NYT on UNITE HERE's Strategy

An article in today's NYT discusses the importance of UNITE HERE's corporate strategy. This strategy is central to both understanding the AAA's role in the struggle, and to seeing the potential for anthropological work on corporate globalization.

Excerpted from the article:
"After years of effort, [UNITE HERE] has managed to ensure that its contracts in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Honolulu all expire this year. This has enabled Unite Here to maximize pressure on the industry by threatening a walkout by 60,000 workers at 400 hotels.

"Hotel workers in San Francisco have been working without a contract since 2004, and that would enable the union to declare a strike here as well. In 2004, some of the city's most prominent hotels locked out many workers in a labor dispute.

"'The only way to take on a global corporation is to take them on with a national or regional strategy,' said Mike Casey, president of the hotel workers' local in San Francisco."

Hostile Working Conditions: How Anthropologists Can Demand Change From Coke

What You Can Do
1. Send your own message to Coke:
E. Neville Isdell, CEO, Coca-Cola
Ed Potter, Director of Global Labor Relations, Coca-Cola (Potter's been Coke’s point-person on this issue, so he should definitely be contacted)
Cc: Rodrigo Calderón, Vice-President, Public Affairs and Communications, Coca-Cola, Latin America
Lori Billingsley, Issues Director, Media Relation, Coca-Cola

2. Ask the AAA Executive Board to adopt the resolution:
Alan Goodman, President, AAA Executive Board
Cc: Bill Davis, Executive Director, AAA
Lucille Horn, Director of AAA and Section Meetings, AAA
Paul Nutti, Director of External, International and Government Relations, AAA

4. Ask your section leaders to take a stand in solidarity with the Colombian Coca-Cola workers and those unions, universities and colleges that seek to pressure the Coca-Cola Company to change its business practices.

Please use the links in the sidebar and see Lesley Gill's essay in Transforming Anthropology (you need Adobe Acrobat to open this link) to find out more about these issues.