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

Yup.

I expressed a similar sentiment in post #134:

As it comes to brewery worker safety we collectively should all "Stop screwing around".

Cheers!

 

Most brewery founders go years or even close to a decade before taking a salary. Often their significant others and family work without pay too. Acting like they're raking in cash when they're usually working heavy hours just to try to keep the business open is ridiculous.

Despite higher prices this is not a lucrative business to be in. If you want to make any money, honestly starting a brewery is the last thing you should do. Not so say you can't succeed, it's a pretty long-shot almost anywhere with anyone.

Despite this, a significant number of breweries I know go out of their way to pay what is considered a living wage in their locality. Not all, and honestly it's easy to understand why they can't or are reluctant to pay more when they're barely solvent.

I think larger ones like Bells, Founders, Stone, etc should be looked at and criticized in this manner, but the medium to small guys are doing the best they can do in most cases.

Also, this seems to assume the only arrangement under which a worker could do well is if they're unionized.

 

Question: “How do you make a million dollars in today’s Craft Beer environment?”


Answer: “Start with two million dollars.”

 

I’m under the impression the Bells pays a decent wage with benefits for a brewery in MI. Do you know something I don’t?

 

No, just using them as an example. They represent the size of brewery where I'd say that these types of criticisms are entirely fair if applicable. I don't think to be small means you're off the hook entirely, but acting as though small breweries are screwing their employees and raking it in is out of touch with reality.

I can list off many breweries that many would consider extremely successful that took many years just to start turning a profit. I'm sure there are a few counterexamples, but the vast majority live in the reality where the massive capital investment upfront weighs them down for a long time.

 

I think unions are still doing good things with regard to workplace safety and fair wages/benefits, and I think there ought to be a whole lot more of them. It would make our middle class a lot bigger and stronger which would be better for the country as a whole. Admittedly, it would not be better for the super rich, but it's not like they'd end up destitute either.

Who can't be fired? The idea that union members can't be fired is pure nonsense.

Unions do help to ensure a worker isn't fired unjustly. Most of the time when a bad employee isn't fired, the management has no one but themselves to blame because they were too incompetent or lazy to keep a proper paper trail or do proper performance reviews, or even too uniformed to know who their good and bad employees are. I've actually seen this last one a lot, and it was the most frustrating.
Every union job I've had, most of the members wanted the crappy employees to be fired because they made everyone else and the union as a whole look bad.