With the country’s largest beer industry conference set to take place in Minneapolis May 2-5, union organizers have a unique opportunity to galvanize a national labor movement through contact with thousands of attendees. As unionization, workplace safety, and pay have become national storylines—including in beer—the annual Craft Brewers Conference (CBC) will be held in a city that has become ground zero for hospitality and craft beverage unionization efforts.
This year’s CBC takes place against an uneasy backdrop: The pandemic is far from vanquished. Unsafe and inequitable working conditions at breweries are a more discussed topic than ever before. Barriers to inclusive workplaces remain. Pay, benefits, and growth opportunities aren’t keeping pace with workers’ needs.
But as employees descend upon a city vaunted as fertile ground for labor organizing, does this represent a once-in-a-generation opportunity for labor organizing in craft beer, or will conference attendees focus their attention elsewhere?
Minneapolis is no stranger to union efforts over the past two years. Sparked in part by the demands made of workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, employees at Tattersall Distilling, Stilheart Distillery, Lawless Distilling, and Fair State Brewing Cooperative all voted to unionize in 2020. In doing so, Fair State became the first U.S. craft brewery to successfully unionize. (Workers at Minneapolis’ August Schell Brewing Company have been represented by United Steelworkers since the 1930s.) Several more restaurants, bars, cafeterias, and airport concessionaires in the Twin Cities have followed their lead in years since.
The AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the United States, holds the city up as a national model: “Minneapolis is one city that has seen a wave of worker actions and organizing wins in the hospitality sector, and the labor movement’s successes there will undoubtedly inspire workers in other parts of the country who are looking to form a union.” Last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 16% of Minnesota workers were part of a union, far ahead of the national average of 10.8%.
In an April survey of 280 brewing industry employees completed by Craft Beer Professionals and Craft Beer Advisory Services, respondents reported wages typically trail living wages across states with sufficient data.
The survey found that more than 60% of brewing operations employees who responded classify their compensation as somewhat or extremely below fair pay.
Nearly 30% of all respondents said they do not have meaningful educational or professional development opportunities at their current jobs.
Base pay raises, growth opportunities, and increased benefits were the top three factors employees cited as critical to their future happiness at work.
Last year’s Craft Brewers Conference, downsized due to COVID, hosted about 7,000 brewery staff, owners, and trade partners. It was halved from a historic high of about 14,000 attendees in 2019. The Brewers Association (BA), which hosts the event, expects about 9,500 this year. These attendees will gather a year after the largest outpouring of #MeToo stories in the beer industry to date, and less than a year after major worker-led critiques of conditions at BrewDog, Mikkeller, Modern Times, and others, in some cases resulting in resignations and reforms.
Next week, Minneapolis will be not only the center of the hospitality labor movement, but will become the focus of the craft brewing universe.
None of CBC’s official conference events or seminars directly address labor unions in beer. That’s not a surprise, given that it’s brewery owners or managers who pay BA membership dues, and that it’s often ownership and management rather than rank-and-file workers who attend CBC. (The BA says data on what it refers to as attendees’ “rep classes”—management, marketing, brewer, etc.—is still in flux leading up to CBC, and thus it cannot provide information about what percentages of overall attendees come from each rep class.)
Anders Bloomquist, a warehouse specialist at Fair State and an organizer with the union Unite Here Local 17, says given those realities, he wouldn’t expect discussions about unionization to take place as part of the official CBC docket. He and other organizers also suspect that workers who do attend CBC may feel constrained by their bosses’ presence there, even if they were interested in exploring what unionization would mean for them and the businesses at which they work. It’s only been within the last couple of years, he says, that there’s been any kind of concerted effort from labor unions to organize workers within the craft brewing industry.
As a result, Fair State and Unite Here 17 don’t have any official pro-labor programming scheduled to coincide with CBC, nor does the Industrial Workers of the World, a U.K.-based global labor union that has been doing outreach to the brewing industry. On one hand, organizers might appear to be missing a huge opportunity. On the other hand, the chance to loudly and explicitly discuss labor organizing in beer would likely be hindered by the environment at CBC anyway, a place where owners, bosses, and managers dominate. Instead, such communication is likely to happen more quietly.
“Minneapolis is a great city and I know a lot of workers who will be there to revel in CBC, but no IWW organizers will be there this year,” an IWW spokesperson wrote in an email. “As a brewer and organizer, I agree how important Minneapolis is to labor organizing in brewing.”
Unlike labor organizing, the topic of general workplace culture is on the official CBC schedule. This year’s conference will feature a programming umbrella called Thrive, “a CBC experience that fosters safe, inclusive, and equitable cultures where everyone in the craft brewing community can thrive.” This includes training, educational seminars, meet-ups, and workshops.
Two seminars directly address workers:
“Stay Modern: Crafting Internal Company Culture” is a discussion between BA president Bob Pease and Modern Times’ CEO Jennifer Briggs, focused on how breweries of all sizes can create safe environments for employees. (Briggs officially took over as CEO of Modern Times in January following the departure of former CEO and founder Jacob McKean, who stepped down after some employees asserted Modern Times fostered a hostile work environment. In recent months, Modern Times has closed four taprooms, laid off 73 employees, and is currently in financial receivership.)
“The Burden of Burnout: Where to Start to Combat and Prevent It,” led by DJ Enga, a financial wellness services manager and employee assistance program consultant, and Katie Muggli, founder and executive director of Infinite Ingredient, a nonprofit focused on the well-being of craft beverage employees.
Bloomquist is glad to see working conditions addressed at CBC, but he’s skeptical that these panels will focus on the demands that are most salient to actual workers: better pay, better benefits, and a greater voice for workers in setting company policy. A 2021 YMCA WorkWell poll of 2,000 working adults found that the most important thing employees say would support their mental health is a reduced workload, followed by paid mental health days they can actually use and more flexible work options. Bloomquist says platitudes like “positive company culture” can obscure a drive for more tangible changes.
“When we talk about it in a very abstract manner, I think we’d all say, ‘Sure that sounds good,’” he says. “But when the conversation starts to move to people’s paychecks, suddenly it’s a very different conversation.”
In the absence of official programming, pro-labor organizers hope that Fair State union members will be a resource for CBC attendees curious about unionizing. Bloomquist says his co-workers are prepared for that; they’ve discussed having business cards and informational handouts available for attendees they meet. He has advised workers to be cognizant of who is present for such conversations; legally, employers cannot discourage workers from organizing, however, in reality, this does happen both subtly and overtly, often without legal ramification for employers. Fair State has also discussed which employees will attend certain CBC seminars and events that are relevant to workplace conditions, such as a seminar that will address the concept of eliminating tipping in brewpubs and taprooms.
Such informal conversations between Fair State and other brewery employees is not very visible—and that’s the idea. Bloomquist and Freeberg want attendees to feel that they can ask union stewards candid questions and get unvarnished answers. (Fair State employees will be wearing union buttons, and Bloomquist is urging Unite Here members in attendance to wear their bright red union T-shirts.) If other employees’ supervisors are present, that might mean waiting until after the conference to have those conversations by phone or text.
“If there is that individual who is like, ‘Boy I’d love to chat more about this subject but my boss is 5 feet away from me here,’ we are looking into having [union stewards’] contact info available for anyone who stops into our taproom,” Bloomquist says. “If they have even a little bit of interest then myself or someone can reach out to them and say, ‘Hey, heard you wanted to chat a little bit more when it wasn’t in the middle of a crowd.’”
Bloomquist is already used to fielding unionization-related questions from other brewery workers across the country. He estimates he has at least one such conversation a month, for varying degrees of time, with workers in various stages of considering workplace drives. The vast majority of those people have heard about Fair State’s union and found him through social media. He hopes any of those people attending CBC are able to see what a unionized brewery looks like up close by visiting Fair State’s taproom. The goal is to illustrate that a unionized workforce can result in both happier employees and a thriving business.
Freeberg also believes Fair State and Minneapolis’ unionized distilleries, bars, and restaurants will act as positive examples for not just brewery workers but managers who are in town for CBC.
“It’s cool that a bunch of owners are coming to a place where we have a hugely successful brewery in Fair State that has a union contract,” he says. “They have health care, raises every year, respect on the job, and [the business is] still making money. That’s a good thing for them to see.”
Unionization among craft breweries is, perhaps paradoxically, a quite fractured and localized process. There’s not one union that counts all breweries as members:
Workers at San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing are represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Local 6, while those at Olympia, Washington’s Headless Mumby Brewing Company are part of SMART, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers Union.
Front-of-house workers at Bend, Oregon’s Crux Fermentation Project notified the National Labor Relations Board in April of their intent to form their own union called Crux Front of the House Employees Union.
Such efforts are geographically disparate and don’t have a central organizer. Yet they often informally serve as inspiration and guidance for each other, especially at a time when Amazon and Starbucks workers have kept labor organizing in national headlines. At least 220 Starbucks stores nationally have begun unionization efforts as of mid-April, with at least 20 successfully establishing unions; a second Amazon warehouse in New York will count votes in its unionization drive next week. Fighting such efforts costs employers big: A December 2019 report from the Economic Policy Institute found U.S. employers spend $340 million each year on union-avoidance consultants. Given such headlines, inspiration for the next craft brewery union is just a Google search away.
“Because unions in craft brewing is a brand-new thing … that’s why it can seem more fragmented. But the workers are finding each other and are talking,” Freeberg says. “It’s 100% happening on Twitter and Instagram.”
This is true across the pro-labor movement. Gen-Z for Change, which Politico dubbed “the progressive movement’s TikTok army,” counts more than 540 million followers and has recently turned much of its attention to backing pro-union efforts at companies like Starbucks and Amazon.
“Maybe we created another generation of organizers,” Elise Joshi, the group’s director of operations, told Wired in April. “Maybe they’re [saying to] themselves, ‘Hey, I work at a restaurant too. Maybe I’ll try to organize my workplace and mobilize people that I work with.’”
Given the absolutely critical role that social media and digital communication play in today’s labor movements, perhaps face-to-face meetings between workers and organizers at CBC isn’t as important as it once was. In 2022, solidarity among craft brewery employees is more likely to coalesce in Instagram DMs than on the CBC convention floor.
Words by Kate Bernot