Dozens of black employees joined unions and environmental groups outside Coca-Cola's annual shareholder meeting in New York City today, to protest what they assert is the corporation's continuing race-discrimination. Despite Coca-Cola's recent establishment of a company-wide diversity committee and other diversity management practices, some employees claim that the company is doing more to improve its public image than it is to end bias within the organization. Coca-Cola paid $192.5 million to settle a class-action racial discrimination suit in 2000, but seventeen individual suits are still pending against the company---brought by employees who insist that the company's allegedly racist practices must be made public through the courts.
See BEN WHITE, The Washington Post, April 17, 2002