"Killer Coke" Or Innocent Abroad? Controversy over anti-union violence in Colombia has colleges banning Coca-Cola

January 23, 2006
By Dean Foust and Geri Smith,
with Elizabeth Woyke
The Corporation

It's early monday morning, but Ray Rogers has the full attention of some 70 students in a Rutgers University classroom. For nearly half an hour, the 61-year-old labor activist rails against Coca-Cola Co. (), taking the beverage giant to task for allegedly turning a blind eye as eight employees of Coke bottlers in Colombia were killed and scores more were threatened or jailed on trumped-up terrorism charges over the past decade.

"The reality is that the world of Coca-Cola is a world of lies, deceptions, corruption, gross human rights and environmental abuses!" thunders Rogers, a legendary union activist who cut his teeth organizing a highly publicized campaign against textile maker J.P. Stevens & Co. in the 1970s. He slams his hand on a desk. "But this is where it's going to stop! We're going to put an end to this once and for all! How many of you will stand up against Coke?" One by one, roughly half the students lift their hands. In response to Rogers' charges, a Coke spokeswoman says the activist "has no facts to support his claims."

Despite the vast generation gap and Coke's rebuttals, Rogers' diatribes are starting to resonate on campuses from New Haven to Ann Arbor, where his "Killer Coke" campaign has become the latest cause célèbre among student activists -- "the new Nike," as one puts it. At dozens of schools, small but feisty groups of students have demonstrated against the company -- like the ones who staged a "die-in" during a 2004 Yale University speech by then-CEO Douglas N. Daft. Already, about 20 colleges in the U.S. and abroad have halted sales of Coke on campus, in part over the Colombia controversy.

In December, Rogers bagged his two biggest victories to date when New York University and the University of Michigan banished Coke. For two years, NYU student activists had demanded an independent investigation of worker conditions in Colombia. "The students felt it has been two years, and nothing's been done," says Arthur Tannenbaum, a faculty spokesman at NYU. In response, a Coke spokesperson says the company would accept an outside review, but only if the findings aren't admissible in a lawsuit filed in Miami by the International Labor Rights Fund on behalf of the slain Colombian workers -- a condition the ILRF has not accepted.

PICKING UP STEAM
Coke officials maintain that the company has been unfairly tarred by union activists who have distorted the facts about Colombia. Perpetuating "urban myth is more exciting [for activists] than knowing what the facts are," says Edward E. Potter, a longtime corporate labor lawyer who joined Coke as global labor relations director last March. Coke officials say only one of the eight workers was killed on the premises of the Coke bottling plant owned by Bebidas y Alimentos de Urabá. Also, they say, the other deaths -- which all occurred off-premises -- were byproducts of Colombia's four-decade-long civil war among leftist guerrillas, government forces, and paramilitaries, which has resulted in at least 35,000 deaths, including 2,500 trade unionists since the mid-1980s alone.

What's more, an important global coalition of labor unions has refused to support Rogers' anti-Coke crusade, which seeks reparations for the families of victims. "We have no evidence of complicity by Coke in the killing of workers," says Ron Oswald, general secretary of the International Union of Foodworkers in Geneva, whose members include tens of thousands of Coke workers worldwide. Some government and union leaders believe that the militant union leading the crusade, SINALTRAINAL, a Colombian union of food-industry workers known for its socialist views, has zeroed in on Coke as a way to get the broader issue of union violence heard around the world. "Out of one killing they built up a campaign," says Colombian Vice-President Francisco Santos Calderón. "In the end they're hurting Colombia" by making it seem like a dangerous place to do business...