Ray Rogers to speak in Dublin

dublin | worker & community struggles and protests | news report Friday February 23, 2007 13:16 by Boycott Killer Coke

Trinity Students to Vote on Coke Boycott next week

As the third referendum in Trinity college on the sale of Coca Cola products reaches its climax - union activists Ray Rodgers is coming to Dublin and will speak in the Davis Theatre in TCD Arts Block on Monday at 7pm.

Students in Trinity have already voted twice in support of Colombian Coca Cola workers who have faced torture, intimidation, threats, kindnappings and murder for been members of a trade union. The campaign to support human rights and the Colombia workers is receiving an excellent response in Trinity and the visit of Ray Rogers is set to bolster the campaign.

Ray Rogers

Ray Rogers, president and director of New York City-based Corporate Campaign, Inc. (CCI), has been described as labor's most innovative strategist and "one of the most successful union organizers since the CIO sit-down strikes of the 1930s." For 25 years, Corporate Campaign has championed union and community solidarity and membership and family involvement in campaigns for social and economic justice. Rogers and his organization have been featured many times in major publications such as Time, Business Week, Forbes, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsday, USA Today and The Washington Post, as well as many television programs. In 2006, Business Week described Rogers as “a legendary union activist.” Many of Rogers' accomplishments are cited in Marquis Who's Who in America.

Time said Rogers has "brought some of the most powerful corporations to their knees, and his ideas are spreading." In 1995, the US Chamber of Commerce, Republican Congressman Peter Hoekstra of Michigan and other big business interests launched an unsuccessful effort to outlaw "corporate campaigns," the term Rogers coined to describe strategies and tactics that help achieve victories for labor and other victims of abusive corporations and politicians.

In 1999, Corporate Campaign developed a contract campaign for Transport Workers Union Local 100 in New York City. The local's 33,000 members, who operate and maintain New York City's subways and buses, won a settlement described on the front page of The New York Times as containing "the largest annual raises received by any of New York City's public employee unions in nearly a decade." In the spring of 2000, CCI developed a campaign strategy for the 53,000-member New York State Public Employees Federation that put Gov. George Pataki and other politicians on notice and led to major contract gains for the union. In 2001-2, CCI helped Pacifica Radio listeners take back the nation's first and only non-commercial, free-speech radio network from a predatory, pro-corporate faction that had seized control of its national board. CCI raised funds for the campaign and helped develop and implement the strategy that led to the resignations of several board members.

In 2001-2, CCI was involved with national environmental, public interest and religious organizations in the successful struggle to prevent oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain. CCI has developed and is currently directing the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke (www.killercoke.org), aimed at holding Coca-Cola's policymakers and key shareholders accountable for the murders of union leaders and other gross human rights violations in Colombia.

Rogers was born in Beverly, Mass., and is the son of a union machinist and an electronics assembler. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts in 1967 and spent two years working in Tennessee as a VISTA volunteer. His work on behalf of poverty-stricken people in Appalachia was cited and commended by the Tennessee legislature and featured on NBC Nightly News. Later, he worked with reformers in the United Mine Workers Union to oust its corrupt leaders. In 1973-4, he played a decisive role in winning a historic labor struggle involving 3,000 Chicanos on strike against the Farah Slacks Company in Texas.

From 1976 to 1980, while on the staff of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers, he devised and led its pioneering corporate campaign against the notoriously anti-union J.P. Stevens & Co. In the mid-1980s, Rogers developed the corporate campaign strategy for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, representing thousands of migrant farm workers, which was instrumental in ending a six-year strike and boycott and winning the union its first contract. In that same period, Rogers became one of the most controversial figures in the labor movement when he developed a campaign on behalf of UFCW Local P-9 against Geo. A. Hormel & Co. in Austin, Minnesota.
"Workers and other victims of corporate greed cannot legislate, litigate or advertise away their problems," Rogers says. "They must organize aggressively and take their fights into the boardrooms of those at the center of the corporate and political web of power…Corporate, financial and political power brokers can be pitted one against the other, to divide and conquer them the way they have divided and conquered poor and working people."