The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [109]
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,