I lean out of the front window at the next stall. Two old men in buttoned-up shirts and leather strap sandals stand staring at the empty road. They appear as if their whole purpose in life is just to stand there and collect furrows on their faces. And they are not doing too badly at it. I ask, in my admittedly imperfect Spanish and with help from the others, if the good gentlemen might know of any plantations cutting today that have a reputation for employing child labour?
They both shake their heads with one slow and barely discernible twist of the neck.
‘Gracias, señor,’ I say, turning back inside the van. ‘Let’s try again at the next stall, Armando.’
He swings the van off the dirt and back on to the tarmac, leaving the men to continue the wrinkle harvest. We drive in silence for a minute before Armando nonchalantly says, ‘You are aware that you just told those people that we were ‘hunting’ children.’
‘What?’
‘You said to them ‘we are hunting down children, can you help us?”
‘Oh God…’
My head hits my hands. Here we are trying to investigate one of the blights of the developing world and I have made us look like the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Field one
There is one place we know for sure will be harvesting today, as we visited it last night to watch the foreman burn the crop ready for harvest. The sugar grows higher than a man and close together too, with big dry leaves and debris bunched in with the cane, making the job of harvesting all the more difficult. The simplest method of clearing this is set it alight.
The foreman is a young guy with not an ounce of fat on him and a metal plate over his front teeth. Last night he was happy for us to film the burning and even introduced his wife and child who have wandered over to watch the palavar of a film crew. He used a long dry leaf as a taper, lit it, inserted it deep into the detritus that litters the forest of tall cane, then stepped back. The flames jumped ten feet high with a low rushing rumble and a loud cackle that sounded as if the fire were chewing through the field. Left in its wake was black and dry earth and the prized cane, burnt on the edges, still hot to touch, scorched but standing in the drifting smoke ready for the next day.
The foreman had not expected to see us this morning and he does not smile this time. He just nods and snorts before turning his back and getting on with his work. Filming the burning is one thing but now there are children working in the fields and he is deeply suspicious of our presence.
‘Hola, bueneos días,’ I call, cheerfully and ineptly.
But he just looks blankly and continues grabbing the long cane with one hand and swinging the machete with the other. In a single motion he chops the stalk at the base, twists it free, cuts off the shoot end, clipping the remaining leaves and throwing the cane at a pile, where it lands with a rustle.
Nearby is a ten-year-old boy with his father who’s cutting the cane. The boy’s name is Jonathan, this is his first year working on the sugar cane harvest, he tells me. His job is to collect and stack the cane.
‘You’ve come to earn some money?’ I ask Jonathan.
He laughs and so does his dad. This work is piecework so a family needs as many helping hands as possible to earn a wage. Jonathan is one of the 25,000 child ‘helpers’.
The kids are uneasy with our presence, so after a quick chat there is little need for us to stay and even less of an invitation to do so. But our first search has found two children working on a small six-acre site. If we are to find if the practice is commonplace or not we will need to look in other locations.
Heading back to the main drag we pass the company transport parked at an angle on a bank of earth just by the field. It’s an old American-style yellow school bus, with Transporte de Pers
onal Agrícola Ingenio Central Izalco (transport for the agricultural staff working for Central Izalco) written on the destination plate above the driver. Central Izalco the sugar mill has driven the workers down here to the fields, as they often do. Given the reputation for child labour in the area I wonder if the use of a school bus is an act of corporate irony.
As we bump along the narrow mud track, dodging dogs and grunting pigs, at one point we slow right down and inch past a homestead on the roadside. It consists of a sloping shelter made of palm leaves. The roof nearly extends to the ground at the rear and the two side walls are almost triangular. In the shaded light we can make out a wooden framed couch. To say there is no door on this shelter would be to miss the point, as there is no wall on which to hang it. Standing in front of it is a young mother washing bowls and she smiles as we pass. Her kids have all got thick scruffy morning hair, they look up too, while a chicken scuttles round their legs. They were all standing in the kitchen. But the use of the word kitchen in this instance leaves the word straining and groaning at the seams of its own meaning. The kitchen is an area in the dirt that has been swept. One sheet of corrugated iron stands upright to support a board and a bowl. In the middle of the orderly dirt is a table, with a couple of chairs and a single piece of wire runs around the whole area at waist height - tied to a tree here and a stick in the ground there - it is a boundary, just so we all know where the ‘kitchen’ actually is. I have wandered into this world without walls carrying a simplistic set of values picked up off the Fairtrade shelf, where kids working = bad. And I curse myself.
