The Candor That Refreshes

Even with the best of intentions, corporations sometimes have a tough time keeping pace with demands for social reform. Consider the case of the Coca-Cola Co. It has exemplary programs for hiring the hard-core unemployed and controlling pollution. But just after Earth Day, the company was singled out by pollution protesters, who dumped mounds of nonreturnable bottles at its Atlanta headquarters. Lately Coca-Cola has found itself a target of criticism in a more serious matter that it has too long neglected: its treatment of migrant workers.

The living conditions of workers in the Florida citrus groves were limned in both a television documentary and Senator Walter Mondale's Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. The migrants who work for Coke, picking oranges for its Minute Maid fruit juices, live in tiny houses (often with outdoor plumbing) and have little in the way of the employee benefits that have become an American norm. Children work in the fields partly to maintain the family income, partly because their mothers simply cannot afford to stay at home to look after them. To answer for his company, Coca-Cola President J. Paul Austin was called up before the subcommittee. Rather than try to defend Coca-Cola's record, Austin was refreshingly candid. He concluded that the living conditions of the workers are indeed "deplorable."

Simple Amenities. Though Coke has owned the groves since 1960, Austin said, he awakened to the migrant workers' plight only in 1968, after he had begun reading about Cesar Chavez's drive to organize California grape pickers (see THE NATION). Austin sent J. Lucian Smith, president of Coke's food division, to inspect the Florida groves. Smith reported back to him that the workers' living conditions "could not in conscience be tolerated by the Coca-Cola Co."

With that, Coke started to provide the workers with simple amenities --things like ice water, toilet facilities and gloves for pickers in the groves. "Our first instinct," said Austin, "was to change the physical condition in which the migrant worker found himself trapped." The second thought was that simple welfare was not enough. Last February, accordingly, Coke sent a team of behavioral scientists to Florida to plan a comprehensive program that would, in Austin's words, "face up to the basic human problems involved." The result of their study amounts to a sound approach to caring for the migrant workers.

Benefits and Bonuses. More than anything else, the plan illustrates what has been lacking up to now. The company will establish four permanent social-service centers and one mobile center, which will offer child care, preschool training and adult education. Austin promised better medical care and toilet-equipped buses to transport workers between home and the citrus groves. He said in addition that the company will have "modern and sanitary" dormitories and new homes for its seasonal workers, and will raise the wages for 300 full-time grove workers by 23%, to a top of $2 per hour. The roughly 1,000 part-time workers will get higher pay and health and life insurance coverage.

By adjusting its planting and harvesting schedule, the company intends to shift as many part-timers as possible to full-time status. Instead of being paid piecework rates, they will collect hourly wages plus production bonuses. By using these incentives to raise productivity, Austin hopes to convert 200 workers to full-time status next year; the plan is for two-thirds of the harvesting employees to be on full-time status with all benefits in five to seven years.

Social critics may charge that Coca-Cola took a long time to act, and that its timetable for progress is exceptionally drawn out. That may be true, but at least Coke has produced a promising program that other companies might well emulate.

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