The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [136]
Despite the finely orchestrated display, the real negotiations began after the meeting, when Potter requested to meet with college administrators to see if they might come to an agreement. USAS’s Romero was tentatively hopeful when Potter suggested a commission with students and administrators that would set the ground rules for a new, truly independent investigation. Whatever good faith Potter may have had going into the negotiations, however, Coke was soon setting its own rules, insisting nothing in the investigation could look back more than five years (falling short of both the Gil case and the detentions in Bucaramanga), and nothing could be admissible in court. The students dismissed those demands out of hand; by October, five out of six of them had dropped out of negotiations.
By that time, the day of reckoning was approaching at both NYU and the University of Michigan. As NYU’s senate reconvened to consider the vending machine ban, Coke continued in its refusal to meet with the WRC. The university issued an ultimatum—either Coke agree by December, or the Coke machines would go. When the deadline passed, NYU announced it would begin removing Coke from campus, effective immediately. But that wasn’t all. When the University of Michigan’s December 31 deadline passed three weeks later, it, too, declared it would be severing its ties with Coke. This decision was even more significant, since unlike both NYU and Rutgers, the university was breaking an exclusive contract and it was doing so specifically because of the company’s human rights violations—and not only in Colombia but in India as well. Whatever Potter and Isdell were doing, it clearly wasn’t working—at least not yet. By this time, the Killer Coke campaign could claim about two dozen universities around the world that had dumped Coke. Even the student newspaper at Emory—the university started with money from Asa Candler himself and known as “Coca-Cola University”—had written editorials supporting the campaign. “Certainly if there was any wrongdoing in the past,” Emory’s president announced approvingly, “Coke needs to be held responsible for it.”
Around the same time Coke was suffering these defeats, allegations of anti-union violence emerged in a new country: Turkey. In April 2005, a group of drivers who transported Coke for a contractor were fired after they tried to unionize. When, along with family members, they occupied the local Coca-Cola headquarters in a nonviolent protest, members of Turkey’s secret police attacked them with tear gas and clubs, sending dozens to the hospital. The union accused the company—which owns 40 percent of the bottler—of instigating the violence by calling in the police. After hearing about the Colombia situation, union members contacted Terry Collingsworth, who filed an ATCA case in New York, arguing that the police violence amounted to torture under international law.
While Coke didn’t deny that protesters were attacked, the company claimed that police acted of their own accord, despite requests from Coke to hold off attacking. Even so, the company insisted, the dispute was between the union and the contractor; Coke had nothing to do with it. Coke spokesperson Kari Bjorhus brushed off such attacks as “the flipside of being a big brand,” as she told Brandweek in December 2005. “You become a focal point for many issues because of the visibility of your trademark.” (The case was eventually dismissed upon a finding that the union hadn’t first exhausted its remedies in Turkey; it was promptly appealed.)
Behind the scenes, however, the Coca-Cola Company was still maneuvering to stop the Campaign Against Killer Coke before it spawned opportunistic attacks from any other countries.