The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink

by Michael Blanding

  As for the Coca-Cola Company itself, Coke’s lawyer argued that it shouldn’t even be there—since its bottler agreement with the franchise didn’t control labor relations anyway. Frustrated by a lack of specifics about the actual agreement, the judge cut to the chase: “Shouldn’t I have a copy of that?”

  “I would like to see one myself,” interjected Collingsworth.

  At the judge’s request, Jiménez said that Coke could furnish the bottlers’ agreements with Panamco and Bebidas within a few days.

  “Try to get here before five o’clock tomorrow,” concluded the judge, calling an end to the hearing. When Coke’s lawyers came back to the court, however, they claimed they didn’t have time to translate the exact agreements between the company and the bottlers in Colombia. In its place, they submitted a sample bottlers’ agreement, a boilerplate document representing the kinds of agreements it had with its bottlers all over the world.

  Even as the judge deliberated, SINALTRAINAL received news of another murder in Colombia, when Adolfo de Jesús Múnera was shot dead on the doorstep of his mother’s house in the northern seaport city of Barranquilla. Branded as a guerrilla after organizing a successful strike against a Panamco plant, he had come out of hiding for only a brief time to see his family when the paramilitaries caught up with him. It was a brutal reminder, if one was needed, that the workers at the Coca-Cola plants in Colombia still faced daily threats of violence.

  In Miami, meanwhile, a new judge had been put on the Coke case: José Martínez. Known for his conservative opinions and his off-the-cuff style, he pleased no one with his ruling in March 2003. Essentially, Judge Martínez found that Gil’s murder wasn’t a war crime, since it hadn’t happened during an open battle—however, it was still a violation of international law given the Colombian government’s close ties to paramilitary forces. Score one for the union.

  At the same time, he ruled that the sample bottlers’ agreement backed up Coke’s claims that it had no control over the bottlers. “Nothing in the agreement gives Coke the right, the obligation, much less the duty . . . to control the labor practices or ensure employees’ security at Bebidas,” the judge wrote. Because of that, Martínez dismissed the Coca-Cola Company from the case, at the same time he kept in the local bottlers—Panamco, Bebidas, and the Kirbys.

  As Collingsworth and Kovalik celebrated keeping the case alive, they privately fumed that the judge had prematurely dismissed Coke Atlanta without even looking at the actual bottling agreement—or at least giving them the ability to question the Colombian bottlers to see if there were any differences between their agreements and the sample agreement. Frustrated with the mixed ruling in the courts, Collingsworth and Kovalik immediately appealed the case against Coke Atlanta. Procedural rules, however, required them to wait until the case against the bottlers was finished before it could go forward—a process that could take any number of years, depending on how many motions the other side presented. “We needed to figure out a way that Coke sees delay as bad,” says Collingsworth. They found it—and so much more—in an aging labor activist by the name of Ray Rogers.

  The attempt to hold Coke accountable in the United States might have died a slow death in fruitless hearings and procedural motions had it not been for Rogers, whom Coke eventually considered the biggest threat to its brand in more than a hundred years—and in some ways more serious than the fight over childhood obesity it was engaged in at the same time. The lawsuit might have made Coke listen, but it was Rogers’s tactics—brash and confrontational—that made Coke actively take steps to defend itself.

  The contrast between Coke’s gleaming headquarters towering over downtown Atlanta and the office from which Ray Rogers has launched his attack to bring down the giant could not be greater. The Manhattan Bridge runs directly outside the window of his ramshackle Brooklyn warehouse space, drowning out all conversation every few minutes as the subway rattles noisily overhead. The dimly lit space overflows with file cabinets piled high with flyers, books, and DVDs, and the air is musty with the smell of the office’s full-time resident, a long-haired crossbreed cat named Melvin.

  Sitting amid the confusion this Saturday morning, Rogers is wearing a navy blue sweatshirt and matching sweatpants, as if he’s just returned from the gym. At age sixty-five, he has a shock of white hair and the physique of a longshoreman, a fact he attributes to his earliest education as an activist. “One of the best things to happen to me was when I was beat up in the third grade,” he says. After the incident, he took up weight-lifting and boxing, and the next time someone picked a fight with him, he gave as good as he got. “I never liked the bully syndrome,” he says. Only these days, he’s the one picking fights—as a self-described corporate-thug buster. “There is tremendous imbalance of power, with corporations having far too much of it,” he says. “What we want to do is equalize that balance.”

  Rather than use legislation or the courts, however, Rogers’s favored tactics have been loud and contentious activist campaigns that target companies’ financial connections and corporate image. In 2003, he was gearing up for his most ambitious campaign yet—an attempt to take on ExxonMobil over its failure to pay for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Knowing Collingsworth had himself sued ExxonMobil in the past, he sent him an e-mail asking for help. Instead, Collingsworth called him with a very different proposal: developing a campaign against Coke. “Look, we’ve got a very serious life-and-death situation,” he said. “But we don’t have any money.” Rogers didn’t hesitate. He knew that he couldn’t build a campaign against ExxonMobil without a boatload of cash. But Coke was different. “I said, you know, we could really try to build from scratch. There are some good elements that make it vulnerable.”

  Rogers should know. He coined the term “corporate campaign,” now in common usage among activists, back in the late 1970s. The son of two union factory workers, he began working as a union organizer after college, including a stint with César Chávez’s Farm Workers Association, whose members popularized the idea of product boycotts to pressure agriculture companies. In 1976, Rogers was working with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU) in their fight to unionize at North Carolina textile giant J. P. Stevens. He quickly ruled out a boycott, since few of the company’s products were sold retail. At a loss one day, he drew a big circle in the middle of a chart and said, “That’s J. P. Stevens.” Then, getting more and more excited, he began drawing arrows representing all of its business and financial interests. With some research, he developed a list of banking and insurance companies, each with interlocking members on their boards of directors, who could all be subject to personal pressure.

  He launched his new “corporate campaign” with a big punch at the company’s 1977 shareholder meeting, when six hundred textile workers attended, bringing the meeting to a standstill as one by one they stood up to denounce the company, threatening that anyone involved with them be held accountable. Thus putting them on notice, Rogers moved against one bank where two Stevens board members served as directors, threatening to pull out millions of dollars of union money if it didn’t dump the two executives. The bank blinked, and the two directors stepped down. Only emboldened, Rogers moved against insurance giant MetLife, which did a huge business insuring union pension funds. In a panic over the prospect of negative publicity, MetLife’s president cleared his schedule to meet with the union, and eventually pressured Stevens to come to the bargaining table. The contract eventually signed on October 1980 ensured the unions’ rights to organize, but only if they agreed to never “engage in any ‘corporate campaign’ against the company.” Stevens employees dubbed it the “Ray Rogers clause.”

  Business advocates spared no criticism for Rogers’s tactics, which they saw as little more than extortion. “Because Stevens can’t be beaten in a fair and square stand-up fight, Amalgamated has now resorted to terrorizing businessmen who do business with Stevens,” wrote The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. And they weren’t the only ones who took
issue with Rogers. Some union leaders as well derided his scorched-earth tactics as overly confrontational, leaving little room to negotiate. Throughout the campaign, Rogers constantly ran afoul of the ACTWU’s own lawyers, who feared a countersuit on defamation charges. Rogers pushed ahead regardless, leaking information to the media behind the lawyers’ backs. “What the labor movement has done that I really criticize is they have turned more and more to lawyers to fight their battles,” he said at the time. “You can’t confront powerful institutions and expect to gain any meaningful concessions unless you’re backed by significant force and power yourself.”

  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.