The ethical issues and dilemmas that Coca Cola faced were actually very surprising since I have been drinking the product for years. Allegations of Intimidation, Racial Discrimination Financial Misconduct, and Environmental issues have hovered beyond the walls of the Conglomerate with very little room to disappear. I was extremely surprised about the Financial Misconduct but having interviewed for them and being denied due to credit issues I assume I can understand. Seems to me that the management within the organization was not up on ethical standards within an organization because, it could have been taught to many of the staff workers worldwide.
The Columbian Union situation with you Union was very frightening yet a red flag in my book. In 2001, SINALTRAINAL, a Colombian labor union, charged that Coca-Cola and its bottlers Panamerican Beverages (Panamaco), Bebidas y Alimentos De Uraba, and Coca-Cola Femsa, were linked to the violence against its union members in Colombia. Around eight union leaders of Coca-Cola's plants in Colombia had been murdered since 1989, and many others had been abducted and tortured. Coca-Cola was accused of hiring paramilitary death squads to kidnap, torture, or kill union leaders and intimidate worker union activists at its bottling plants. (Management Paradise, 2009)
Another that was amazing and seemed as if Management was unaware of how to handle was when hundreds of Belgians—including school children—complained of nausea and vomiting after drinking Coke products. Some consumers in France had similar symptoms. As a health scare spread across Europe, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Luxembourg banned Coke products or placed curbs on their import, though the bans were later lifted. Meanwhile, in response to this crisis, Coca-Cola was forced to pull millions of bottles off store shelves, the company’s largest product recall in its 113-year history. It took the company days to respond to this situation as if they were stalling on it or just totally confused. My thoughts on this would be is there someone that handles these types of situations effectively? What is the purpose of executives making the “big bucks?” I think that “dropping the ball” or concealing on this issue may have been the most significant because you are dealing with the human being. Although the other dilemmas are pretty strong but anytime a company has poisoned a mass of people and do not rectify it or acknowledge makes the company look bad as a whole. This is a challenge for any company whose principal product is challenged in this striking and fundamental way. What strikes anybody—and especially corporate managers—caught in such a moment is that there is very little time to make decisions and yet the stakes are extremely high. For this reason, a couple of things are important to have in place prior to the event. The first is a crisis-management process. That process has been made more complicated in Coke’s crisis because its bottlers are not owned directly by the parent company. The company needs some way to bring members of its top corporate management together with other decision makers and information providers so that a response to the public can be made quickly. We don’t know all the facts, but in this instance it took a full week to bring Douglas Ivester, Coke’s CEO, to Europe. In a crisis of this magnitude, the public looks for the No. 1 person to be doing something significant. So while we don’t know what Coke’s crisis management process was, it appears not to have moved speedily. The second thing that it is important to have in place is cultural. It is important that the company have evolved a culture that in a crisis like this will put foremost on the table the health of the customer.
Concealing information is a form of deception. This has been a morally questionable activity as long as societies have existed. Soft concealment involves activities that customary ethics regards as acceptable within limits. Nevertheless, in order for a society to evolve even customary ethics must change to accommodate the civilizing process at work around the world. Practical considerations are the source of much concealment. Contractors, for instance, do not reveal every detail of error they have made. Since the buying public does not understand the complexity of the work being performed, they can emotionally "go-off" over practically nothing. Business people learn over long periods of time not to overload the client with every detail of their work. It causes more trouble than it is work. In politics the thrust of this argument is put forth in the sausage paradigm. It goes to the effects that if you love sausage, don’t watch how it is made. The day to day practicality of the political process is made up of elements that are not always pretty, but are necessary in today's political activities. (Bromberg, 2012)
When addressing an issue in business on a large scale such as Coca Cola its important to immediately respond to the crisis. With Internet and 24-hour news coverage speeding the flow of information, companies no longer have the luxury of waiting several days to acknowledge the problem while the rest of world figures out what's going on. Companies should publicly state that they have recognized the problem, and identify the action they will be taking in the near future to remedy the problem. (Nelson, 2010)
Failure to immediately respond to the problem can make a company look like it is scrambling to hide something or dodge blame. For example, when Toyota failed to immediately address the safety failings in some of its vehicles, the public and media began to characterize it as a greedy corporate monster. They dredged up old company memos showing that Toyota executives had known about the problem for months and took no action. The result was a necessary and costly public relations advertising strategy to try to repair the the company's image. (Nelson, 2010)

References

Bromberg, S.E.. (2012).. Small Business Ethics Retrieved April 28, 2012 from http://www.businessethics.net/ Ferrell, O. C., Fraedrich, J., & Ferrell, L. (2011). Business ethics: Ethical decision making and cases: 2011 custom edition (8th ed.). Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage Learning.

Management Paradise: Ethical Problems for Coca Cola.. (2009).. Retrieved April 29, 2012 from http://www.managementparadise.com/forums/marketing-management/137945-ethical-problem-coca-cola.html Nelson, Lauren.. (2010).. Managing Crisis: Business Communication. Retrieved April 28, 2012, from http://www.ehow.com/how_6613326_manage-crisis-business-communication.html