On Monday, an organizer from Teamsters Local 322 walked into the taproom at Stone Brewing Company’s state-of-the-art taproom in Richmond, Va. with a letter addressed to the boss. The boss wasn’t in, and a manager on the floor refused to accept the proffered paper. So instead, the Teamster staffer read it aloud.
“Please accept this as Teamsters Local 322’s (“Union”) Request for Sapporo-Stone Brewing to recognize the Union as the exclusive collective bargaining representative of Stone Brewing’s employees located at its 4300 Williamsburg Avenue, Richmond, Virginia 23231 facility,” said Dwayne Johnson, the local’s recording secretary & director of organizing. “Well over a majority of the employees in the defined bargaining unit have requested that the Union represent them in collective bargaining for improved terms and conditions of employment.” He left the document on the bar, then left the building.
The union drive at Stone, a West Coast juggernaut that was acquired by the Japanese multinational Sapporo Holdings in 2022, is a big deal within the context of those two companies. I reported on those stakes earlier this week, breaking the news of the drive here at VinePair. After unceremoniously shuttering Anchor Brewing Company last summer, Sapporo (which had bought Anchor in 2017; workers there unionized in 2019), pivoted its domestic ambitions to Stone’s East Coast facility, pouring $40 million into upgrades last year to make it as the stateside source for Sapporo Premium. The Richmond plant is a key linchpin to Sapporo’s expansion in this country.
Don’t Miss A Drop
Get the latest in beer, wine, and cocktail culture sent straight to your inbox.
After launching the Richmond drive in September 2023, hot on the heels of Sapporo’s liquidation of Anchor’s proud legacy, pro-union workers at Stone went public earlier this week. The union says it has around 70 percent of applicable union cards signed. Workers want better pay, more reliable scheduling, and smarter staffing. One current employee detailed to me the ways management has tried to stop the drive: outside consultants, increased executive visits, ice-cream socials, and so on.
After I broke the news of the drive, a Sapporo-Stone Brewing spokesperson issued a statement via email on behalf of the company, and I later obtained an email from newly minted chief executive officer Zach Keeling to Stone workers with a nearly identical message. The upshot: the company plans to fight the union to an election, rather than voluntarily recognize it. Sapporo-Stone Brewing did not respond to my follow-up questions to address the allegations of its anti-union conduct.
My source at the brewery spoke on the condition of anonymity, noting that a vocal pro-union worker had just been fired. Hop Take corroborated many of these details with Local 322’s Johnson, as well as the former worker who’d recently been terminated. The latter also requested anonymity, because even after being terminated from the firm, they were fearful of jeopardizing their job prospects in the close-knit Richmond brewing industry.
Let’s zoom out. We’re headed into Labor Day Weekend, which is both one of the most important beer-selling holidays of the year, and one specifically established to honor labor’s contributions to this country. I gotta say, after a decade and a half covering this industry, and half a dozen years looking closely at its intersection with the labor movement, the contemporary American beer business’ track record of honoring labor leaves a lot to be desired. And craft brewery owners’ own track record? Woof.
Macrobrewing executives at the top of the industry have been no great friends to unions of late, don’t get me wrong. But thanks to Jack Welch and the rest of the Masters of the Universe that remade American corporations into singular Molochs of shareholder return, we’ve come to expect a certain extractive ghoulishness from the c-suites of publicly traded firms these days. Workers, being both expensive and prone to occasionally imagining more for themselves than a life of forever toil, have been an obvious target for both pragmatic and ideological reasons. There’s a reason pro-union sentiment and corporate profits are both hitting historic highs at the same time: American workers are realizing they’ve been fleeced by decades of anti-labor propaganda from the suits, and they want their f*cking money back.
Craft brewing was supposed to be different, man. Owners made their bread for three decades in part on claiming to be everything that Big Beer wasn’t. They cared about the environment! They cared about the community! They didn’t even wear suits! When it comes to labor relations, though, the anti-corporate segment has tended to prove the old labor organizer’s creed: a boss is a boss is a boss.
Nothing about the situation at Stone surprises me. There’s a well-worn playbook for this stuff, developed over generations by phalanxes of overpaid consultants and attorneys willing to do management’s bidding. So far, Sapporo-Stone — which, as the 12th-biggest brewery by volume according to the Brewers Association in 2023, is one of the largest examples of a mid-major operator in the non-BA-defined “craft” segment — has followed it nearly to a T.
It’s not the only craft brewery owned to do so. Like Creative Comforts Brewing Company in 2023, Stone has hired a high-powered law firm that specializes in “develop[ing] effective, creative strategies to respond to organizing activity.” Like Minnesota’s Surly Brewing Company in 2020, Stone encouraged its workers with the rhetoric of revolution (compare “Arise, Surly nation” to Stone’s “revolutionary spirit”) right up until they started getting all uppity. Like D. G. Yuengling & Son in 2009, Stone wants to get rid of its union as soon as possible, and is availing itself of the NLRB’s deliberately obtuse function to secure its goal. In Pottsville, it was a union decertification election under allegedly illegal circumstances (of which the NLRB found no evidence some five years later.) In Richmond, it’s the trusty corporate canard that an arduous and drawn out union election, rather than a straight-forward card-check process, is the only way workers should be allowed to express their preferences about union representation. Same as it ever was.
I should pause here and issue the standard disclaimers:
1. Some number of craft brewery owners care deeply about their workers and act accordingly. #NotAllBosses, et cetera.
2. Some number of craft brewery workers do not want to be union members and pay union dues. #RightToWork, et cetera.
3. Unions are not themselves immune from forces of ambition, corruption, and corporate capture. #WeExistInTheContext, et cetera.
If you find yourself angrily drafting an email to me to demand I acknowledge one of the points above, save yourself the trouble. I’m sure you’re one of the good ones. Or maybe you’re not! Moving on.
There are versions of this story that buck the mold. Sometimes craft brewery owners get along with their union workforces. When Fair State Brewing Cooperative’s workers in St. Paul, Minn., organized in 2020, its owners voluntarily recognized their union, as did Aslin’s owners in 2024 when its Washington, D.C. workers did likewise. Good! These relationships don’t have to be adversarial by default, either. Workers at August Schell Brewing Company, also in Minnesota, have been brewing union beer since the 1930s. Good!!!
I don’t write about these examples very often because a) they’re exceedingly rare; and more importantly, b) literally the least that supposedly local/community-oriented companies can do when confronted with a union drive is not try to bust it. Workers, after all, are a key part of said community. This is a low bar, and craft brewery owners routinely struggle to clear it.
Craft brewing has changed. It’s not as cool as it used to be, and it’s much harder to get rich, or even get by. So many workers’ dream of working their way up until they’re able to open their own brewery has given way to a nightmare of bad backs, bad health insurance, and bad lending rates. Breweries are closing and opening at a nearly equal rate, and distributors and retailers — who have their own checkered relationships with organized labor — have long since moved on to the hot new thing.
Do these factors explain why production breweries’ weekly wages (as defined and measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) have trailed those of beverage manufacturers, distilleries, and wineries for all but four of the last 24 fiscal quarters, according to analysis shared with Hop Take by editor Bryan Roth of Sightlines? No. Are they good reasons that craft beer workers should not exercise their federal rights to protect themselves from the capricious whims and panicked impulses of their breweries’ owners, who always seem more interested in redistributing consequences of risk, rather than profits when those risks pay off? Also no.
Unions cannot “fix” the craft brewing industry. They are no panacea for the very real challenges that the segment faces. Anybody who says otherwise is either drunk or lying or both. But unions can help to fix individual breweries. At its best, collective action — the foundational building block of any shop floor union — can force companies to be at their best.
Those labor shortages and transient workforces that the segment has grappled with over the past few years were macroeconomic, and outgrowths of dogshit salaries and asshole managers. Those industry stories in 2021 detailing shameful instances of workplace discrimination and sexual harassment were also stories of precarious workers too terrified of losing jobs they needed to speak out to protect themselves and their colleagues. Substandard products, dangerous equipment failures, hell, even terrible rebrands — workers can help owners solve these problems with union training programs, higher self-enforced safety standards, and honest feedback from outside the boardroom bubble. But they need a voice on the job, and protection to use it even when it’s going to piss the boss off.
This industry is getting left behind by drinkers. It cannot afford to be left behind by its workers at the same time. Like the Teamsters organizer at Stone this past Monday, I have a message to deliver this Labor Day Weekend. This one is for brewery bosses and workers alike. The country is changing, and so is this industry. Which side are you on?
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
One of the most promising growth opportunities for craft brewers these days isn’t beer at all, but rather non-alcoholic seltzers infused with hemp-derived tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). The product has become a big side-line business for breweries in states where it’s legal, notably Minnesota. Not so in Georgia, though. After legislators passed a law in this year’s session dictating how “consumable hemp products” can be sold in the Peach State, the Department of Revenue issued new guidance last week advising retail package liquor stores that they must pull any THC beverages off shelves by October 1 because “mixing them with [d]istilled [s]pirits would create a beverage that cannot legally be sold.” Is that… are people doing that?
📈 Ups…
Left Hand Brewing is crowdfunding a stab at building a craft roll-up/safe harbor/thing for other craft brands… Workers at Stone Brewing Co. are unionizing with the Teamsters in Richmond, Va. … Congrats to Bow & Arrow Brewing Co., Human Robot Brewery, Sacred Profane Brewery, and all the other 2024 Next Wave finalists…
📉 …and downs
Oh cool, even import beers were in the red in the off-premise in the four weeks through mid-August… Ready-to-drinks collectively cracked $13 billion in annual sales, but hard seltzers were down 13.1 percent in NielsenIQ off-premise scans through mid-July… New Belgium Brewing is hot-potatoing Magnolia Brewing, completing the Kirin-owned firm’s pull-back from San Francisco on-premise locations… The hearing for the Federal Trade Commission’s injunction on the Kroger-Albertsons merger has featured some real tautological arguments from the companies’ attorneys…
