Things Go Worse at Coke

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

13 July 14

o, a couple of days ago, if you happen to work at the Coca Cola Company's South Metro distribution center in Atlanta, you had to go to one of these mandatory meetings. Maybe you thought, OK, I can get a nap in. Unfortunately for you and everybody else, what you were being required to listen to was a recitation of anti-union propaganda from the company's "Labor Relations Director." (The primary job the the "Labor Relations Director" is making sure labor doesn't relate to itself so well that it begins to organize.) Some of the folks weren't buying, as you can hear by listening to the recording.

This is how it works in American corporations, large and small, these days. This is what happens when you have 60 years of very successful anti-union propaganda combined with an extended period of conservative Republican governance, which scares national Democrats into another extended period of conservative Democratic governance, combined with a steady winnowing away of workers rights in the courts, combined with a deliberate attempt to defang the institutions within the government that might work to level what has become a very slanted playing field. You get workers compelled to listen to someone from management tell them how unions are what really is holding them back. And, in related news, it's helpful to remember that the Supreme Court case that overturned the president's recess appointments did so in the case of recess appointments to...wait for it...the National Labor Relations Board, which had been deliberately kept incomplete by the Republicans in Congress because they don't want the NLRB to work. Maybe we all need a nap.