The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [111]
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