AT the Coca-Cola Company’s annual meeting of shareholders on April 19, CEO Neville Isdell announced positive first-quarter results and then solicited comments from the audience on the election of directors. The first response came from Ray Rogers, a longtime labor activist—but Rogers had no intention of talking about the makeup of Coke’s board. Instead, he delivered a two-minute tirade on corporate perfidy: “The World of Coca-Cola [is] a world full of lies, deception, immorality, corruption, and widespread labor, human-rights, and environmental abuses.”
If the words sounded rehearsed, it wasn’t merely because Rogers had prepared his statement in advance: He has uttered this line, with its reference to the Coke memorabilia museum in Atlanta, on many occasions. His favorite venues are colleges and universities, where an anti-Coke movement has grown among left-wing activists for several years. They accuse the company of murdering union leaders in Colombia, causing water shortages in India, and violating worker rights in Indonesia and Turkey. Because of the efforts of Rogers and his allies, more than a dozen schools have terminated contracts with the soda maker or expelled its vending machines from cafeterias and dormitories. Activists frequently refer to Coke as “the new Nike”-a reference to a student-led anti-sweatshop movement that went after the shoemaker in the 1990s for the allegedly sorry state of its foreign factories. Right now, the campaign to stop “Killer Coke” is perhaps the trendiest protest movement on campus.
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