During the first two months of 2014, Coca-Cola lost half of its sales Spain's central region because of a worker boycott and simultaneous falloff in people buying the company's beverage products. The strike has hurt Coca-Cola's brand image and resulted from a management conflict at the Coca-Cola Iberian Partners bottling plant in Spain, which elEconomista has covered from the beginning.
A Spanish court ended up voiding Coca-Cola's ERE (a legal procedure in Spain where a company can fire workers cheaply when in financial distress) that laid off 821 workers. Even more serious is the fact that even the judges made a bad ruling and the team of lawyers from Sagardoy couldn't come up with a solution for the company. This should have been included in the technical report and in the history of the ERE. And the court could have figured out that it was necessary to regulate the jobs and restructure how the company's logistics were managed. This is exactly what they tried to do, but neither the lawyers nor the management made an effort to explain this to judges and workers. The situation shows that from the beginning this was a profiting company that was in a position to negotiate a calm restructuring. But instead the situation went out of control.
Coca-Cola is risking its business in Spain, which is one of its most important markets in Europe, and might not be able to recuperate these losses for at least three years. This is another example of how poor management can hurt business.