Ray Rogers is the founder and director of New York City based Corporate Campaign Inc. (CCI), which has championed labor, human rights and environmental causes for 26 years. He was born in Beverly, Mass., 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 impoverished 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.

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. on which the Academy Award winning film “Norma Rae” was based. He defined the corporate campaign as a “mechanism to confront power with power.” The campaign led to the resignations of the chief executive officers of J.P. Stevens, Avon Products and New York Life Insurance Co. from the boards of Manufacturers Hanover Trust, New York Life and J.P. Stevens. The Wall Street Journal headline (10/21/80) read, “Rogers’ Unorthodox Tactics Prevail in Stevens Organizing Fight.” Two years earlier, he organized a unique boycott in Alabama that led to the historic Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America victory for 3,000 Chicanos against Texas-based Farah Manufacturing Co. The Boston Herald described Rogers as labor’s most innovative strategist and “one of the most successful union organizers since the CIO sit-down strikes of the 1930s.”

In the 1980s, Rogers developed campaigns that led to high profile victories for airline, paper and utility workers. He also developed a successful corporate campaign strategy against Campbell Soup Co. for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, seeking to represent thousands of migrant farm workers. The strategy 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 against Geo. A. Hormel & Co. for UFCW Local P-9 in Austin, Minnesota. During the campaign he was jailed under a criminal syndicalism statute that was later declared unconstitutional. Presently, Corporate Campaign is donating its services to develop strategy for FLOC, which is challenging R.J. Reynolds and the tobacco industry over their abuse of migrant farmworkers.

Time magazine 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 government agencies.

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 2000, CCI developed a unique public sector campaign strategy for the 53,000-member New York State Public Employees Federation that put extreme pressure on Governor George Pataki and other political leaders and led to major contract gains.

In 2001-2, CCI provided critical assistance in helping 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. At the same time, CCI and Rogers, an animal welfare advocate and a vegetarian, played a vital role working with national environmental, public interest and religious organizations in the successful struggle to prevent oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain.

Since its launching in 2003, Ray Rogers has directed the Campaign to Stop Killer Coke which was developed by Corporate Campaign. In a cover story in The Nation, “It’s the Real Thing – The Drink That Represses,” (5/1/06) journalist Michael Blanding wrote:

In the past two years the Coke campaign has grown into the largest anti-corporate movement since the campaign against Nike for sweatshop abuses… The fight to hold it accountable has, in turn, broadly connected issues across continents to become a truly globalized grassroots movement.

Rogers was described as a “legendary union activist” in the Business Week article “‘Killer Coke’ or Innocent Abroad? – Controversy over anti-union violence in Colombia has colleges banning Coca-Cola” (1/23/06). In a Financial Times story (11/20/06), he was called The Coca-Cola Company’s “fiercest foe.”

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, USA Today, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and Atlanta Journal Constitution as well as many television and radio programs and newscasts worldwide. Rogers is cited in Marquis Who’s Who in America.

“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.”