“Hello Happiness,” a new video from Coca-Cola, opens with footage of migrant laborers in Dubai, standing before dawn in a patch of dirt as they wait for a van to pull up and shuttle them to work. Later, we cycle through shots of grim-faced men in work clothes—slouched on the bus as the sun rises, hunched on sagging bunk beds, crowded on the floor of a small room during mealtime with their elbows nearly touching. They tell us that they love and miss their families, and that they wish they could hear their children’s voices more often. We learn that these workers make about six dollars per day, and that it costs nearly a dollar per minute to call home—so phone calls are rare. Then the screen goes red, the music brightens, and we are posed a question: “So what if every Coke came with a few extra minutes of happiness?”

In March, Coke installed five special phone booths in Dubai labor camps that accepted Coca-Cola bottle caps instead of coins. In exchange for the cap from a bottle of Coke—which costs about fifty-four cents—migrant workers could make a three-minute international call. The ad shows laborers in hard hats and reflective vests lining up to use the machine—and grinning, for the first time in the video, as they wait. “I’ve saved one more cap, so I can talk to my wife again tomorrow,” one man tells the camera. More than forty thousand people made calls using the machines. Then, in April, after the booths had been up for about a month, the company dismantled them.

The lives of Dubai’s migrant laborers are filled with hardship. Foreigners—including thousands of migrant workers from South Asia—make up more than eighty-eight per cent of residents of the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a commercial and cultural center, according to a report this year from Human Rights Watch. The report found that recruiters in countries like India and Pakistan often charge fees of several thousand dollars to migrant laborers to facilitate their trips to the U.A.E. and their employment once they arrive. Once workers reach their destination, employers sometimes confiscate their passports, the report said, and laborers are barred from organizing or bargaining collectively.

For some people, “Hello Happiness” was a poignant reminder of those difficult circumstances. “Almost made me cry,” one person commented on YouTube. But that view was far from universal. “No offense, but ‘Happiness’ would be working conditions that don’t cause thousands of deaths, non-exploitative contracts, fair wages,” another person wrote. The question is whether Coca-Cola is shedding light on a little-known human-rights crisis and, in its own small way, helping to alleviate the troubles of the victims of that crisis, or whether it is adding to the exploitation of migrant workers in the Middle East and Asia.

Few American companies have worked as hard as Coca-Cola to associate themselves with pleasure. One of the company’s first advertising slogans, in 1905, was “Coca-Cola Revives and Sustains.” The most obvious aesthetic forbear for the “Hello Happiness” ad is perhaps the iconic 1971 ad “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke,” for which Coke gathered hundreds of teenagers of various ethnicities on a hillside in Italy, at the height of the Cold War, to sing an anthem about bringing harmony to the world by—what else?—serving it a carbonated beverage. “That was the basic idea: to see Coke not as it was originally designed to be—a liquid refresher—but as a tiny bit of commonality between all peoples, a universally liked formula that would help to keep them company for a few minutes,” Bill Backer, who was at the time the creative director on the Coca-Cola account for McCann-Erickson, wrote.

More than four decades later, Coke’s message remains more or less the same. But the company’s audience has grown considerably. Coca-Cola has sold soft drinks abroad for decades—for so long that the brand has become one of the most enduring symbols of American capitalism. But its sales are slowing in the U.S. and other Western countries, which has Coca-Cola executives increasingly looking elsewhere for new customers. To that end, the company is spending more on advertising in developing regions where people aren’t already drinking a lot of Coke.

In 2009, the company came up with a new slogan, “Open Happiness,” that was meant to translate more straightforwardly into other languages than the previous slogan, “The Coke Side of Life.” Wendy Clark, a senior vice-president at Coca-Cola, told me that she also feels that happiness itself is a universal concept that makes sense to people from all kinds of backgrounds. “We understand the drivers of happiness—things like being active, being together, trying new things,” she said. “We have these constructs that are universal human truths about happiness. What we’ve got to do is then bring those down to each market so that they’re translated in ways that are locally relevant.”

The Dubai ad, created by a local agency called Y & R Dubai, belongs to a series called “Where Will Happiness Strike Next,” which tries to celebrate people having “authentic” experiences in which they’re “surprised by something they didn’t expect,” Clark told me. In one new ad in the series, from Singapore, special drones drop boxes of Coke onto construction sites manned by migrant workers; the Coke cans are wrapped in messages of appreciation from Singaporeans. Another ad, in Bangladesh, presents an arcade machine that runs on Coca-Cola empties. Clark said that she has seen a different video, showing Indians and Pakistanis coming together through Coca-Cola, hundreds of times, but that she still gets a lump in her throat when she watches it. Each of these ads has gotten hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube; the Dubai ad has been particularly popular, receiving nearly eight hundred thousand hits as of Thursday afternoon.

I sent links to the ads to Nicholas McGeehan, a Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch who has studied labor conditions in Dubai. I was interested in his take on the questions of appropriateness and ethics that some viewers had raised. The videos, he said, were “odious.” For one thing, he said, Coke is not only using these low-income workers to advertise its product, it is also requiring them to buy soft drinks themselves—at nearly a tenth of their typical daily wages, he pointed out—to use the special phone booth. On top of that, he feels that the ads normalize and even glorify the hardship faced by migrant workers—at least some of whom may be working against their will. “If this was two hundred years ago, would it be appropriate for Coke to do adverts in the plantations of the Deep South, showing slaves holding cans of Coke?” he asked. “It is a normalization of a system of structural violence, of a state-sanctioned trafficking system.”

When I asked Clark about this criticism, she identified a broader challenge for Coca-Cola: “If I think about the over-all context of our campaign and our film, it seeks to include everyone. That’s a tall remit with seven billion people in the world.” She added, “If we want to be the world’s most inclusive brand and say we are, we’ve got to speak to those audiences.” In other words, if Coke’s mission is to sell its product to everyone in the world, it will have to find ways to feature all kinds of people in its ads, including the most downtrodden, and to persuade them of the message that Coca-Cola is synonymous with happiness. When you’re talking to migrant laborers in Dubai, it surely requires more than a small measure of creativity to make that case.

Clark and her colleagues at Coca-Cola aren’t the only ones interested in happiness. So are researchers and policymakers who want to measure global development in terms that go beyond economic models. In recent years, some of them have come up with several factors that tend to contribute most to over-all happiness. They include having a higher income, belonging to a community, being in good health, and feeling satisfied with work. Coca-Cola isn’t on the list. Sometimes a soda, refreshing as it may be, is just a soda.