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 [email protected], or to me, at [email protected].