The Coke Machine (39 page)

Rogers would have none of it. When he caught wind of the criticism of the way he ran the campaign, he took Romero aside to address it. “Maybe you don’t like it, but boy, is it having an impact,” he argued, reminding him he’d knocked off four colleges before USAS had even joined. The Colombian Coke Float and the other lurid posters, he announced, would stay.

By May, the fight for Rutgers was over. The school announced that it would sign a ten-year, $17 million contract with Pepsi, effective immediately. Even though the school insisted it went with the company that offered the better proposal financially, Rogers declared victory, counting the decision a “big blow to the company.” If there was any question about why Rutgers dumped Coke, the campaign sought to remove it with more direct appeals at two other universities: the University of Michigan and New York University (NYU).

The country’s largest private university with 50,000 students, NYU didn’t have an exclusive contract with Coke, but it did have about a hundred vending machines and retail operations in dozens of campus stores. This time, USAS led the way, demanding Coke submit to an independent investigation by the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) if it wanted to stay on campus. Students wrapped vending machines in crime-scene tape and staged a “die-in” on the steps of the library with the names of the slain Colombian workers. Their campaigning paid off when, in November 2004, the student senate voted sixteen to four to ban Coke from campus if the company didn’t agree to an investigation by the WRC. The resolution was weakened by the all-university senate to demand only that Coke participate in a university-sponsored forum with the WRC. Even so, Coke apparently decided that giving any legitimacy to the organization with a binding power to censure sales was too much, refusing to participate. The issue was tabled, to be taken up in the fall.

Meanwhile, activists at the 40,000-student University of Michigan demanded that the school reconsider Coke’s nine contracts—worth a collective $1.3 million a year—on the grounds that they violated the university’s new vendor “code of conduct.” In a petition to the school’s “dispute review board,” students demanded the company agree to an independent investigation not only in Colombia but in India as well. After a hearing in March 2005, the board ruled in the students’ favor, requiring investigations by the end of the year. “If they don’t step up and participate in corrective actions . . . in a big way,” said the board chair, “it would be cause to terminate the contract.”

 

 

 

New
Coke CEO Neville Isdell watched the spread of the Killer Coke campaign on campus with mounting anxiety. Going into the annual shareholder meeting in April 2005, he was already several months into his eighteen-month plan to turn around the company. He’d reversed Coke’s slide in profits, begun to get a handle on the childhood obesity situation, and set in motion Coke’s new environmental thrust in India. And almost as soon as he took control, he hired Ed Potter to defuse the Colombia situation and protect the company from future problems with the overseas labor force.

Ed Potter had represented companies as an international labor lawyer in D.C. for more than two decades, even serving as the employer representative to the United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO). Recently, he’d helped Coke put into place a Workplace Rights Policy, which went even further in spelling out the protections for workers. Soon after, Isdell hired him on staff as the company’s new director of global relations. Quickly, he moved to get in front of the “Killer Coke” situation by declaring a new corporate code of conduct on labor and environmental issues. Like previous codes, however, it applied only to direct employees of the Coca-Cola Company and subsidiaries in which Coke owned at least a 50 percent interest. As for bottlers, Coke was “committed to working with and encouraging” them “to uphold the values and practices that our Policy encompasses.”

At the same time, Isdell attempted to take away one of the campaign’s main issues by commissioning an investigation into Colombian working conditions by a supposedly independent group, the Cal Safety Compliance Corporation. Standing up at the 2005 annual meeting, Isdell was able to report the study’s conclusions: that workers were allowed collective bargaining rights free of intimidation.

He continued with a page out of the obesity playbook, simultaneously denying responsibility for the violence in Colombia and positioning the company as part of the solution with the announcement of a new $10 million foundation to aid victims in the country. Likewise for India, he denied the company was responsible for water shortages, at the same time touting the company’s rainwater-harvesting initiative. All in all, it was an impressive presentation, countering the main allegations against the company head-on with a mix of defiance and compassion.

Opening the floor to questions, Isdell never knew what hit him. Immediately, activists jumped up to form two long lines. Rogers was first to speak, of course, dismissing Cal Safety as nothing but the “fox guarding the henhouse,” since the group had interviewed workers handpicked by management and didn’t even investigate links to paramilitaries. That was just the beginning of a ninety-minute slugfest the
Financial Times
later said “felt more like a student protest rally” than a stockholder meeting as Srivastava, CAI’s Gigi Kellett, a nun, a Teamster, and several students all piled on the criticism.

Despite the finely orchestrated display, the real negotiations began after the meeting, when Potter requested to meet with college administrators to see if they might come to an agreement. USAS’s Romero was tentatively hopeful when Potter suggested a commission with students and administrators that would set the ground rules for a new, truly independent investigation. Whatever good faith Potter may have had going into the negotiations, however, Coke was soon setting its own rules, insisting nothing in the investigation could look back more than five years (falling short of both the Gil case and the detentions in Bucaramanga), and nothing could be admissible in court. The students dismissed those demands out of hand; by October, five out of six of them had dropped out of negotiations.

By that time, the day of reckoning was approaching at both NYU and the University of Michigan. As NYU’s senate reconvened to consider the vending machine ban, Coke continued in its refusal to meet with the WRC. The university issued an ultimatum—either Coke agree by December, or the Coke machines would go. When the deadline passed, NYU announced it would begin removing Coke from campus, effective immediately. But that wasn’t all. When the University of Michigan’s December 31 deadline passed three weeks later, it, too, declared it would be severing its ties with Coke. This decision was even more significant, since unlike both NYU and Rutgers, the university was breaking an exclusive contract and it was doing so specifically because of the company’s human rights violations—and not only in Colombia but in India as well. Whatever Potter and Isdell were doing, it clearly wasn’t working—at least not yet. By this time, the Killer Coke campaign could claim about two dozen universities around the world that had dumped Coke. Even the student newspaper at Emory—the university started with money from Asa Candler himself and known as “Coca-Cola University”—had written editorials supporting the campaign. “Certainly if there was any wrongdoing in the past,” Emory’s president announced approvingly, “Coke needs to be held responsible for it.”

 

 

 

Around the same time
Coke was suffering these defeats, allegations of anti-union violence emerged in a new country: Turkey. In April 2005, a group of drivers who transported Coke for a contractor were fired after they tried to unionize. When, along with family members, they occupied the local Coca-Cola headquarters in a nonviolent protest, members of Turkey’s secret police attacked them with tear gas and clubs, sending dozens to the hospital. The union accused the company—which owns 40 percent of the bottler—of instigating the violence by calling in the police. After hearing about the Colombia situation, union members contacted Terry Collingsworth, who filed an ATCA case in New York, arguing that the police violence amounted to torture under international law.

While Coke didn’t deny that protesters were attacked, the company claimed that police acted of their own accord, despite requests from Coke to hold off attacking. Even so, the company insisted, the dispute was between the union and the contractor; Coke had nothing to do with it. Coke spokesperson Kari Bjorhus brushed off such attacks as “the flipside of being a big brand,” as she told
Brandweek
in December 2005. “You become a focal point for many issues because of the visibility of your trademark.” (The case was eventually dismissed upon a finding that the union hadn’t first exhausted its remedies in Turkey; it was promptly appealed.)

Behind the scenes, however, the Coca-Cola Company was still maneuvering to stop the Campaign Against Killer Coke before it spawned opportunistic attacks from any other countries. Just as it rolled out increasingly stringent policies on soda in schools until it found one the public would accept, Coke now announced a new independent investigation to take the place of the discredited Cal Safety report. This time, it called upon one of the most respected brands in the world: the United Nations. In advance of the 2006 shareholder meeting, the company announced that the International Union of Food and Allied Workers (IUF) had asked the United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO) to “investigate and evaluate past and present labor relations and workers’ right practices of the Coca-Cola bottling operations in Colombia,” as Coca-Cola North America president Don Knauss wrote in a letter to the University of Michigan.
⁸

The anti-Coke campaign immediately cried foul, pointing out that Ed Potter had been the U.S. employer representative to the ILO for the past fifteen years. “There are 640 people who have a final vote in the ILO conference’s legislative process,” responded Potter. “To suggest there is any undue influence is preposterous.” He had less of an explanation for why the company was willing to admit the results of this investigation in court, when that was such a nonstarter in a student-led commission.

Rogers thought that he saw one: Despite Coke’s assurances that the UN agency would investigate “past and present” practices, an ILO official told him on the phone that the agency would be doing only an “assessment of current working conditions.” At the 2006 meeting, Rogers decried the ILO investigation as just “a new scam” that would do nothing to explore bottling plant managers’ ties to paramilitary violence. “I can’t think that engaging the ILO is a publicity stunt,” replied Isdell coolly. “We have a document. We have an agreement, and they are going to investigate past and prior practices.”

That wasn’t the only investigation the company would be allowing, Isdell told the crowd. The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a respected NGO based in New Delhi, would also be conducting an audit of the company’s water use. “My message to you today is that the transition is complete,” said Isdell. “We are well on our way to becoming the company you expect us to be.” As with the ILO, activists raised red flags against TERI—with Srivastava pointing out that the organization listed Coca-Cola as a sponsor on its website, had been paid by Coke to do environmental assessments in the past, and had publicly declared Coke one of the most responsible companies in India, and thus was hopelessly biased.

But the two proposed investigations were good enough to buy the company time. The University of Michigan reinstated its contract just three months after cutting it, pending the outcomes of the ILO and TERI reports. The campaigns at other colleges, meanwhile, lost momentum as administrators adopted a wait-and-see attitude. By August 2006, Potter insisted that the student campaign had “stalled,” something virtually inconceivable when NYU and Michigan had dumped Coke months earlier. Now he and Isdell sought to press the advantage to get rid of Killer Coke back where the fight began—in court.

The three years
since Judge Martínez had dismissed Coke from the ATCA case in 2003 had not been kind to Terry Collingsworth and Dan Kovalik. Martínez’s indifference, if not contempt, for the case was apparent from the get-go. He seemed to take pride in getting details wrong, at points referring to Urabá as “Bogotá or Medellín or wherever the heck it was” and to Isidro Gil as “Joe Blow.” His spontaneous style might seem refreshing to someone without a case before him, but to SINALTRAINAL’s lawyers it was downright infuriating. Each June, he dismissed all pending motions, allowing them to be resubmitted the following year. Finally at a hearing in June 2006, Panamco’s lawyer was reciting the judge’s history of dismissals when Martínez broke in. “If you didn’t know any better,” he said, “you would think that I didn’t want to have anything to do with this case, wouldn’t you?”

Collingsworth and Kovalik were flabbergasted to hear such disdain expressed openly by a United States judge. A few months later, Martínez proved the point in a ruling that finally dismissed all the bottlers from the case as well. The evidence provided by Collingsworth and Kovalik was just too vague to link plant managers to the paramilitaries, wrote Martínez, adding that it was the duty of the courts to guard against “unwarranted international fishing expeditions against corporate entities.” Coca-Cola Company spokeswoman Kerry Kerr swiftly responded, saying, “We hope this decision will now enable us to put this case behind us.” It wouldn’t, of course. Collingsworth and Kovalik filed a right to appeal, arguing that the case was wrongly decided when the judge allowed the sample bottling agreement rather than the actual one, thereby denying the union proper discovery to prove its case. “Put aside Colombia, Coca-Cola, murders, anything. This appeal is about fundamental, inflexible, never can violate legal procedures,” says Collingsworth.