Care for Some Blood in Your Coffee?

“Nestlé workers in the Philippines under the United Filipino Employees-Drug Food and Allied Industries -Kilusang Mayo Uno (UFE-DFA-KMU) have been on strike since January 14, 2002 for their right to retirement benefits. To this day, Nestlé refuses to include the workers’ retirement benefits in the collective bargaining negotiation despite a Supreme Court ruling ordering them to negotiate. The strike has both directly and indirectly resulted in the deaths of 23 union members, including union president Diosdado Fortuna, who was assassinated on his way home from the picket line on September 22, 2005, his predecessor Meliton Roxas was also murdered and the current leadership continue to live in fear of their lives.”

Slideshow: Solidarity Protests Vs Nestle in Vienna, New Zealand

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Over three years ago we got a free ceramic coffee mug for every jar of Nescafe Classic we bought from the shops.  It was a nice promotional idea, very novel and rather fancy, we thought at first.  We didn’t know how much instant coffee we were consuming at the time, but the mugs started to pile up in our cupboard.  We ended up with far too many while the promo was running that eventually we started giving them away, sometimes to thankful shop employees who probably buy the cheaper range of coffee or coffee-tasting mixture (using chicory I think).

I thought that was the end of it.  Then we flew with our kids for the first time to my family in the Philippines.  They had had the same promotion running there.  Or so we thought.  There was a big difference.  The mugs were made of plastic.

I bet no one else knew about this double standard except their ad campaign managers.   It turns out they don’t just scrimp on their promotional materials when it comes to the “third world” (how I hate that term!).