The Coke Machine (32 page)

Rogers’s tactics bear an obvious debt to the controversial father of modern community organizing, Saul Alinsky, the Chicago radical who published the seminal
Rules for Radicals
in 1971. In detailing tactics for successful organizing, Alinsky turned common conceptions of power on their head, arguing that the goal of anyone wanting to change the world was not to
fight against
power, but to
gain
power herself. With that view, the morality of what was fair was a luxury for those removed from any real stake in the situation—or as Alinsky put it, “rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest.” For those in the fight to win, the question isn’t what was right, but what is effective. Situations were always complicated and murky—a fact that corporations and governments always use to their advantage in shifting responsibility for problems—the way that Coke can always say that obesity is a complicated problem with many factors beyond soft drink consumption; or that bottled water bottles account for only a small amount of the entire municipal waste stream; or that Colombia is a complicated country with a long history of violence by conflicting forces.

“In a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil,” says Alinsky. “There is a constant, and somewhat legitimate passing of the buck.” If an activist wants to be effective, it is his job to stop that inevitable game of hot potato. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” says Alinsky. “If an organization permits responsibility to be diffused and distributed in a number of areas, attack becomes impossible.” It’s for this reason that anticorporate activists have tended to pick one company—usually an industry leader—to focus their efforts on. When it came to the evils of tobacco companies, Corporate Accountability International and others focused their efforts on Philip Morris. When it came to sweatshops overseas, United Students Against Sweatshops publicly shamed Nike.

Not only does personalizing a corporate target help crystallize a complicated issue in the mind of the public, but it also quickly leaves them bereft of allies, as their competitors (say Brown & Williamson or Adidas) trip over themselves to avoid association with the now toxic target. That is the principle that Rogers’s newly formed Corporate Campaign, Inc., used to great effect after the Stevens battle, picking off other companies involved in labor battles, and in successful campaigns against Campbell’s Soup and American Airlines.

In the mid-1980s, however, Rogers met defeat in a disastrous strike against the meatpacking company Hormel when he became the polarizing figure. After Hormel made heavy cutbacks in the midst of a national recession, the local union called Rogers to put on the pressure. Rogers butted heads immediately with the international union, which advocated a more cautious approach. When a judge forbade pickets at the plant, Rogers and the local went ahead anyway. Police called in tear gas and dogs, carting off more than two dozen people, including Rogers, to jail. Eventually demoralized, the union gave up their fight, and 650 people lost their jobs. In an Oscar-nominated documentary about the struggle,
American Dream
, Rogers comes across as a caustic carpetbagger, seeking confrontation and publicity at the expense of a more reasoned settlement with the company.

By 1988,
Time
magazine was referring to Rogers as “one of the labor movement’s most controversial and innovative figures,” writing that “while supporters describe his approach as a welcome addition to strike tactics, critics attack him as a glory hound who seduces local unions into pursuing his interests—publicity and influence over the rank and file—rather than theirs.” The head of the local union, Jim Guyette, however, continued to praise Rogers—at a recent sixtieth-birthday party for Rogers, he gave a heartfelt tribute to his courage and personal sacrifice in the fight. Rogers himself lost everything and was forced to relocate Corporate Campaign, Inc., from a spacious office in Manhattan to a dark warren in Brooklyn, the predecessor to his current ramshackle office.

It wasn’t long before Rogers found his footing again with several more victories against companies. By the time he got the call from Collingsworth, his strategy of going after interlocking financial interests was well established. From the very beginning, however, he saw a new weakness he could exploit in the fight against Coke: its brand.

 

 

 

The Campaign to Stop Killer Coke
began in April 2003 with a letter to Rogers’s Rolodex of union contacts. “We need your help to stop a gruesome cycle of murders, kidnappings, and torture,” the letter began, bearing an image of a Coke can with—in the same expressive Spencerian script Frank Robinson had so indelibly created more than a hundred years before—the words “Killer Coke.” From the beginning, Rogers did everything he could to tweak Coke’s brand image to highlight its culpability in the Colombian murders, producing posters with the slogans “The Drink That Represses” and “Murder—It’s the Real Thing.” One particularly gory image titled “Colombian Coke Float” featured a flared soda tumbler with dead bodies floating on top and the caption: “Unthinkable! Undrinkable!” Another depicted two blue, wrinkled feet, tagged with the words “Colombian Union Worker” as if in a morgue, along with the caption, “Ice Cold.”

A parade of union carpenters carried the posters in front of Coca-Cola’s shareholder meeting in Houston on April 16, 2003. Inside, William Mendoza, up from Barrancabermeja, challenged Coke’s general counsel, Deval Patrick, to intervene against the ongoing violence against Coke workers in Colombia. The action was hardly more than a jab, but it was enough to get Coke’s attention. Immediately, the company released a statement emphasizing all that it was doing to protect its workers, providing transportation, housing loans, and bodyguards for threatened union leaders. SINALTRAINAL was quick to point out that the company had nothing to do with those protections, which were afforded by the Colombian government. And still the violence continued, with the alleged attempt on Juan Carlos Galvis’s life in August 2003, and the kidnapping and beating of the son of Limberto Carranza, a union leader in Barranquilla, the day after the union rejected a company demand to change its retirement plan.

Besides the new Killer Coke campaign, SINALTRAINAL released a list of demands—including that the Coca-Cola Company establish a human rights policy that would apply to its bottlers and compensate the families of slain workers. Watching the early splash of the campaign, Collingsworth saw it as just the kind of pressure the lawyers needed to bring the company to the bargaining table. “The Nike campaign in particular always burned me, because it had no end point,” he says. “There was nothing you could say to necessarily end that campaign. I like the fact of tying the campaign to a [court] case, because the end point would be to resolve these issues.”

The campaign was almost derailed before it really began, when SINALTRAINAL called for a yearlong boycott of Coke products in July 2003. Immediately, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which transported Coke products and was having its own union difficulties with Coca-Cola Enterprises, balked, fearing it would cost them jobs. In conference calls with the lawyers and the union, Rogers hastily concocted a new strategy he called “cutting out markets.” While the campaign wouldn’t ask consumers to stop drinking Coke products, it prevailed upon unions and other allied organizations to ban Coke from their facilities. It was a boycott in everything but name, and the media reported it as such, but the Teamsters were mollified and continued their support.

In the meantime, Rogers explored how he could attack Coke’s financial interests, including its interlocking board of directors with Sun Trust Bank, the descendant of Ernest Woodruff’s Trust Company of Georgia, which still owned some 50 million Coke shares. Without any money to create a sustained campaign against the bank, however, Rogers was unable to create much momentum. But as summer turned to fall, the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke hit upon a new target to put pressure on the company’s image almost completely by accident. As luck would have it, it took virtually no resources at all: college campuses.

 

 

 

Colleges have been
centers of activism at least since the Vietnam War; even as unions were fighting downsizing in the 1980s, however, labor issues were hardly on the radar of the privileged, middle-class, mostly white students who gravitated toward global issues such as the wars in Central America or the nuclear-freeze movement. As environmental issues took prominence in the 1990s, unions were frequently on the opposite side of battles pitching jobs against the environment.

Then came Nike. In the campaign against sweatshops, students led the boycott against apparel companies on behalf of workers overseas. By the late 1990s, activists were making connections between environmental, labor, and human rights issues, which they saw as casualties of a globalizing economy pushed through by international institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for the benefit of multinational corporations and politically connected elites. The backlash burst into view in protests at the WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999, when thousands of activists locked themselves together on street corners and skirmished with riot police and tear-gas-wielding National Guardsmen to shut down the talks.

The inevitably dubbed “Battle in Seattle” inaugurated the modern anti-globalization movement (or as some within the movement insisted on calling it, the “anticorporate globalization” movement). This time, unions were allied with environmentalists, marching side by side in Seattle with activists dressed as sea turtles under the slogan “Teamsters and Turtles Together!” After Seattle, a patchouli-scented caravan of activists and black-masked anarchists followed the economic elite to meetings of the WTO, IMF, G8, and Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in cities across the world, stalling much of their agenda.

Even after energy was siphoned off from the movement in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the new alliance between environmental and labor activists against corporate globalization held strong. It’s that attitude students brought with them when they returned to campus in the fall of 2003, at the same time the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke was finding its feet. Suddenly, here was a campaign against the very symbol of American capitalism, accused of horrific crimes of murder and intimidation in a far-off country. Rogers encouraged anyone who wanted to run with the campaign to download literature and campaign materials from the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke’s website. But even he was surprised when word came that a 1,200-student college in Illinois had removed Coke from its campus in favor of Pepsi after a student petition. Soon after, 1,400-student Bard College in upstate New York followed suit, on the basis of violations to the code of conduct it implemented for vendors after the sweatshop campaign.

It was enough for the Coca-Cola Company to take notice. “Unfortunately, Bard College officials appear to be relying on discredited allegations that have been reviewed and repeatedly rejected by courts and independent investigations in the United States and Canada,” Coke spokeswoman Lori Billingsley told the
Atlanta Business Chronicle
(without elaborating on which investigations she was referring to). “There is no factual or legal basis that our company and its bottling partners were responsible for wrongful conduct in Colombia.”

Despite Coke’s denials, the college campaign really took off across the Atlantic when the 20,000-student University College Dublin scheduled a referendum on dropping its contract with Coke. With three thousand votes cast, the measure passed by fewer than sixty votes. Coke flew into action, sending in a public relations representative from Latin America to give a presentation in support of the company; SINALTRAINAL countered by sending Luis “Chile” García to present its side. When a revote came down on November 19, 2003, the campaign won by an even higher margin than before—causing the first serious blow against the company, and putting the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke on the map.

In a sense, colleges seemed the perfect venue for the campaign—a way to “cut out markets” in the one place that Coke was most eager to keep them in order to develop that key early brand loyalty. Meanwhile, Corporate Campaign could rely on a virtually unlimited amount of foot soldiers that cost it virtually nothing—a not insignificant fact given that the campaign never had more than a $100,000-a-year budget, compared with Coke’s $30 billion. The college battle also created waves far from campus, as the media piled on Coke’s alleged misdeeds overseas. Coke’s hometown
Atlanta Business Chronicle
wrote a long, unflattering article, and business magazine
Forbes
ran a cover story titled “Coke’s Sinful World” that mentioned the situation in Colombia. Rogers’s strategy of publicly embarrassing the company was working—and the company only dug itself into a deeper hole when it tried to fight back. When Carleton College invited Coke spokeswoman Lori Billingsley to speak in the spring of 2004, Rogers was in the audience. When she repeated her assertion that an independent investigation had cleared the company, he leaped up, yelling, “They’re lying! They’re lying!” The investigation, he told students, was done by the company’s own law firm White & Case, the same firm representing them in the ATCA case in Miami. “There’s a moment in history that’s very rare where students have the power to change one of the largest corporations in the world,” he continued, urging them to boot Coke from campus. Following the meeting, the student senate voted twelve to eight to remove Carleton’s Coke machines.

Meanwhile, students started campaigns at more than a hundred other colleges, lured by the opportunity to do something concrete about the overwhelming issue of global injustice. “It’s something that students feel personally connected to, because it’s something they can hold in their hand,” said Avi Chomsky, a professor of Latin American studies at Salem State College in Massachusetts, the next campus to sever its ties with Coke.