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