Brewery workers at Seattle's Elysian Brewing join Teamsters

Good for them. Maybe other breweries will do the same, having a voice in your compensation, safety, work rules, benefits and other things a union contract affords the employees is a good thing.

 

I suspect the clock is ticking on the closure of Elysian. Cheaper to move it to a place where cost of living is less expensive to keep production costs down. I would imagine this is a price sensitive beer for consumers and if production costs increase and thus the price of the beer, consumers are going to go for cheaper alternatives in the macro craft aisle of their grocery store.

 

My philosophy regarding employment, and I stand by it, is that one hand washes the other.

 

Remember that Elysian is owned by Inbev. The Seattle location only brews small batch stuff for local consumption.

 

https://washingtonbeerblog.com/workers-unite-at-elysian-brewing/


We discussed it a bit in the Washington beer News thread in the NW forum, starting at post #226:
https://www.beeradvocate.com/community/threads/washington-beer-news-2023.670643/page-12

 

I know InBev owns it. Didn’t they recently offload 8 of their “craft” breweries? This will either be too much of a headache for them and they’ll just close it down as Starbucks does with unionizing stores or hopefully they’ll pay everyone to keep it open as a break even marketing tool for grocery store Elysian.

 

The major difference between the labor-law violating Starbucks (over 200 but that was back in May) and Anheuser-Busch is the workers at the latter's 12 US breweries work under a Teamster national contract, one that is up for renewal next year. With all of their other problems, AB probably isn't too anxious to further aggravate the Teamsters by closing a recently organized brewery. (I don't imagine they're too happy with selling off the other IBT-organized (ex-craft) Widmer Bros. to the marijuana company).

 

We’ll see. Goose Island canned the leaders of their attempted union drive a few years ago. We’ll see if they learned their lesson or if a few popular folks from Elysian will be let go due to “performance issues”.