Why We Should All Boycott Union Busting Beer Corporations

By Benjamin Dangl

Monday, 10 August 2009

\When Obama sat down for a beer in the White House Rose Garden with Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley, they all turned their backs on the smaller, craft brewers of the country. Obama chose Bud Light, Gates asked for Red Stripe, and Crowley drank Blue Moon.

One of the major craft brewers based where I live in Vermont is Magic Hat, a brewery with a delicious array of brews. That brewery issued a press release following the “Beer Summit” explaining, “Craft Brewers the country over are chagrined by the President’s choice to consume a beer owned by a company based outside of America’s borders. Bud Light, owned by Belgium-based AB InBev, and Blue Moon, owned by London-based SAB MillerCoors, together control 94% of the beer market in the United States. However, the United States boasts over 1,500 craft brewers, the majority being made up of small Main Street Businesses that employ less than 50 people.”

This encounter at the Rose Garden provides a perfect time to reflect on why we should all boycott the beer monopolies of the world.

One reason to boycott large breweries is the union busting, right wing culture that dominates some of the biggest breweries in America. Yuengling, America’s oldest brewery, and Coors, America’s largest brewery, both offer insights into the ugly political and labor practices of this multi-billion dollar industry.

In 2007 Yuengling owner Dick Yuengling told his workers, “the writing was on the wall” and that if they didn’t get rid of the union he would close the Pennsylvania-based brewery and open up shop in a location in the southern US where labor was cheaper. Faced with the choice of looking for work in an area with few jobs, the workers decided to kick the union out.

At the time, Patrick Eiding, then-president of the AFL-CIO union in Philadelphia said of Mr. Yuengling, “If he doesn’t want union people, then I would say union people shouldn’t drink his beer.”

Municipal worker Don Long said he would follow along with the boycott, explaining that Yuengling “doesn’t care for his workers — he just cares about how much money he can make.”

I’ve joined in a boycott against this beer, and have convinced some of my friends to do so as well. But it’s really Coors Brewing Company that takes the cake for supporting conservative causes and busting unions.

Over the years the Coors family has contributed handsomely to plenty of conservative projects and organizations. Reading about their family’s philanthropy is like reading a history of the right wing in America.

Joseph Coors was an advisor to Ronald Reagan, provided the founding grant to the infamous Heritage Foundation as well as the right wing Free Congress Foundation, which asks the following question on its website: “Will America return to the culture that made it great, our traditional, Judeo-Christian, Western culture?” If not, the US will, revert to “no less than a third world country.”

Joseph Coors really put his money where his right wing heart was when he donated a $65,000 plane to the Contras in the covert US war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas in the 1980s. It’s high time to raise a glass of non-Coors beer in solidarity with the Sandinistas. But here’s another reason to boycott America’s most successful brewing company: their union busting.

In 1977, in Colorado, home to the company’s brewery, Coors hired scabs to replace workers on strike at the plant. Jeff Coors, the president of the family company at the time, told the Los Angeles Times that he wouldn’t back down because agreeing to union demands was like “inviting the Russians in to take over America.”

The family’s repression of workers’ rights didn’t stop there. Annika Carlson writing about the Coors’ legacy at Campus Progress, says, “Until 1986, prospective Coors employees were sometimes required to take lie detector tests, answering questions about their sexual orientation, communist leanings, and how often they changed their underwear.”

In 2004, when Peter Coors, the chairman of Coors Brewing Company ran for Senate as a Republican from Colorado, local union leaders were quick to criticize the company’s poor labor relations. Steve Adams, the president of the Colorado AFL-CIO at the time, told USA Today, “Peter Coors is a Republican, and there are very few Republicans who support workers’ rights. The Coors company track record is not friendly to workers’ rights.” To this day, many of Denver’s 23,000 Food and Commercial Workers union still boycott Coors beer due to the company’s crackdowns on labor rights in the 1970s.

You can show that drinking is a very political act by turning your back on the big breweries. Or, as Carlson says about Coors, “When cracking open a cold one, remember to toast the things that make the Coors family great: union-busting, lie-detecting, Heritage-funding, double-talking and, of course, its beer.”

Brewing Trouble: How to Drink Beer and Save the World

By Benjamin Dangl

Tuesday, 18 March 2008

Reviewed: Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World
By Christopher O’Brien, New Society Publishers (November 2006), 275 pages

Beer, like so many other products, is largely in the hands of giant corporations. Therefore, drinking beer can often enrich the same systems of power we as activists are fighting against. Fermenting Revolution: How To Drink Beer and Save the World by Christopher O’Brien is a book about how the people can take back the brew and join together in saying, “If I can’t drink good beer, it’s not my revolution.”

It is satisfying and rebellious in this increasingly corporate world to make your own beer. In Vermont, homebrewing and microbrewing is a state-wide past time; a 2005 census shows that there is one microbrewery for every 32,792 people in the state, which is the highest number of microbreweries per capita in the country. As many people know, beer drinkers can be activists in how they choose and make their own beer. Interested in changing the world through drinking? Fermenting Revolution can serve as a kind of bible for the beer activist that’s bubbling inside each and every one of us.

In Fermenting Revolution, O’Brien presents a people’s history of beer, allowing the reader to feel connected to beer activists centuries ago. The author explains the scientific process of brewing in an easy to understand style, avoiding what he calls “Beer geek-speak.” The book goes into the important role women have historically played in beer making, and how people can take on corporate globalization by making and drinking their own beer. It’s time to get to the home fires brewing!

A People’s History of Beer

O’Brien starts his book out by taking us through the long and intoxicating history of beer. It is in Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq, where first emerged the trade of beer and barley. The need to cultivate crops for this important product may have been the initial reason for the settlement of the world’s first human civilization. In Babylonia, where beer was safer to drink than the canal water, barley and beer were used as a form of currency. O’Brien argues that the foundations of modern society are built on, well, beer.

Beer has also played a central role in the world’s major religions. The author suggests that a down-to-earth Jesus who “made a point of associating with ordinary folk” would probably have preferred the common beverage of beer, rather than expensive and elitist wine. “I rather like the image of Jesus as a long-haired, beer-drinking rebel, welcome to crash any party so long as he was willing to conjure up a bottomless supply of beer. Rock on, Rock of Ages!” O’Brien writes that the typical image of Buddha with a round belly suggests the spiritual figure may have been a regular consumer of beer. After all, the Buddha “encouraged abstention from intoxicating drink and drugs” but didn’t totally discourage consumption. And none other than Saint Nicholas (Santa Claus) is listed by the Catholic Church as a Patron Saint of Brewing. With stories like this linking beer to religion, O’Brien argues that “sbeerituality” needs to be put back into our drinking culture in the US.

One manifestation of beer’s role in modern spirituality is the local bar. The author writes that the bar can act “as a bridge between the sacred and secular domains.” O’Brien says that in bars in Asia, it’s often common to see a nearby altar with alcohol as an offering. Similarly, worshipping ancestors is often common at bars in the US: “It’s the picture of “Old Joe” hanging behind the bar. “Joe” built the place in nineteen-hundred-and-something-or-other, and now after his death, he offers his blessings or his disapproval to what goes on in his sacred beer-drinking place.”

A recurring theme in Fermenting Revolution is the role women have played in brewing and beer culture throughout history. Some of the earliest signs of beer show that women were primarily the brewers, and later the tavern owners, that supplied beer. This meant women historically played an important role in society through their control of the beer industry. For example, O’Brien tells us that Viking women in Norse society at the end of the first millennium were the only ones allowed to brew beer. According to law, brewing equipment could only be used by women.

As time went on, however, women around the world were pushed out of brewing by men who felt threatened by the power wielded by women brewers. O’Brien calls himself a “femaleist”: he believes that beer brewing has empowered women in the past, and has the potential to do so now. “More women brewing and drinking beer would help correct some of our socially constructed gender imbalances.” He laments the fact that today the beer industry is dominated by machismo: “Women of the world, greedy men have stolen your beer and its time to take it back.” However, one hopeful example O’Brien points to is Ethiopia, where the homebrewing industry is still strong and is largely controlled by women.

Another sign of hope is Vermont. According to an article in the VT-based Seven Days newspaper, women are no strangers to micro-brewing in the Green Mountain State. Vermont’s Trout River, Rock Art and the Alchemist Breweries all have women as co-owners or presidents. At Otter Creek Breweries, there is a woman CFO, brewer, packing manager and labeler.

Another widely discussed topic in Fermenting Revolution is the influence beer has always had on politics. Some interesting passages in the book describe early American history when rebels encouraged boycotts against English beer, using the phrase, “Homebrewed is best.” Shortly after the founding of the nation, it was common for politicians to reward their constituencies with beer at the polling stations. Often there was only one polling place per county, so after traveling such a distance to vote, the citizen wanted to be rewarded with a drink. Here O’Brien argues that “Given the dismal voter turnout levels in contemporary American elections, perhaps this strategy might be
readopted? One ballot, one beer.”

Think Globally, Brew Locally

For centuries, beer was brewed primarily at home in unregulated settings with home-made recipes. When corporations began making beer for profit, a lot of the culture and spirit of the craft was lost. Yet O’Brien believes that corporate “globeerization” can be fought through “beeroregionalism.” While corporate control of production centralizes beer power in the hands of a few, Beeroregionalism, as defined by O’Brien, is a return to local production and community. The author argues that the craft of making beer should be cherished as an ingredient in community-building, not as an assembly-line method of making money. The author walked the talk at the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. Though there’s a picture of book of O’Brien dressed up as a turtle with some other friends at a march, he admits he spent a lot of his time in the famous brewpubs of Seattle rather than in the streets.

Though O’Brien explains that three companies control over 80 percent of the beer industry in the US, there are an estimated 250,000 homebrewers in the country, and the numbers are growing. Not only is homebrewing a fun activity to do with friends and family, but brewers can choose organic products to use as ingredients and not rely on corporations for their beer. O’Brien also reminds us that brewing at home cuts down on fossil fuel consumption in that homebrew doesn’t rely on gas for delivery. In Vermont, we have a variety of organic products to use in our brewing, as well as a whole host of micro-breweries to choose from. (For those who want to learn how to homebrew, pick up a copy of Charlie Papazian’s easy to follow book The New Complete Joy of Homebrewing, published by Harper Resource).

Every reader of Fermenting Revolution is likely to find something that strikes a personal chord with them. For me, it was a history of the tin beer can. My grandfather was an avid recycler of beer cans in the college town he lived in. He was able to save tens of thousands of dollars from the nickels acquired over decades of digging through garbage bins and salvaging cans after college parties. O’Brien tells us that in 1959, Bill Coors, the owner of the beer company which carried his last name, developed the first seamless aluminum beer can. His colleagues in the industry laughed at him even when he asked people to return the cans for a penny a piece – but it worked! O’Brien writes that using a recycled can utilizes only five percent of the energy required to produce a new can from scratch: “Recycling one can saves enough energy to power a TV for 3 hours.”

Fermenting Revolution is not only informative, with pragmatic suggestions on social change, but it is fun to read. This mind-expanding book will make you thirsty for justice, and a good organic, homebrewed beer. Readers interested in self sufficiency and homegrown products should pick up a copy of Fermenting Revolution and get things brewing.

***

Visit Chris O’Brien’s Beer Activist Blog for regular updates, news and links.

Benjamin Dangl is a member of the Burlington, VT Homebrewer’s Co-op. He is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press, 2007) and edits the VT-based international news website, TowardFreedom.com. This review was originally published in Vermont Commons.

Grassroots Beer Brewers Score a Victory in Utah

By Benjamin Dangl

Published on Wednesday, March 4, 2009 by CommonDreams.org