The human rights hypocrisy of The Coca-Cola Company

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that no one’s rights are secure unless everyone’s rights are secure, and that human rights are indivisible and inseparable.

In the 70 years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, there have been significant advancements in promoting and protecting sexual orientation and gender identity as fundamental human rights. But workers around the world continue to face discrimination based on sexual orientation at work, in access to health care and education, as well as hate-motivated violence, detention and torture.

Defending the right to form and join a union, union recognition and collective bargaining rights and defending LGBTI rights at the workplace are common struggles joined by their common commitment to promote and defend the universality of human rights.

Because transnational companies (TNCs) can have an impact on the entire spectrum of internationally recognized human rights and their responsibility to respect applies to all such rights, TNCs cannot selectively “cherry pick” which rights they promote and which rights they deny employees’ access to.

Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the International LGBTQ Leaders Conference organized in Washington, US from December 6 to 8 and its promotion of LGBTI rights take place against the background of a growing number of human rights abuses within the Coca-Cola System, abuses that the company has been unwilling to remedy.

Currently attacks by the company on the fundamental rights of Coca-Cola workers are taking place in Indonesia, Haiti, the Philippines, Ireland and the USA. (Read more here). The IUF LGBTI Workers and Allies Steering Committee sent a letter to the Victory Institute and requested them as the conference organizer to raise these repeated abuses with The Coca-Cola Company and insist the company act to remedy the growing number of human rights violations within the Coca-Cola system.

Coca-Cola is obliged to respect all human rights and must ensure employees throughout its system have free and fair access to those rights. IUF calls on all who defend the rights of LGBTI to join the IUF struggle. To learn how you can support the IUF struggle please visit www.tastezerorights.org and www.iuf.org.