The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [110]
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