On The Need for a Code of Corporate Responsibility

By John F Earl

This a the text of a speech that I gave before the Huntington Beach City Council last Spring, asking that the city reconsider its business relationship with the Coca-Cola Bottling Company and create a code of corporate responsibility, similar to that on many college campuses, for large corporations that do business with the city. The actual speech may have been modified some at the last minute in order to meet the 3 minute time restriction during Public Comments.

My name is John Earl

I am a resident of Huntington Beach.

Tonight I want talk about our city’s unhealthy business relationship with international traffickers and dealers of Coke.

This relationship offers great potential for harm to our city’s own residents and millions of visitors who come to our beaches every year.

It can lead to tooth decay, obesity, and diabetes and other serious health problems.

But it also encourages gross destruction of the environment, including life sustaining water supplies.

And it has the effect of giving a good name to an organization that has a terrible history of routinely violating human rights at home, but especially in other countries.

This unthinkable business relationship began in 1999 when the city of Huntington Beach, on a 7-0 vote of the previous city council, approved a contract with the Coca-Cola bottling company that gave it a soft-drink monopoly on all city properties in return for badly needed cash to be received annually until the year 2010.

The decision to enter into this agreement was made for one reason only: to make money for the city and for the Coke company.

No consideration whatsoever was given to Coca-Cola company’s human rights record or the effect that the agreement might have on people’s health or fundamental human rights, especially if those people resided outside of our local borders.

All we thought about was money, because we need money badly to sustain our way of life in one of the most livable cities on earth.

All we thought about was money---same as we did when we approved a Wal-Mart store and the same as we’re about to do with a corporate run desalination plant.

In each of these cases what we do locally effects people around the world who are locked into today’s global economy.

The people living in China also want to have a decent standard of living, but every Wal-Mart that is approved in Huntington Beach or anywhere else pushes them toward working conditions that better resemble a slave market than a free market.

Our proposed privatized desal plant will also bring the city of Huntington Beach needed revenue, but only at the price selling our democratic rights and water rights to the highest bidder and setting a dangerous legal precedent throughout the state.

Selling our city parks, beaches and good name to the Coca-Cola company will bring us revenue, but at what price?

Would the city do business with a company that makes lampshades out of human skin?

Obviously not, but then why do business with a corporation that, as strong evidence suggests, is directly complicit in death threats and assassinations by death squads of seven of its workers in its bottling plants in Colombia since the city signed its agreement?

The workers only wanted to belong to a union and to require Coca-Cola to live up to its collective bargaining agreements.

Instead, the company is doing everything, including the use of violence, to destroy the union in a country where hundreds of union members and organizers are killed every year.

And why do business with a corporation that is destroying the water supplies for peasants living in communities in India, and then punishing their protests with beatings and other harassment?

The Coca-Cola company is bad for our health, bad for our reputation and bad for our souls.

We need money.

People all over the world need money, but we shouldn’t try to get it by exploiting our brothers and sisters either here at home or abroad.

They are just like us.

What we do to them, we do to ourselves.

Instead of selling out to the corporations who exploit us all, we should join together with our needy brothers and sisters and fight the corporate exploitation that hurts us all.

Please investigate this issue and reconsider the city’s contract with Coca-Cola.

The contract allows you to do so.

Call a public hearing and demand, as the city of New York has done, that Coca-Cola account for its actions.

And after that hearing, if you believe as I and human rights and labor groups around the world do, that Coca-Cola needs to clean up its act, tell that corporation to live up to human rights standards or get out of town.

Then apply those same standards to any corporation that tries to buy us off in the future.

And, in the future, in order to get more money for the city, start fighting at the state and national level or a fair tax system and for better spending priorities than war and prisons.

Then, we will have plenty for the services that we need here in Huntington Beach.

I have provided the mayor with the necessary background information to get you started.

Thank you.