Belching Out the Devil

by Mark Thomas

  In a back street where old men sun themselves in fold-out chairs and unemployed dads gather round the underside of a broken-down van, while their children help them work, Chile approaches a guy in an oil-covered vest holding a hammer. He says words to the effect of, ‘I’m looking for the guy the cops fucked up…’ and the oily dad lifts his arm, hammer still in hand, and points out directions.

  The road bends where it starts to run up the hill. This is where Carlos Maldonado Anaya rents a room in a bungalow. Behind it palm trees grow and their wilting leaves hang over the roof, under the shade of which sits Carlos in a wheelchair. He shoots a brief smile when he sees Chile, recognising him from other days, and leads us cautiously inside. The cool small front room is the lounge, the dining area and the parlour. The room is three steps long, with a kitchen to the rear and two bedrooms to the side. What it lacks in size it fails to make up for in decor: the doors are plain unpainted plyboard affairs, with bolts rather than handles to keep them shut. Old faded photos of children long grown and gone decorate the wall, a solitary china cat sits on a shelf. Positioning himself opposite a cheap print of the Last Supper, Carlos tells us he is fifty, but in poverty years this translates as about seventy-five, he’s skinny enough to evoke the word ‘wretch’ and sits in a raggedy pair of shorts and a shirt. The most eye-catching thing about him though are his legs, thin and brown with silver metal tubes and pipes sticking out from the flesh. The pins holding his bones together emerge from his skin and run at angles down his leg, like a homage to the Pompidou Centre.

  Before the police ran him over Carlos was a fletero - literally translated the word means transporter or porter. He worked in the dense streets of Bucaramanga where the lanes are sometimes inaccessible to a truck, where the crowds flow down the narrow capillaries of the city, so crates of Coca-Cola have to be delivered by hand. Weaving amongst them shouting warnings of his presence Carlos hauled crates of Coca-Cola to the shops and cafés for twenty-five years.

  The system worked liked this: the company supplied the stock, Carlos provided the manpower, ‘they give me the product so that I can distribute it,’ he says. Using a sack barrow that can balance fifteen crates on its iron frames he would deliver during the day and return to do the paperwork at night. Carlos said, ‘I have had to work almost eighteen hours, in previous seasons. I used to work from 6am and sometimes until 11pm or 12pm’ his fingers arc through the air to show the passage of time. As you might expect his earnings were far from great. ‘The last year I worked I earned the minimum wage. The minimum. I was earning around 360,000 pesos a month.’ That’s about £100.

  Carlos explains the set up, ‘The company gives us the job, but from that job we had to to pay the warehouse.’ This is often just a small lock-up with a roll-down shutter where you can stack crates of pop. The Coca-Cola trucks come round and deliver the crates of soda to the warehouse. They tell you how many crates you have to deliver. They tell you what drinks each order needs, where you have to deliver them to, the routes. They make you wear a Coca-Cola uniform. They tell you who you can hire as an assistant and they sometimes say, ‘Sack so-and-so they’re no good.’ Effectively the Coca-Cola bottlers control their working lives, which sounds remarkably like the role of an employer, but the job of a fletero is a sub-contracted one, hired by contractors, not directly by the company, so they do not appear on Coca-Cola’s books. ‘No, I don’t have any contract, nothing signed at all, never, I have never signed any document with the company.’ This means that he can be fired any time.

  Given this precarious state it is perhaps not surprising when Carlos spoke of the wish to unionise and spoke about this with his fellow workers, ‘but the problem is that we cannot join our union because of the fear that when the company realise that you belong to the union they will sack you. They will say that you know that the company does not allow you to join a union. Then they say “no, you have become a trade unionist there is nothing else for you to do here”.’

  So to sum up the relationship: Coca-Cola bottlers don’t employ Carlos, but they do tell him when to collect the stock, where to go, what to deliver, who to deliver it to and when to do it, what to wear, who to hire and who to fire and threaten him with the sack should he join a union. None of which sounds like the declarations The Coca-Cola Company have made to respect workplace rights.

  Carlos has kindly given us the name of another person who used to work delivering Coke so we set out to search for him, though having the name of the person we are looking for feels slightly like cheating. Leaving the bungalow we cut back through the side streets to the centre, squeeze past the cattle trucks parked up on the kerb side, dodge buses as they lurch out of the station and wander against the lunchtime market crowd of shoppers, where shoulders hunch with the weight of bags, jaw chomp on snacks held in napkins and feet tango through the surge of fellow humans. There are wide-eyed chickens stacked high in wire boxes with guinea pigs and geese as neighbours. We pass stalls selling cutlery, crockery, lace and knives as we head out of the market, along the main roads and on to the quieter roads. Here Ivan works in a kiosk, a small café selling sweets, beer, hot food and cigarettes, with a few tables and chairs outside. The boundaries of this establishment are an ambiguous affair, as the pavement runs into the dining area and visa versa. This is the epitome of Colombian café culture: a café, a street and a complete absence of culture.

  Ivan only has two customers - a young man in denim with a proprietary arm draped around an even younger woman whose crop shirt allows her puppy fat to gently lollop over her tracksuit bottoms. Ivan leaves the counter when he sees Chile, and nods a friendly smile. He is twenty-nine years old, with a baseball hat pulled back on his head and a grin that collapses to hide an overreaching top set of teeth. He’s as eager to talk as Carlos was cautious, but constantly checks the couple drinking beers lest they want another round.

  Ivan was a delivery assistant. ‘I had to go with the lorry and deliver the bottles.’ These were long days, ‘to be honest we started at quarter to six in the morning and we finished around 7, 8, 9pm.’

  Like Carlos he too talked to Sinaltrainal about joining the union, but Coke said ‘that if we join a trade union we would have been sacked’.

  In one single motion Ivan lets out a little ‘hmmph’ through his nose, his head twitches to one side, eyebrows raised and he pulls his lips tight together in an expression of disgust.

  Just to be absolutely clear I ask again, ‘So they would sack you if you joined the union?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that a common occurrence?’

  ‘Nowadays it is happening…The project, the plan the company has, is to end the union.’ He explains, slightly perplexed that the question was even asked.

  Under the bottlers’ system of subcontracting, which is referred to simply as contracting in Colombia, Ivan was employed by four different subcontractors. In this kind of environment the possibility that workers might have some kind of job security is non-existent.

  ‘There was an indefinite contract,’ Says Ivan

  ‘Could they sack you at any point?’

  ‘They sacked us because the company gave them the order to do it…’ he shrugs matter-of-factly. ‘There was a verbal agreement contract, there wasn’t any signed contract. It was kind of indefinite.’ According to Ivan it was the bottlers who decided who was hired and fired; if the bottlers didn’t like you ‘then they called one of the men and they said ‘we don’t want to see this man any more. He cannot work for you any more.’ Ivan hmmphs with increased vigour and as if to prove his point adds that in 2006 he became ill with tuberculosis. ‘They sacked me, I never had any help from them…they turned their back and they didn’t help me, not even five pesos.’ Hmmph.

  His head twitches with a sideways tilt as he adds, ‘Lastly I want to clarify that I want the trade union to carry on its duties. And to carry on fighting as they always have done.’

  With that, right on cue, a denim-clad arm appears in the air behind him to order a
nother beer, Ivan turns instinctively, says ‘Thank you’ and politely returns to serving beer.

  So far our morning tour of the city has found two men who claim to have had their right to join a union denied them; Chile thinks there is another nearby and it turns out there is. His name is Jorge Santana Acostaho. The metal doors open inwards from the bright light of the sun into the shadow-dim world of the lock-up. A step down leads to the bottle bunker. It is a maze of narrow walkways created by stacks of crates with room enough to fit a small sack barrow. God knows how far back the place goes, there are endless crates, red ones, yellow, brown ones too. Stacks of Aguila beer, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Gatorade, 7Up and Crystal. A small workbench is to one side by the wall with a desk lamp on it and above it, on the brick, a calendar features the obligatory woman in a swimsuit. This is very much a man’s world. The place has the faint whiff of fresh sweat and pride. Jorge Sanatana leans with one hand on his desk, the collar on his shirt open, revealing a red V where the sun has caught him over the years. His face is hard and his hair is short and greying. Now maybe I am just a soft hand-wringing middle-class Englishman abroad and maybe all the men are like this around here, but I swear to whatever God you want that I don’t think this man is capable of standing up without looking defiant.

  Jorge worked for three years on the delivery lorries and for nine years in the warehouse. Back then the bottlers were more reliant on the fleteros not just delivering the drinks but for drumming up the orders too. ‘Coca-Cola gave me an area and said I had to find the customers, so I got two or three people to go and find them. They told me to sell 200 crates a day. They used to call saying you have to sell more…So Coca-Cola pressured me and I had to pressure the employees.’ According to Jorge Santana the pressure to sell that number of crates was so intense that, ‘sometimes I would cheat and buy the crates myself just to make up the numbers.’

  As with the other testimonies ‘They used to tell me “this guy is no good, sack him”. And I have to sack them.’ Coca-Cola ended up sacking him for arguing, and Jorge Santana set up as an independent fletero. He is happier now, but ‘Coca-Cola won’t sell to me directly. I have to buy Coca-Cola on the black market as they refuse to sell to me.’

  So far none of this paints a picture of ‘respecting workers’ but at this juncture I should mention my relationship with The Coca-Cola Company, which is this: I ask them questions about their practices, a PR person prevaricates on answering, waits until after my deadlines expires, then sends over a wodge of PR guff last thing Friday and buggers off on holiday for two weeks so I can’t ask a follow-up question. It would be sad but for the fact that the company accidentally sent over their lawyer’s notes on how to answer my questions [see Appendix B].

  Trying to get TCCC to answer a question directly is like trying to run a quiz night in an Alzheimer’s care home. So I have taken the liberty of imagining what they might say were they to imbibe the original recipe and get a little talkative. The Coca-Cola Company could say that I had merely spoken to disgruntled former employees, people with a grudge against the company. To which I would reply, ‘That is most surely true, they do indeed have a grudge.’

  The Coca-Cola Company could also say that I have spoken only to people known to Chile, a Sinaltrainal member who is in dispute with the company and that the views expressed are not representative of the workforce. Which makes the next person I talk to all the more significant.

  We leave Jorge and walk through the alleyways in the hot afternoon, skipping across to the shady side of the street to avoid the sun. I become aware that we are walking, purely by chance, behind a Coca-Cola deliveryman - a fletero. The red shirt with the Coca-Cola logo on it is the first clue. The enormous metal frame on wheels that he is pushing, the second. The large crates of Coca-Cola merely confirms my suspicions. So ambling at his side I whisper to Chile,‘Do you know him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can we talk to him?’

  ‘We can ask.’ And with that Chile strikes up a conversation, the result of which gains me a five-minute audience in the fletero’s warehouse - on the condition he remains anonymous. Hiding your identity for fear of reprisal is one thing but denying yourself a name seems a bit too impersonal, so I have taken the liberty of giving this fletero a false name: Pemberton, after Coca-Cola’s founding father.

  No doubt the daily delivery of 300 boxes containing 9,000 bottles of drinks has helped keep Pemberton trim, unlike his historically lard-arsed namesake. He stands legs akimbo with one hand on his hip, like an action hero, and with his other hand holds a clipboard at his side. Just like the other fleteros Pemberton says he is told what to deliver, to who, in what amounts and at what time, as well as what to wear by the bottlers, ‘You have to buy this uniform from Coca-Cola,’ his hands now motion to his clothes, a red T-shirt, with a green collar to match the green company approved trousers. The T-shirt bears the words COCA-COLA FEMSA on the breast.

  Pemberton is matter-of-fact and businesslike even when he tells of the precarious nature of his employment. ‘They can get rid of me whenever they want. I have no job security at all. I have been working [here] for ten years and I have no security for those [years]…So I have to do whatever they ask and agree to everything.’ He looks to his assistant and whistles out a call, pointing at some crates stacked tightly together at the side of the lock-up, which the assistant starts to load on a barrow. Pemberton turns unsmiling and continues, ‘Coca-Cola say I can only employ one other person to help me.’ But he explains there is too much work for the two of them so he has to break the rules and employ two assistants. Running with the theme I ask, ‘Has the bottler ever mentioned who you should or should not employ?’

  ‘Yes, two years ago they told me to sack someone.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘The Coke Supervisor.’ Mimicking the supervisor, Pemberton says, ‘“This guy is useless, get rid”.’ Shrugging he adds, ‘What can I do? If they ask me to do it I have no choice.’

  ‘What about joining a union?’

  He laughs and shakes his head with a mild contempt. Joining a union is simply not an option.

  It was not always like this, Chile says the Coca-Cola deliverymen - like the fleteros used to be unionised, ‘In 1992 80 per cent of the distribution workers were fixed contract workers and unionised. Today in Bucaramanga there are only two workers in distribution who are on fixed contracts,’ himself and his driver Domingo Flores. For Chile, subcontracting is one of the main causes for the decrease in Sinaltrainal membership, ‘In 1992 there were 282 Bucaramanga workers in Sinaltrainal, and in Bucaramanga today you will only find sixteen.’

  Meanwhile The Coca-Cola Company proudly boast of their good employee relations, ‘In Colombia, a country where 4 per cent of workers are unionised, 31 per cent of the employees of Coca-Cola Colombian bottling partners belong to unions.’8 So why are the fleteros telling such a different story? The answer lies in the statistic…oh yes, my friends, statistics: the thinking man’s lie. Calculating a statistic is similar to normal counting but with different rules and when dealing with an entity like a transnational corporation it is important to remember that statistics are facts that have been shaped to fit the story. So, is the Coca-Cola statistic accurate? Let us suppose for a moment it is and consider the implications. The rest of Colombia has only 4 per cent union membership, yet the Coca-Cola bottlers have created such an employee positive environment that union membership is up nearly 800 per cent on the national average. If true the appropriate response has to be Viva Coca-Cola! La Lucha Continua Hasta La Victoria Siempre con Coca-Cola!

  Meanwhile, back on my planet, logic dictates that this surely cannot be the case, how can Coke bottlers be so pro-union in such an anti-union environment? The answer is they are not. Coke’s calculations are based on the number of permanent employees they have working for them, and as for the casual labour, or the sub-contracted workers - they are simply not included in the figures. Neither Carlos, Ivan, nor any of the other fleteros I spoke to are co
unted as employees.

  A few days earlier in Bogota I had spoken with Sinaltrainal’s researcher Carlos Olaya, who told me that since the Nineties Coke bottlers have taken full advantage of a change in the law,9 which enabled them to remove swathes of workers from their books as direct employees and push them into casual contracts. Huge sections of the bottlers’ operations were sub-contracted out - hirings, delivery, maintenance services (like canteens), security, accountancy; all of it was outsourced. ‘Now the Coca-Cola bottlers have about 9,000 workers but only about 1,850 are directly or permanently employed, of that figure about 600 are in a union - about 32 per cent.’ Which is close enough to the company figures of 31 per cent. ‘However, when you include the other 7,150 workers, the true figure is about 6.5 per cent of the workforce are unionised, higher than the national average, true, but still ridiculously low.’