The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [113]
Meanwhile, students started campaigns at more than a hundred other colleges, lured by the opportunity to do something concrete about the overwhelming issue of global injustice. “It’s something that students feel personally connected to, because it’s something they can hold in their hand,” said Avi Chomsky, a professor of Latin American studies at Salem State College in Massachusetts, the next campus to sever its ties with Coke.
As the student campaigns started to gain momentum, they rallied around the idea of a truly independent investigation into the Colombia murders that would determine once and for all the truth of the situation: What hand did local bottling plant managers play in fomenting the violence against the union, and how much and when did bottling heads and the Coca-Cola Company itself know about that violence. The stakes for Coke were high in such a scenario—agree to an investigation and it would be able to put the case behind it once and for all; but if something turned up in the investigation that was unflattering to Coke’s image, it would cause a backlash even greater than the one it was currently facing, not to mention potentially open it up to hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. And in 2003, Coke could ill afford any more controversy. It was already fighting for its life in the midst of the obesity crisis, not to mention dealing with the fallout from its catastrophic dip in earnings after the death of Goizueta and the rejection of Ivester.
Given that context, it’s surprising that the company executives actually considered giving in to activist demands on this point—even in one case agreeing sincerely to carry one out. When Coke’s general counsel Deval Patrick was being honored as a civil rights pioneer by the legal nonprofit Equal Justice Works, the campaign saw an opening. Patrick had formerly headed the civil rights division in the Clinton administration Justice Department, before becoming a corporate lawyer for the likes of Ameriquest, Texaco, and finally Coke, which he joined in 2000. He was hailed as a reformer, trying to extricate the company from its legal troubles in the nineties with the channel-stuffing allegations and the frozen Coke fraud revealed by whistle-blower Matthew Whitley. Collingsworth sent a letter to his colleagues at Equal Justice Works criticizing Coke, which he said profited “from human rights violations while limiting liability to a local entity that is a mere facilitator for the parent company’s operations.” When one of the nonprofit’s members raised the issue publicly at the awards ceremony, Patrick impulsively pledged to create an independent delegation to Colombia “so we could see that those workers were in fact organized and were able to be organized.”
When Patrick got back to headquarters, however, CEO Doug Daft nixed the idea, telling Patrick in March 2004 that it wouldn’t happen. Patrick resigned a month later, with The Washington Post quoting “sources close to the situation” as saying “the frustration played a role in Patrick’s decision.” Coke denied it, saying Patrick’s decision to resign was “predominantly personal.” Running for governor of Massachusetts a year later, however, Patrick said that even though Coke’s internal investigations hadn’t turned up links between the Colombian bottlers and paramilitaries, he had pushed for an independent investigation to give consumers “confidence in the brand.” In his mind, he said, “either of two things would happen. . . . Either that independent investigation would confirm what we had found with our internal investigation, or we would find something we didn’t know, in which