New York University threw in the towel on Wednesday. They’ve had a five year wrestling match with the Coca-Cola Company over human rights issues, and now NYU has decided to lift the three year ban that prohibited the sale of Coke products on campus grounds.

The ban was a response to an international demand for Coca-Cola Company to stop exploiting and abusing its workers. Between 1989 and 2002, eight union organizers from Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia were murdered after protesting the company’s labor standards. Isidro Segundo Gil was one of them. He was killed at a bottling plant in Columbia, where paramilitaries fired ten shots at him according to eye witness accounts. Later in the day another union leader was kidnapped from his home. And the next day the paramilitaries called the remaining workers together at the plant and told them that if they didn’t quit the union by 4 p.m., they would also be killed.

The men who took Gil’s life were never charged with any crimes. In 2005, NYU’s Public Affairs Committee chair wrote a letter to the CEO of the Coca-Cola company asking them to participate in a forum, to be marshaled by the Worker Rights Consortium, in order to address the allegations of human rights violations in Columbia. The company responded to the letter, and maintained in contact with the university, but failed to agree to a third-party protocol that would have lead to an independent investigation. So they pulled the “classic” sugary beverage, along with all other Coca-Cola products, from campus shelves and vending machines.

NYU wasn’t the only university to abstain from selling Coke on it’s property, University of Michigan, Manchester University, University of Sussex, Bard College, Oberlin College, Lake Forest College, and College of DuPage, have all observed a ban at some point….and some still are.

In July of 2001, The United Steel Workers Union and the International Labor Rights fund sued Coca-Cola for human rights abuses. In the opening complaint they accused the company of the “[S]ystematic intimidation, kidnapping, detention and murder of trade unionists in Colombia, South America at the hands of paramilitaries working as agents of corporations doing business in that country.” I believe the case is still pending.

Coca-Cola finally agreed to have the human rights allegations looked into, but only by the United Nation’s International Labour Organization (ILO). They “passed” the inspection, allowing the ban to be lifted at NYU. The problem is that Coca-Cola and ILO may have some common interests. You see, Coke’s director of global labor relations, Edward Potter, happens to be an ILO member. Hmmm.

I don’t trust the ILO investigation, and I’m certainly not giving Coca-Cola my money