BOYCOTT DR. PEPPER, SNAPPLE, & MOTT
A CALL TO BOYCOTT ALL PRODUCTS OF THE DR.PEPPER SNAPPLE GROUP–Dr. Pepper, Snapple, Mott, etc.
Norman Spinrad

A report in the August 18th New York times on a strike by workers against the Mott apple juice plant in Williamson, N.Y. has set my blood to boiling. The union is fighting against a demand by the company to cut workers’ wages and benefits while making record profits.

To quote a company statement:

“The union contends that a profitable company shouldn’t seek concessions from its workers. This argument ignores the fact that…Dr. Pepper Snapple Group has a fiduciary responsibility to operate in the best interests of all its constituents….”

To quote a union representative quoting a company representative:

“He said that we’re a commodity like soybeans and oil, and the price of commodities go up and down. He said that there are thousands of people in this area out of jobs and they could hire any of them for $14 an hour.”

To quote a company representative:

“We’d prefer that our employees return to work…But we’re prepared to continue operating without them.”

Which is what they’re doing, running the Mott plant with “replacement workers,” better and more honestly called scabs.

In other words of few obfuscating sylables, the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, while making record profits, is demanding that workers at their Williamson Mott apple juice plant accept lower wages and reduced benefits for no other reason than they believe they can can get away with it because the unemployment rate in the area is so dire that they can hire all the scabs they need to either break the union strike or quite literally “render the union workers redundant.”

There is far more at stake here than a strike in a single Mott apple juice plant. Many major corporations have layed off thousands of workers during the recession, resulting in higher profits off lower cash flow, and continue to lay off more workers even while their profit margins soar. What Dr. Pepper Snapple Group is doing is something even worse, but at least nakedly honest, putting the screws to their established work force to raise their obscene profit margins even more, and admitting that they’re doing it not because they need to in order to save the company, but just because the horrendous unemployment rate will let them get away with it.

They can’t be allowed to get away with it. Because if they do, their action will become an encouragement and a model for similarly highly profitable companies all across the United States to do the same thing. Wages will be driven down, and therefore purchasing power. And the so-called “recovery” from the so-called “Great Recession,” a recovery that thus far has not “trickled down” from rising corporate profits to the population at large, will stall in its tracks.

So we all have a stake in not allowing the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group to get away with this nakedly greedy immoral and in the end nationally counterproductive screw-job.

Fortunately, collectively, we do have a sure means of bringing the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group to its repentant knees, which is precisely where it belongs. Dr. Pepper Snapple, as the name implies, produces the Dr. Pepper, Snapple, and Mott brands, national brands which are not only widely marketed, but which have entre, and frequently monopolistic entre, to public institutions such as schools and metro stations.

I may be a small voice here, and I confess I don’t understand why neither the Williamson local nor the national union movement hasn’t yet done it, but conscience demands that I at least try to do it for them.

So I am calling for a national boycott of all products of the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group until their demands for concessions from the unionized workers at the Mott apple juice plant are rescinded and the strikers returned to their jobs at their previous wage rates. I am calling for all concerned parties to demand that Dr. Pepper, Snapple, and Mott products not be purchased for schools and public institutions, and that their vending machines be removed from the premises until Dr. Pepper Snapple sees the light of reason and mends its rapacious ways.

They will, you know, if a national boycott is even halfway successful, because the lost income will far exceed any cost-cutting benefits to be gained by running a single apple juice plan with cut-rate scab labor.

Back in the day, Caesar Chavez’s Farm Workers Union was successful in unionizing crop pickers by calling for a national boycott of lettuce. The American people saw the justice in the cause and by their millions gave up eating a highly nutritious vegetable for the duration of the struggle.

Surely we have not degenerated so far as to not give up a brand of sodas and a brand of sugar-laden flavored water that contribute to the obesity epidemic for a while in order to defeat an even ranker and truly rapacious injustice. Vital for the national interest, and, considering what you would be giving up, good for your health too.

Boycott Dr. Pepper. Boycott Snapple. Boycott Mott.

Let’s get well by doing good.