The Coke Machine (38 page)

When told of Sharma’s contention that the group hires day laborers to swell its numbers, Kuriji’s face crinkles with laughter. “Who has that kind of money?” he asks, incredulous. Ever the civil servant, he pulls out a photo album full of pictures of protests. “Do these look like hundred-rupees-a-day day laborers?” he asks, pointing to the faces of men much like those around his home for the wedding, simply dressed but not poor. Next, he opens a ledger book in which he’s written captions for each photo with name after name of participants, some with signatures beside them. “This is ample proof they are not day laborers,” he concludes.

Even so, the movement here has struggled to achieve the critical mass seen in Plachimada, or even Mehdiganj. The largest protest was in May 2004, when, a news report says, some two thousand people came to see Indian environmentalist Medha Patkar and local Gandhian social activist Sawai Singh. As in Kerala, Singh has helped bring a petition against the company, arguing that local people had the right to groundwater before a multinational corporation, but it was denied by the local court. Recently, however, Rajasthan has seen a change of government from the more conservative Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to the socialist-leaning Congress party, giving the community members hope that the issue will be revisited. “We are not ready for defeat,” says Kuriji. “We will carry on this agitation and Coke will get tired. We will certainly shut down the plant.”

 

 

 

Kala Dera
isn’t the only place where Coke has pursued corporate social responsibility in India. By 2008, the company claimed to have more than three hundred rainwater-harvesting structures around the country. With the twenty-three projects around Mehdiganj, Coke India says it is able to recharge 46,933 cubic meters per year, versus the plant’s consumption of 38,191. In 2008, in fact, the company declared the plant to be “water neutral”—that is, it recharges more water than it extracts. According to Ranjan, the water levels in the area of the plant actually rose between 2007 and 2008, from twenty-eight feet to nineteen feet belowground. In order to make that claim, however, the company relies on the closest government monitoring site, three miles southwest of the plant. In an official document the company submitted to the local groundwater board, meanwhile, it admitted the level at the plant was eighty feet belowground.

The community also tells a different story about Coke’s rainwater harvesting. The figures for Coke’s recharge potential rely on an average rainfall of 1,000 millimeters a year, but in many of the past few years, it’s been only half that. What’s more, in 2008, activists say half of the rain fell on one day—overflowing the capacity of the rainwater storage tanks. As in Kala Dera, several rainwater harvesting structures are in dilapidated condition. On one, built on the rooftop of the local police station, the main pipe coming from the roof isn’t even connected to the underground tank. “No one has ever come here after the management first installed it,” says one police officer. “The pipes are all blocked and the water overflows.”

Ranjan dismisses the activists’ rainwater-harvesting tours as publicity tours. “They always take you to a place with a broken pipe,” he says, insisting that the company does an annual maintenance before the monsoons. Whether or not the structures are in working order, however, there is truth to back up the activists’ claims that there is simply not enough rain to make them work. Despite Coke’s claims that it recharged the water it took out in Kala Dera, government figures show that water levels still declined in Kala Dera by more than ten feet between 2007 and 2008. Rainfall levels for 2009, meanwhile, were only half of the prior year’s total.

India has been experiencing droughts all over the country the last few years, says M. S. Rathore, head of the Jaipur-based nonprofit Centre for Environment and Development Studies. He actually agrees with Coke that farmers are responsible for most of the water depletion, overexploiting the carrying capacity of the land in an effort to grow as much as possible. That doesn’t mean Coke’s contention that industry uses only 1 percent of the water is accurate. While that may be a statewide average, in certain districts industry uses up to 50 percent. And the same goes for the rainfall averages, which are drawn from one hundred years, despite the fact that Rajasthan, at least, gets only one year of good rain in every seven or eight years. Of the remaining years, half of them may see just two or three rainy days total.

So what about Coke’s claims that it is recharging seventeen times what it takes out in Kala Dera? He shakes his head immediately. “It’s not possible. I don’t believe them.” Is it possible even to recharge half that, a quarter of that? “If they are recharging even five times, then the water level should come up—did it?” he shoots back. “No. Contrary to that, the water level is coming down in that area, it’s not coming up. The calculation may be right, but what is actually happening? Did they get it?”

Ranjan repeats his assertion that Coke can’t accurately measure the actual recharge of its rainwater wells. While they could put in a groundwater gauge called a piezometer to measure water levels, he says, it would require sending someone manually to check it after each rainfall. “It will not work in auto-mode,” he says. “There has to be someone there to take the reading.”

Merely a little bit of research online, however, turns up a company called Integrated Geo Instruments and Services in Hyderabad, India, that not only produces a line of groundwater monitoring equipment, but also lists Hindustan Coca-Cola among its clients. Contacted via e-mail, a representative confirms that it offers something called an “automatic water level indicator”—a computer attached to a length of cable that registers groundwater levels in a well “continuously and without human intervention.” In fact, the representative says, Coke uses these very devices throughout India to monitor water levels in its bore wells. The cost: $1,800 each, meaning that Coke could outfit every one of its rainwater structures with a probe for just $540,000, a fraction of the $10 million it recently bequeathed to the Coca-Cola India Foundation to spend on community CSR projects throughout the country.

Reached at the company’s headquarters, the representative confirms that the logger can automatically monitor groundwater levels, and also says that Hindustan Coca-Cola has bought loggers in the past from the company to monitor its intake wells. Ranjan doesn’t respond to e-mails asking if Hindustan Coca-Cola has considered using such a device to monitor rainwater harvesting.

Leaving Jaipur for the railway station, it miraculously begins to rain. Within moments, it’s a hard rain, washing over the pavement and soaking into the dirt on both sides of the road. It tapers off quickly, however, and in five minutes, it’s all but over. Srivastava’s cell phone rings, and it’s Professor Rathore, speaking excitedly on the other end. Srivastava nods and thanks him before hanging up. “He says that accounts for one rainy day.”

D
espite activists’ successes holding Coke accountable in India, the real fight over operations in that country—as well as in Colombia—would be fought in the United States.

A week after being wrestled to the ground and ejected from Coke’s 2004 annual meeting, Ray Rogers was back on the campaign trail, looking for one big campus to serve as a poster child for his campaign. In late April 2004, he stood in front of the unsubtly named Radical Student Union at the University of Massachusetts, trying to fire up students to break their exclusive pouring-rights contract expiring in August. “The Coca-Cola Company is an enterprise rife with immorality, corruption, and complicity in gross human rights violations,” he boomed. He then introduced his fellow speakers: Dan Kovalik, who talked softly but no less passionately about the Colombia murders and the stalled ATCA case, and Amit Srivastava, who ran down the outrages of water depletion, pollution, and pesticides in India.

After first making common cause at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, the Colombia and India campaigns had joined in a kind of global version of the Teamster and Turtles alliance to tie together Coke’s international labor and environmental sins. In doing so, the new Campaign to Stop Killer Coke became, in effect, the first truly globalized campaign since the word “globalization” was coined. Unlike previous campaigns focusing on a single issue—sweatshops (Nike) or baby formula (Nestlé)—this would combine disparate offenses in an all-encompassing critique on corporate capitalism. And what better corporation to make the critique through than “the essence of capitalism,” Coke.

Rogers and Srivastava began gathering other stories of the company’s alleged misdeeds, from child labor in sugarcane plantations in El Salvador to strike-busting in Russia and the Philippines. Colombia and India, however, would be the focus. By now, more than one hundred schools had campaigns to cut their contracts with Coke based on allegations in the two countries, and the Coca-Cola Company was beginning to respond to prevent it from snowballing any further. After the shareholder meeting, Coke bought the domain
killercoke.com
(as opposed to Rogers’s
killercoke.org
) and pointed it back to a new website,
cokefacts.org
, in an effort to set the story straight.
⁷
Despite the allegations from the student campaigns, it assured visitors, Coke had nothing to do with the murders in Colombia, for which it had been cleared in court cases in both the United States and Colombia. And it added new proof of its support of union rights, including the fact that 31 percent of Coke workers in Colombia were unionized, versus a national rate of 4 percent. It failed to note, however, that that rate applied only to official employees—not the increasing number of contract workers in the bottling plants, a fact the Killer Coke campaign soon pointed out.

The feeble PR push did little to blunt the student campaign, which came roaring back to campus in the fall with the help of a new ally: the group that led the last great student activist campaign against Nike, United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). Together Killer Coke and USAS would mount a challenge to Coke’s brand on international issues every bit as dangerous as the childhood obesity campaign on the domestic scene, and almost at the exact same time. To counter them, Coke would have to move strategically to take the fight from the courtroom and campuses to the back rooms where it could sap the energy of the campaign and exploit philosophical differences among the activists themselves to prevent it from going mainstream.

 

 

 

The rally
against Coke fit well into USAS’s goals. Even after the Nike campaign had ended with the apparel makers’ announcement of new factory policies through the Clinton-backed Fair Labor Association, USAS had not given up their fight against what they saw as global abuses by corporations overseas. Dismissing the Clinton standards as mere “corporate cover-up,” the students had created their own group, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), signing up some two hundred member colleges from Harvard to the University of California who agreed to adhere to binding decisions on what companies they could do business with based on their labor policies.

By the fall of 2004, it was looking for new ways to broaden focus beyond just sweatshops—and it found one with the help of a Colombian-American student activist at UC Berkeley named Camilo Romero. Born in the United States, Romero had always acutely felt the discrepancy in privileges between himself and his Colombia-born family members. When one of the leaders of SINALTRAINAL came to Berkeley to talk about the Coke boycott, he saw a chance to directly affect a situation in his family’s country by advocating for it in his own.

Joining with two Latin American friends, Romero sought to use Coke as a way to show U.S. businesses exploited workers in Latin American countries. Soon after forming a group to advocate cutting Berkeley’s contract, he was approached by an organizer from USAS to take the campaign national.

He accepted—with some reservations. Looking around at the student group’s membership, he saw a lot of well-meaning but “privileged white kids.” From the beginning, he vowed the campaign would draw in students from a more diverse range of backgrounds, to present a more nuanced critique of the situation in Latin America. As part of a new generation of activists, he didn’t necessarily agree with Saul Alinsky’s tactics of “polarizing” a target no matter what the cost. As he began reaching out to campuses farther east, however, he quickly found out about Rogers’s campaign—which was making headway at some of the largest and most influential campuses in the country, though with a very different message.

 

 

 

Rogers was
still on the hunt for one big campus where he could fire a meaningful shot across Coke’s bow. After UMass renewed its contract over the summer, he moved on to a new target: Rutgers University in New Jersey, vowing the same thing wouldn’t happen here. It was the perfect place to set an example. Not only was the campus big—with 50,000 students—and close to Rogers’s headquarters in New York, but the contract was also particularly egregious. In exchange for $10 million over the course of ten years, the school agreed to Coke advertising all over campus, to the point of sanctioning the cheer “Always Rutgers, Always Coca-Cola” over the loudspeaker during athletic events.

With the help of a labor studies professor, Rogers plastered the campus with Killer Coke posters and organized students to demand the administration go with a different vendor. To his surprise, the university agreed to delay its decision until May 2005 to solicit bids. That spring, Rogers and Srivastava appeared together on campus with a giant inflatable Coke bottle on the steps of the student center with the logo “College Control,” while the campus USAS chapter supplied shock troops behind the scenes.

Tensions were rising, however, between the tactics of Rogers and the USAS students. Romero especially took issue with the gory posters like the Colombian Coke Float that sensationalized the issue with the bodies floating in the Coke glass. “It certainly catches your eye,” says Romero. “But people don’t necessarily feel welcome to it. It’s this particular kind of activism—the chest-pounding, look at me, this corporation is the devil.” Romero felt the macabre imagery trivialized the complexity of the situation in Colombia. Worse, he thought they risked the message being dismissed as the ravings of a “crazy, loudmouth guy”—Rogers.