News Article

Confidential Coke Documents Released

The Atlanta Constitution

Published: February 10, 2000

ATLANTA -- Airing its dirty laundry in public is not what Coca-Cola wanted to do.

But the company had little choice after a federal judge ruled it had to release confidential documents about its shortcomings on workplace diversity to the plaintiffs in a racial discrimination suit.

Instead of just handing over those papers to the plaintiffs' attorneys, however, the company Wednesday made them available to reporters covering the case.

"A great deal of attention has been focused on these documents, and we want to make sure the information is put in the proper context," said Coca-Cola spokesman Ben Deutsch. "It is a critical self-analysis of the company's diversity efforts. "

But plaintiffs' attorney Cyrus Mehri described the release of these documents as "the litigation equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall. You fight us over these documents for 10 months and then you blast fax them to the world. "

The centerpiece of the information is an internal report by Carl Ware, the company's highest-ranking black executive. The 1995 report, which was given to then-President M. Douglas Ivester, was put together after Ware met with four other senior African-American executives at the company.

In summarizing their collective experiences at Coke, Ware's report said:

Some African-Americans are viewed inappropriately as lacking the skills and intelligence to succeed in certain aspects of the business. This can create a difficult working environment that hinders, rather than facilitates, growth and development.

Even when African-Americans were few in number, an informal network was operating to provide "sanity checks" for them, which involved comparing their experiences. This allowed many of them to retain their "psychological health. "