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

As a taxpayer, I'm a huge advocate of well-paid, low-turnover professionals teaching my kids, maintaining public infrastructure, putting out fires, delivering my mail, fighting our wars. You get what you pay for. I wish more of them were even better paid and better trained, and I wouldn't have a problem paying more taxes if it resulted in better public services and a real social safety net. Single payer healthcare would be a great start. Cheers!

 

If not for Unions my parents would not have been able to buy a house, take the family to "the shore" for a week in the summer or send me to college. I'm an attorney and a large part of my practice is workers compensation. The vast majority of workers I deal with are significantly better off if they are in a Union than those that are not. Also, a Union shop prevents the employer from hiring people "off the books" and paying them significantly less than the going rate.

Part of the issue is the difference between working for a start up and working for an established business. This is not limited to breweries but is across the board. I would just say this: I hope business owners reward their employees that were there in the beginning and helped them get over the hump. If you don't do that for your employees, you are a dick.

One thing that does piss me off is business owners that take advantage of people that are willing to work for free. (It happens in the law all the time) I have spoken to numerous people that "help out" on release day or brewing day just because they like the brewer. If you let people that are not family work for you for free, you are a dick.

 

McDonald's - WTF does that have to do with the US subsidiary of ABInBev, Anheuser-Busch, having first signed a union contract in the 1890s ( that is, before the enactment of the Wagner Act)? The workforce at AB was long "unionized" before InBev even existed, by the United Brewery Workmen and, after the NLRA, by numerous elections (which is how, in the 1940-50's primarily, some Brewery Workers locals at AB went into the Teamsters).

Can companies break the law? Sure. I'm well aware of the numerous illegal "Unfair Labor Practices" corporations often can and do get away or the "legal" ways they might use to avoid a union win in an NLRB election, and, afterward, avoid signing contracts or bargaining in good faith (Coors' method in the '70s), or "bust" existing locals by threatening closure and encouraging voting out a union, etc. (That's how Yuengling in Pottsville did it). But even those cases, the workforce is still "unionized" even without a contract or, in some cases, without employment during strikes or lockouts.

Workers and unions "unionize", not employers.

 

Never said the employers unionize. I said they allow their employees to do so. This nation is filled with corporations that are notorious union breakers. A quick Google search will net you enough legal documents to ensure InBev isn't a big fan of their employees unionizing either.

 

Sure you did.

No one is disputing the fact that few companies, from multinationals like ABInBev down to the small "craft" brewers which are the OP's topic, are "fans" of having to collectively bargain with their employees or run their facilities under the work rules and regulations of a union contract nor that, particularly in recent decades, companies do engage in legal and illegal acts to prevent their employees from organizing or, once an NLRB election is won, fail to bargain in good faith.

But that argument kinda comes down to:
"Workers at small breweries shouldn't organize because their employers won't like it."

 

Forgive me, I juxtaposed the words unionizing and workers.

 

This has devolved into an odd debate about the merits of unionization but after actually reading the article I have to say there's not a lot of there there. It definitely implies the author thinks unionization is the answer but he doesn't really provide much in the way of evidence that things are that bad. The two sources about benefits are a disgruntled brewer whose boss contradicts his claim about access to benefits and a survey whose conductor admits is of a small sample size. The average salaries quoted for brewers are not that bad, and given the wide spread of size and geographic location of craft breweries, don't really tell us much. If I am making 40k a year brewing at Cellarmaker in san francisco that is rough, If I am making 40k brewing at a small start up brewery in ft. wayne, indiana that is a good job

 

Why do people say this as if it is in any way acceptable as a given state?

It doesn't have to work this way. People make a lot of money off of that "unskilled" labor.

 

I think it’s more about people’s expecatations of what a “good living” is than anything else.

Couple that with the complexity of the situation and people’s aversion to nuance and the complex, discussions like this tend to devolve as this one did, “unions are great” “unions aren’t great”.

So many things can go into a businesses margins that prevent them from being able to pay their employees more. Rent, cost of goods, facility maintenance, loan/interest payments. A small brewery’s lack of purchasing power can increase cost of goods across the board. Could have an agreeable owner that doesn’t negotiate well and is giving away potential earnings that could have been passed along. Or he could be a greedy asshole.

I don’t think “the owner drives a new car” is worth much as an argument... almost anyone can get a new car.

Ultimately, I’m of the belief it is up to the employee to make the best decision for himself. If the total compensation isn’t worth his effort, leave for somewhere that is more inline with his expectations. If the pay is as poor as people make out, should be relatively easy as long as they are aware they made need to change professions. If what they command as a salary doesn’t fit there expectations of “a good living,” they should work to improve themself into a more marketable employee worthy of higher wages.

 

Wages have grown, just not at as high a rate as would be expected this far into an economic cycle. But, that's a top line number and maybe doesn't tell the full story. Labor participation rates are still below pre-crisis levels, but the core 25-54yo rate bottomed out around mid-2015 and has been growing steadily since. That means people that were completely removed from the labor force, so not even included in the unemployment rate, have re-entered the work force. Most of the new entrants are not coming into high paying jobs, so this can be deflationary on total wages. The Atlanta Fed has an interesting wage tracker that focuses on actual wages/salaries of employed people. This paints a different picture, with wage growth above 3% per year and approaching 4%, which isn't far off from where we were in the middle of the last decade: https://www.frbatlanta.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker.aspx?panel=1

 

So how much more should brewers make to solve this issue? If wage growth had been 5% per year every year over the last 10 years we'd see headlines about how phenomenal the growth had been. However, it wouldn't change a thing when it comes to concentration of wealth. That's simply a matter of compounding. It stinks, but unless you have a plan to develop into the superhero form of Robin Hood, it's not going to change.

 

I never said it was acceptable, but those are the facts. I'd love to see unskilled labor pay a liveable wage. But realize it's going to take major change in our government to make that happen. That's too big of a topic for me to want to get into.

 

The issue with this particular industry is obvious. Underfunding. When most brewery owners are either the brewers themselves or hire the least expensive brewer that they can find because they are cash poor, you can expect for brewers to get paid 30K a year with no benefits.

The larger breweries that are doing this, and there are many, are simply taking advantage of people, because they have the money to pay their employees a living wage and they choose to not do so.

 

This.

 

My ‘BS’ statement was more directed at the tone in the article, which came off as, “craft brewers should feel bad for not paying their guys as much as AB does.” I think that is absurd. It’s like saying, “The cook at my greasy spoon is being mistreated because he makes minimum wage and the CEO of Vienna Beef makes millions. I mean, they both just sell hot dogs!”

I actually agree with pretty much everything you said, though, and I think it’s good that people like you are bringing attention to this stuff.

I’ve definitely asked ‘how would you feel if the big guys were doing ___?’ more than once on these boards. I’ve also stated that mistreating workers is pretty much the one thing that gets a boycott from me. Got a couple of craft and import breweries on that shit list. Guess who isn’t on it? Any of the big guys.

I’m instinctively skeptical of any corporate altruism, but i agree that the, “they are evil so they’re incapable of doing anything cool” is ridiculous.

And I definitely did plenty of ranting in the comments to the, “Will work for beer” article, but I think that this free labor trend is one of, if not the biggest threat facing US craft beer right now. It is truly maddening that so many people don’t see what a fucked up practice it is...

 

I don't know if I agree with that. Brewers were getting paid a lot less than they were worth before the big craft beer boom.

If we're just talking about the present, I'd be more apt to agree, though.

 

It's also historically, screwed the employer, especially if they don't have an army of lawyers fighting tooth and nail from day "negative one" of the union's formation. I'm not talking about child labor and dying in building fires with locked doors, yes at one point unions did some good things, but there are modern protections for that kind of stuff, without the unions.

If you like working hard and it being "fair" as a new employee... and work in a unionized shop....I'd love to see these writers go up against the guy who's been there 30yrs, doesn't do shit, knows all the tricks of the rigged system and how to avoid doing any real work, that can't be fired, and makes 3x as much as them.

They'd be crying like little babies about how it's not fair by the second day.