The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [140]
The night before negotiations started in Atlanta, Romero was put in the awkward position of translating for Rogers as he addressed the Colombians in their hotel room. Coke spent $20 million for a few minutes of advertising during the Super Bowl, he told them. Surely they could afford more than that to compensate victims of torture and murder. “We don’t intend to give up our fight against the company,” answered Correa. “Nor will we accept that people make money on us as victims”—implying that Rogers was looking for his own cut. Privately, Romero also interpreted Rogers’s plea as a personal money grab.
Despite their past clashes over Rogers’s campaign tactics, Romero was on the same page in thinking Coke was offering a bum deal that didn’t ultimately address any of SINALTRAINAL’s key demands. Sitting around the heavy wood conference table overlooking downtown Atlanta, the two groups went over the main points of contention without progress—Coke holding fast to the basic agreement—that SINALTRAINAL and Killer Coke be muzzled in exchange for money, with no other enforceable obligations. Finally Kovalik walked out, followed soon by the Colombian team.
But Collingsworth proposed that he try one last time to personally negotiate with Ed Potter. Early the next morning, Collingsworth called to say he’d had a breakthrough—the company would pay settlement money to end the lawsuit and Rogers’s campaign, but SINALTRAINAL would be free to say whatever it wanted in the future.
The Colombians delayed their flight home to meet with Coke’s representatives for a handshake, even taking pictures with the Atlanta skyline in the background. They flew back to Bogotá thrilled about bringing the arrogant multinational to its knees, even as the union lived to fight another day. When the translation of the agreement finally arrived, their elation turned to dismay as they saw that all of the old language forbidding the union from denouncing the company had remained.
The union went back on the attack, with renewed calls for a boycott, and Coke again protested the breach in the cease-fire. A frustrated Potter wrote Collingsworth to say, “It may be time to move on and conclude no agreement is possible and that we were just wasting our time for the last fourteen months.” Twisting the knife, he added: “We are in a much better position to deal with this dissipating campaign than we were in 2005.” As reluctant as the lawyers were to admit it, Potter was right. Despite continued campaigning by Rogers and Srivastava, the student campaign had peaked with the victories at NYU and Michigan. Since then, the lack of active campaigning by the Colombian workers had thrown the campaign into disarray. For all of Coke’s complaints about SINALTRAINAL breaking their agreement, in fact, the union had substantially reduced its public comments and appearances, especially at the schools that formed the backbone of the campaign. When Srivastava went up against the largest Coca-Cola contract in the country—a ten-year, $38 million contract at the University of Minnesota—he learned too late that SINALTRAINAL wouldn’t appear to make its case to the administration. Coke, of course, did show up, and the contract was renewed.
The more he saw the campaign slip away, the more livid Rogers became about the botch that the lawyers had made of the negotiations. In the same way the anti-obesity lawyers had given Coke the upper hand when it agreed to hold off bringing a lawsuit, SINALTRAINAL’s agreement to suspend campaigning had taken all the fire out of Killer Coke. “When you do something like that, you’re playing into their hands and undermining your own power,” says Rogers. “When they are feeling the heat, that’s when you need to pick up a bigger club.”
It’s that attitude that made Rogers the biggest threat to Coke—and the company knew it.