The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [133]
After first making common cause at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, the Colombia and India campaigns had joined in a kind of global version of the Teamster and Turtles alliance to tie together Coke’s international labor and environmental sins. In doing so, the new Campaign to Stop Killer Coke became, in effect, the first truly globalized campaign since the word “globalization” was coined. Unlike previous campaigns focusing on a single issue—sweatshops (Nike) or baby formula (Nestlé)—this would combine disparate offenses in an all-encompassing critique on corporate capitalism. And what better corporation to make the critique through than “the essence of capitalism,” Coke.
Rogers and Srivastava began gathering other stories of the company’s alleged misdeeds, from child labor in sugarcane plantations in El Salvador to strike-busting in Russia and the Philippines. Colombia and India, however, would be the focus. By now, more than one hundred schools had campaigns to cut their contracts with Coke based on allegations in the two countries, and the Coca-Cola Company was beginning to respond to prevent it from snowballing any further. After the shareholder meeting, Coke bought the domain killercoke.com (as opposed to Rogers’s killercoke.org) and pointed it back to a new website, cokefacts.org, in an effort to set the story straight.7 Despite the allegations from the student campaigns, it assured visitors, Coke had nothing to do with the murders in Colombia, for which it had been cleared in court cases in both the United States and Colombia. And it added new proof of its support of union rights, including the fact that 31 percent of Coke workers in Colombia were unionized, versus a national rate of 4 percent. It failed to note, however, that that rate applied only to official employees—not the increasing number of contract workers in the bottling plants, a fact the Killer Coke campaign soon pointed out.
The feeble PR push did little to blunt the student campaign, which came roaring back to campus in the fall with the help of a new ally: the group that led the last great student activist campaign against Nike, United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS). Together Killer Coke and USAS would mount a challenge to Coke’s brand on international issues every bit as dangerous as the childhood obesity campaign on the domestic scene, and almost at the exact same time. To counter them, Coke would have to move strategically to take the fight from the courtroom and campuses to the back rooms where it could sap the energy of the campaign and exploit philosophical differences among the activists themselves to prevent it from going mainstream.
The rally against Coke fit well into USAS’s goals. Even after the Nike campaign had ended with the apparel makers’ announcement of new factory policies through the Clinton-backed Fair Labor Association, USAS had not given up their fight against what they saw as global abuses by corporations overseas. Dismissing the Clinton standards as mere “corporate cover-up,” the students had created their own group, the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC), signing up some two hundred member colleges from Harvard to the University of California who agreed to adhere to binding decisions on what companies they could do business with based on their labor policies.
By the fall of 2004, it was looking for new ways to broaden focus beyond just sweatshops—and it found one with the help of a Colombian-American student activist at UC Berkeley named Camilo Romero. Born in the United States, Romero had always acutely felt the discrepancy in privileges between himself and his Colombia-born family members. When one of the leaders of SINALTRAINAL came to Berkeley to talk about the Coke boycott,