The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [108]
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