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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 1, 2014)
By DON McINTOSH Associate Editor Beer is said to be the beverage of the American worker — an ice-cold re- ward for a hard day’s work, steeped in heritage and pride for the place it was made. Half the beer in America sports images of a bald eagle, verbiage about tradition, or a red-white-and-blue label. But look past the marketing and you find an industry profoundly reshaped by corporate consolidation and global- ization in the last three decades. Today, 10 of the 10 best-selling beer brands in the United States come from just two companies, both of which are foreign- owned. This story began as a quest to find union-made beer. But it turns out it’s not easy to identify what beer is made by union workers. There’s no union la- bel on beer today, and accurate, up-to- date information isn’t easy to come by. To produce this guide, the Labor Press spent days poring through government databases and corporate annual reports, hounding union and corporate press of- ficers, and cold-calling local union of- ficers. Here’s what we found: Two massive and mostly unionized compa- nies, one big beer company that doesn’t make any beer, several smaller union- ized breweries, and a fast-growing and almost entirely nonunion craft brewery sector. Anheuser-Busch Everyone knows Anheuser-Busch was started in St. Louis, Missouri in 1876. But since 2008, it’s been a PAGE 12 UNION BEER wholly This story began as a quest to find union-made beer. But it turns out it’s not easy to identify what beer is made by union workers. There’s no union label on beer today, and accurate, up-to-date information isn’t easy to come by. wholly-owned subsidiary of the world’s largest brewer, the Belgian- Brazilian multinational that now calls itself AB InBev, headquartered in Leu- ven, Belgium and Sao Paulo, Brazil. With over 200 brands, AB InBev has a quarter of the world beer market, and 47.6 percent of the U.S. market. In the United States, all of the com- pany’s domestic brands are union-made by members of the International Broth- erhood of Teamsters, in 12 massive company-owned breweries around the country. In April, they ratified a new five-year union contract, which contains a pledge not to close any breweries. So all varieties of Budweiser, Busch, Natu- ral Light, Michelob, Rolling Rock, O’- Doul’s non-alcoholic, Shock Top Bel- gian-Style wheat ale, and Hurricane and King Cobra malt liquors are union-made. A company web page lists which brands are brewed at each brewery for which area of the country, so if you’re drinking a Budweiser in Oregon, for example, you can tell that it was brewed in Fort Collins, Colorado or Fairfield, Califor- nia. Miller-Coors The can says “since 1855, Milwau- kee, WI” but today, Miller is one of over 150 brands in the world’s second largest beer company, SABMiller, headquartered in London. In the United States, SABMiller NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS owns a 58 percent stake in a joint ven- ture with Molson Coors (Canada’s Molson and Denver’s Coors having merged in 2005). The joint venture, Miller-Coors, functions as a single company, brewing, marketing, and dis- tributing the brands of its two parent companies, totaling about 28 percent of the U.S. beer market. The six former Miller breweries are union. The two former Coors breweries are not. At the Miller-Coors breweries in Ir- windale, California; Fort Worth, Texas; and Eden, North Carolina, workers are represented by the Teamsters. In Tren- ton, Ohio, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, it’s the United Auto Workers (UAW). And in Albany, Georgia, it’s the Inter- national Association of Machinists. Miller-Coors’ largest facility is the flagship Coors brewery in Golden, Col- orado. Workers there were union-rep- resented for 44 years, but Coors fa- mously busted the union after permanently replacing workers who went on strike in 1977. That led to a 10- year boycott of Coors by the AFL-CIO, until Coors agreed to give union organ- izers a shot. But workers voted down the Teamsters in 1988. Today, five members of Operating Engineers Lo- cal 9 are the only union-represented workers among the brewery’s 1,100 employees. Meanwhile, Coors’ newer Shenan- doah brewery, which opened in 2007 in Elkton, Virginia, has never been union: Teamsters campaigned there in 2009 and again in 2012 and 2013, losing all three elections, the third of which was a rerun election ordered by the National Labor Relations Board after it found management’s anti-union campaign broke labor law in multiple instances. Since two of Miller-Coors’ eight breweries are nonunion, it’s not easy to know which products were union- made. John Drew, Milwaukee regional representative for the United Auto Workers, says UAW considers any Miller products to be union-made. That includes top-selling Miller Light and Miller High Life, but not Coors Light or Keystone Light, even though those are also brewed at the former Miller breweries. Teamsters take the opposite tack, listing Coors as union-made, even though the former Coors breweries are nonunion. SABMiller does have an upper- Midwest regional subsidiary that’s all- union: Leinenkugel’s, brewed by Teamsters in Chippewa Falls, Wiscon- (Turn too Page 11) AUGUST 1, 2014
