The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [134]
Joining with two Latin American friends, Romero sought to use Coke as a way to show U.S. businesses exploited workers in Latin American countries. Soon after forming a group to advocate cutting Berkeley’s contract, he was approached by an organizer from USAS to take the campaign national.
He accepted—with some reservations. Looking around at the student group’s membership, he saw a lot of well-meaning but “privileged white kids.” From the beginning, he vowed the campaign would draw in students from a more diverse range of backgrounds, to present a more nuanced critique of the situation in Latin America. As part of a new generation of activists, he didn’t necessarily agree with Saul Alinsky’s tactics of “polarizing” a target no matter what the cost. As he began reaching out to campuses farther east, however, he quickly found out about Rogers’s campaign—which was making headway at some of the largest and most influential campuses in the country, though with a very different message.
Rogers was still on the hunt for one big campus where he could fire a meaningful shot across Coke’s bow. After UMass renewed its contract over the summer, he moved on to a new target: Rutgers University in New Jersey, vowing the same thing wouldn’t happen here. It was the perfect place to set an example. Not only was the campus big—with 50,000 students—and close to Rogers’s headquarters in New York, but the contract was also particularly egregious. In exchange for $10 million over the course of ten years, the school agreed to Coke advertising all over campus, to the point of sanctioning the cheer “Always Rutgers, Always Coca-Cola” over the loudspeaker during athletic events.
With the help of a labor studies professor, Rogers plastered the campus with Killer Coke posters and organized students to demand the administration go with a different vendor. To his surprise, the university agreed to delay its decision until May 2005 to solicit bids. That spring, Rogers and Srivastava appeared together on campus with a giant inflatable Coke bottle on the steps of the student center with the logo “College Control,” while the campus USAS chapter supplied shock troops behind the scenes.
Tensions were rising, however, between the tactics of Rogers and the USAS students. Romero especially took issue with the gory posters like the Colombian Coke Float that sensationalized the issue with the bodies floating in the Coke glass. “It certainly catches your eye,” says Romero. “But people don’t necessarily feel welcome to it. It’s this particular kind of activism—the chest-pounding, look at me, this corporation is the devil.” Romero felt the macabre imagery trivialized the complexity of the situation in Colombia. Worse, he thought they risked the message being dismissed as the ravings of a “crazy, loudmouth guy”—Rogers.
Rogers would have none of it. When he caught wind of the criticism of the way he ran the campaign, he took Romero aside to address it. “Maybe you don’t like it, but boy, is it having an impact,” he argued, reminding him he’d knocked off four colleges before USAS had even joined. The Colombian Coke Float and the other lurid posters, he announced, would stay.
By May, the fight for Rutgers was over. The school announced that it would sign a ten-year, $17 million contract with Pepsi, effective immediately. Even though the school insisted it went with the company that offered the better proposal financially, Rogers declared victory, counting the decision a “big blow to the company.” If there was any question about why Rutgers dumped Coke, the campaign sought to remove it with more direct appeals at two other universities: the University of Michigan and New York University (NYU).
The country’s largest private university with 50,000 students, NYU didn’t have an exclusive contract with Coke, but it did have about a hundred vending machines and retail operations in dozens of campus stores. This time, USAS led the way, demanding Coke submit to an independent