Splinter: Craft Beer's Moral High Ground Doesn't Apply To Its Workers

Understand, I'm not anti union, and support working class efforts to better ourselves. My political ideals are decidedly leftist when it comes to this. I know the history of unionizing, and believe the original ideals have been CO opted by laziness and greed, the same things that created a need for unions in the first place. I don't think there is a place for unionizing in small breweries, most are on a shoestring as it is, and the ones I have seen are in it for their love of beer and community and nothing more.

 

The thing is blanket condemnation of all for the actions of a few bad actors is a bit like saying that Colorado has a sick beer scene when we see Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout being brewed and put on the market.

https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/986/91838/?ba=Knapp85

An as I've mentioned at least twice before in this thread, the real issue being discussed by the OP and the article linked to is not whether unions are or or not involved, rather it is not being a hypocrite and moaning that big boys are treating you unfairly while you are treating your employees unfairly by failing to recognize, monetarily or otherwise, their contribution to your success. Not all fair treatment is based on money.

 

It's an issue of scale, and also an issue of history where unions and brewing at the elder generation of big breweries the article mentions come into play.
That said. I get salary, and I have no real qualms with the pay, or benefit package I receive from the 4 year old brewery I currently am working at.
The hours/time commitments put in at smaller breweries is quite different, and can vary widely at the smaller scale as well.
Those are just additional realities to factor in when comparing Big Beer to every other brewery.

 

The notion that craft breweries have, somehow, the moral high ground, is ridiculous to start with.

 

When workers are paid wages that do not meet basic needs it is a huge drag on society. When someone is making minimum wage other parts of society have to cover their subsidized housing, healthcare, food etc. I personally would love to see everyone making a salary that at least covers their basic needs. If your industry cannot do this then you have no right to exist. Why should taxpayers, charities, and other organizations subsidize your business.

 

ITT: People who constantly praise Treehouse, Trillium and others for being very successful and raking in money at an astonishing rate, calling craft brewers' margins insufficient to support paying a decent living wage.

Its not good when you'd be better off being a bartender at said breweries than being in the back actually making the beer.

 

Unfortunately we live in a capitalist society where feeling good about ourselves doesn't feed our children. Maybe we should be treating the disease and not the symptoms, no?
I feel maybe we should be discussing breweries that support consolidation of wealth rather than who supports unionizing. I don't give a shit about InBev unionizing workers if their corporate hierarchy makes %500 higher salaries than the next highest paid worker.

 

Well, since I'm not talking about unionizing as a solution....

I feel we should be talking about breweries who say one thing and practice another.

 

I guess to bring my socialist rhetoric around to button things up, just because InBev allows their workers unionize doesn't mean we should champion them as a bastion of workers rights. Their other dubious practices demonize them enough for my liking. But I do think it's bullshit that anyone treats their employees poorly, union or not, craft or not.

 

Uh, that's not how it works in the US under the NLRA - employers don't "unionize" workers or "allow" them to unionize...-

Not to mention the fact that workers at Anheuser-Busch were organized by the National Union of United Brewery Workmen of America (AFL) over a century before InBev, with Adolphus Busch first signing an agreement with the St. Louis local in the 1890s, thanks, in part, to an effective boycott supported by the Knights of Labor (to which many brewery worker locals also belonged at the time).

Well, a $2 raise, even the inflationary 1970s, was pretty significant when the typical brewery worker wage under the existing contract was a bit under $7/hr (plus the final contract was $1 the first year, and 75¢/hr each of the following 2 years) but that strike was much more complicated that simply one over wages, with individual locals of Teamsters - some from out of state - picking each others' breweries (the old Brewery Workers Union had only merged into the Teamsters a few years earlier after nearly a century of jurisdictional conflict and IIRC some of the St. Louis locals* were formerly UBW) as conflicts arose between the national agreement and local agreements.

In St. Louis and Newark, at least, there were 3 locals in each brewery - roughly representing brewhouse workers, bottling house workers and drivers. A left over from the old structure of the United Brewery Workers, the first "industrial" union in the AFL.

 

Yeah, large corporations allow unionizing. MacDonalds has been known to shut down stores where workers unionized only to open a new store across the street. If you think corporations don't have the ability to choose you're naive.

 

Given that over 80% of McDonald's locations are owned by individual franchisees rather than by the McDonald's corporation, how do you know it was the corporation rather than one or two different franchisees?

 

Great conversation with lots of interesting perspectives. I'm 100% pro-union, but will second what some others have said. Unionizing should help workers at a small business with issues of safety and basic respect, but it can only going to help with compensation so much if the business isn't yet profitable. It seems obivous to me that someone at Budweiser is going to be making a lot more than someone working at a small craft brewery.

That said, whether or not employees choose to form a union, I'd like to see breweries in the "start up" phase experiment more with profit-sharing and worker-owned cooperative structures.

I'm pretty sure the building trades and government jobs pay well because they're historically professions with high rates of unionization; same with parts of the medical sector.

Doctors, lawyers and accountants arent union positions, but those professions are also very highly organized to make sure they get paid -- with bar associations, medical boards, etc.

I like the sentiment. How do you know which breweries are run by assholes? (Or non-assholes for that matter?)

 

Does it matter? Point stands.

 

Word of mouth. Talking to employees/ex-employees. If one guy complains about working at a brewery, I give them the benefit of the doubt. If three guys do...fuck that brewery.

 

Sure it matters. In the one case it is in fact corporate. In the other case it's not coporate but a small business owner. Blaming one when the other is responsible creates confusion, makes problems harder to solve through waste of resources and damages credibility.

 

I am not at all a strong source of information on this but having worked at a franchised Dominoes in college and having been friendly with the owner, I don't think franchisees can tie their shoes without the okay of the parent corporation. I can't imagine rules about unionizing aren't written into the contracts at the outset.

 

Hard to be sure what details are written into the contract without actually holding a franchise.

Public summaries:

https://www.franchisedirect.com/foodfranchises/mcdonalds-franchise-07030/ufoc/

may leave out critical details or there may in fact be nothing about unionization.

To bring this back closer to being about beer, the independently owned beer distributorships who have contracts to handle ABInBev are not legally required to carry only ABInBev brands and they can and do, if they choose to, also distributed multiple craft brands.

 

Yeah, let’s use the government and the medical sector as an example where unions have been beneficial. Benefial to the employee, yes. Beneficial to the customer, not so much. Unfortunately most businesses do not have taxpayers and insurance companies to pay the bills.

 

It also occurred to me after writing that maybe it would be illegal to stipulate things concerning unions one way or the other? To the extent there actually are any "rules" perhaps it would have to be more on the nudge nudge wink wind end of the spectrum.

Whatever the case is, in my very limited experience franchises didn't have a great deal of autonomy.