The case was initiated by Sinaltrainal, the trade union that represents workers at the Coke facilities in Colombia. Other plaintiffs include the estate of Isidro Segundo Gil, a trade union leader who was murdered while working at the Coke bottling plant in Carepa, Colombia. The plaintiffs charge that the manager of that facility, owned by an American, Richard Kirby, who is also a defendant in this case, specifically threatened to kill the leaders of the union if they continued their union activities. The other plaintiffs are Luis Eduardo Garcia, Alvaro Gonzalez, Jose Domingo Flores, Jorge Humberto Leal and Juan Carlos Galvis. All are leaders of Sinaltrainal. All, while employed by Coke, were subjected to torture, kidnapping, and/or unlawful detention in order to encourage them to cease their trade union activities.
The lawsuit alleges that Coke employees either ordered the violence directly, or delegated the job to paramilitary death squads that were acting as agents for Coke.
A spokesperson for Coke at its headquarters in Atlanta referred Multinational Monitor to the company's spokesperson in Colombia. "We vigorously deny any wrongdoing regarding human rights violations in Colombia and are deeply concerned by these allegations against our company," says Pablo Largacha, spokesperson for Coca-Cola de Colombia. "We have been and continue to be assured by our bottlers that behavior such as that depicted in the claim has in no way been instigated, carried out or condoned by these bottling companies."
5. ENRON: Executive Rip-off
Amalgamated Bank, the trustee of equity and bond funds that invest the retirement savings of union employees, suffered losses of $10.3-million, part of a $20-billion loss for public investors. The lawyer for the bank said that Enron cheated millions of investors out of billions of dollars. Countless lives and retirements have been destroyed. "While lining their own pockets and setting themselves up financially for life, Enron insiders misled many investors who represent working men and women," said an Amalgamated vice president. "It's our intention to retrieve the ill-gotten gains of the Enron insiders and return it to the people who were ripped off."
No one got hit harder than Enron employees. Enron used stock rather than cash to match employee contributions to their 401(k) retirement fund. And many of the employees, believing the company's hype about its prospects, chose to put even more of their money into company stock. Sixty-two percent of the assets in the 401(k) were invested in Enron stock. Then, in October, following the company's announcement that it was taking more than a billion dollars in charges to offset bad investments connected to insider deals — at the exact moment that Enron began to unravel — the company "locked down" the pension plan so that employees could not sell off their Enron stock. The lockdown supposedly occurred because Enron was changing plan administrators. Trading at $33.84 when the lockdown went into effect, the stocks were worth less than $10 a share a month later, when employees were again permitted to sell the stock. In the process, many lost their life savings.
Enron says it does not comment on pending litigation. Meanwhile, Enron board chairman Kenneth Lay, reported cashing in more than $200-million worth of stock options in the last several years — before share values started dropping like a stone. Lou Pai, chairman of Enron unit Enron Accelerator, sold stock in excess of $353-million. Even Wendy Gramm, the wife of former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm, is reported to have sold $297,912 in stocks. She served, believe it or not, on Enron's audit committee.
"How am I going to retire now?" Gary Kemper, 57, of Banks, Oregon, a maintenance foreman with an Enron affiliate, asked USA Today. "Everything I've worked for the past 25 years has been wiped out. Meanwhile, the executives got out while the getting was good."
6. EXXONMOBIL: King of Global Warming Denial
You know a company is behaving badly when it starts getting cuffed around by the public relations industry. That's why it was so notable in May when O'Dwyer's, the leading rag of the PR industry, criticized "ExxonMobil's stubborn refusal to acknowledge the fact that burning fossil fuels has a role in global warming."
Climate change, now accepted by scientific consensus as fact and acknowledged by virtually all reputable scientists to be underway, poses enormous environmental, human health and economic threats in coming decades. Among other consequences: Rising tides due to polar icecap melting are expected to submerge entire island nations and vast swaths of coastal lands; changing temperatures are expected to contribute to the spread of deadly tropical diseases; extreme weather events are expected to become much more frequent; and countless species are facing endangerment due to rapid shifts in local weather patterns. Emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels such as oil are a leading contributor to the problem of climate change.
