The Workers Unite! Film Festival is arriving in Greenwich Village from May 9 – 19th and promises to be a cultural spotlight. Though the main venue for the series of films focusing on income inequality, injustices to workers and their efforts to fight back is primarily Cinema Village on 12th Street, it’s one of the additional locales for the diverse program that is generating some controversy.
On Sunday May 18th, a special set of events will take place from 3:00 to 5:30pm in the Judson Memorial Church auditorium, deep in the heart of New York University. Here, the award-winning documentary, The Coca-Cola Case, will be shown, accompanied by performances from New York City’s famed Labor Chorus. The film, which highlights the ongoing controversy surrounding Coca-Cola’s complicity in decades of violence directed at union leaders and members of their families in Colombia and Guatemala, including kidnapping, torture, murder, and recurrent death threats, places the Church at loggerheads with NYU, Coca-Cola, and Greenwich Village resident Barry Diller, who serves on both the boards of NYU and The Coca-Coca Company.
Following a March 17th letter sent to NYU President John Sexton and members of the University Senate, the Church’s Senior Minister Rev. Donna Schaper, stated that “Universities stand for the highest ethical and moral standards and we hope New York University will continue that great tradition and remove Coca-Cola from campus.” The letter, signed by both her and Rev. David Dyson, Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church Pastor Emeritus and well-noted for his labor and human rights advocacy states:
“NYU took the moral high road from 2005-2009 by removing all Coke products…but brought Coke back on campus… in violation of the University Senate Resolution which led to its removal in the first place. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Diller purchased another $20 million of Coca-Cola stock and now owns some $160,000,000 worth…
Since Coca-Cola returned to NYU, there have been a number of books, reports, news articles, documentary films, lawsuits and websites documenting this company’s sordid past and present criminal and other unethical conduct… The “New York Daily News” reported on lawsuits describing Coca-Cola plants in New York City and Westchester County as “cesspools of racial discrimination.”
NYU should once again remove all Coca-Cola products from campus indefinitely and publicly censure Mr. Diller or demand his resignation from NYU’s board.”
The outspoken Ray Rogers, labor and human rights advocate and director of the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke, an organization featured heavily in The Coca-Cola Case, believes, “If NYU administrators feel that continuing their addiction to Coke is more important than setting an example of high ethical and moral standards, then plans for a ‘NYU Kick Coke Off Campus Campaign/2014-2015’ will be announced at the event.”
Posters and literature will be distributed at the event to help promote the campaign and educate the public about Coca-Cola’s record of abuse. Including a deplorable record of human rights abuses from Latin America to India, Coca-Cola is widely criticized for continuing to aggressively market products to children that the company knows fuels childhood obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure epidemics.
Christopher Maltby is a freelance journalist who lives and works in New York City.
