THE GIST
On Sept. 16, a former employee of Portland, Maine’s Rising Tide Brewing Company filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against the business. The independent, federal agency is responsible for enforcing U.S. labor law. The complaint alleges an 8(a)(3) discharge, a termination based on an employee’s pro-union position.
The former employee, who asked not to be named because he fears it will harm his chances of future employment in the brewing industry, says Rising Tide’s co-owners Heather and Nathan Sanborn discouraged him from organizing production staff at the brewery to form a union earlier this year. The primary goals of the union, according to this former employee, were to improve safety protocols, facilitate better communication between owners and staff, and to conduct employee performance reviews on a regular basis in lieu of a sporadic or request-only basis. Ultimately, he hoped that a union at Rising Tide would serve as a model to encourage other area breweries to raise wages and benefits.
The tension between ownership and employees goes back to the start of the year. On Jan. 23, the Sanborns sent an email to six production staff outlining seven reasons the employees should not vote to organize. The email asserted:
Costs associated with unionization would reduce the company’s overall resources, resulting in less money for compensation and benefits.
Unionization could result in employees having “benefits or work rules that [they] don’t like.”
Union dues would cost workers hundreds of dollars a year.
The pair concluded: “When you consider all the facts, we hope that you will decide that a union would not be the right choice for Rising Tide.”
Ultimately, the NLRB complainant says the owners fired him because of his pro-union efforts, as well as COVID-19-related safety concerns he raised on behalf of himself and others.
Rising Tide co-owner Heather Sanborn is no stranger to the politics of unionization. She’s served as a Democratic state senator since 2018 and has a 100 rating from the AFL-CIO based on her voting record for issues that would typically be pro-union. The Sanborns declined to talk about the lawsuit with GBH, providing only this statement: “As a family owned business, we have worked tirelessly to take care of our staff during this pandemic—both during the closure and during the reopening process. We are confident that when the National Labor Relations Board examines the facts, they will find that we conducted ourselves entirely appropriately.” They say they are unable to comment further.
The NLRB has begun to depose parties and witnesses related to this complaint; it’s expected to issue a judgment in the next three months. If the board finds the complaint has probable merit—that there is evidence the employee was terminated for his pro-union efforts—it could order the former employee to be reinstated and/or compensated with back pay.
WHY IT MATTERS
Labor unions in beer have made news over the past year, dating back to December 2019, when Anchor Brewing employees successfully unionized. But as COVID-19 has created economic hardship and safety concerns for breweries and workers nationwide, the movement has picked up steam.
Earlier this month, hospitality employees at Minneapolis’ Surly Brewing Company informed ownership of their intent to unionize. That decision was driven partly by employees’ desire for better pay and healthcare coverage during the pandemic. Ownership did not voluntarily recognize the union, and two days later informed employees the Surly Beer Hall would close entirely in early November, eliminating roughly 140 positions. Also this month, employees of Fair State Brewing, with locations in Minneapolis and St. Paul, saw their union voluntarily recognized by ownership.
The former Rising Tide employee who filed the NLRB complaint says the Sanborns were well aware of his role in coordinating the brewery’s pro-union drive. He says production employees’ interest in forming a Teamsters-affiliated union began in early 2019, culminating in a planned vote in late January 2020. Organizers called off that vote the day before it was set to take place when they realized they wouldn’t have a majority of “yes” votes.
The former employee who led the effort alleges that issues raised to ownership around communication and safety concerns during the pandemic were part of his termination.
This employee and five other production workers were furloughed in March during the early days of the pandemic. When he and four of those brewers were brought back in mid-June, however, he says they were asked by a manager to work mostly as servers and bartenders in the tasting room, rather than as brewers. “There was never any official, HR-type contact,” he says, adding that they were told they could return to brewing only when production demand increased.
Failure to accept this role, the former employee assumed, meant he would have been refusing an offer of work and therefore unable to collect unemployment. He also would have lost health insurance he had through Rising Tide. He says health insurance was especially important to him during a pandemic.
After being brought back from furlough, he says he and some front-line employees voiced concerns to the Sanborns in early July about creating time for hand-washing breaks, customers getting within six feet of staff (in a breach of health officials’ guidance to reduce virus transmission), staff touching dirty glassware without gloves, and other COVID-related safety issues. (Gloves were provided to taproom staff, he says, but there was no guidance on how to properly use them, and it was his understanding that to change gloves after handling dirty and clean glassware would have slowed down the pace of service.) He characterizes the Sanborns’ response to such concerns as dismissive.
“We wanted to be included in the conversation about how to do this safely, to have our conversations heard and acknowledged, not just to be categorically dismissed without any [discussion],” he says. Research backs up his safety worries: A New York Times analysis found fast-food workers, waiters, cashiers, and other front-line hospitality workers face “elevated risk” for contracting COVID-19.
Rising Tide’s former employee says after workers spoke up about their safety anxieties during a Zoom call with all tasting room staff on July 6, the Sanborns canceled future departmental Zoom meetings. Against the backdrop of COVID-19, which brought about a need for increased transparency to keep people safe, this move was worrisome to some staff who had cited better communication as one of their reasons for wanting to unionize in the first place.
“We understood that circumstances were different and would have to change on the fly, but changes weren’t communicated to us and our input wasn’t included in the process when we’re the ones on the front line,” the former employee says.
Low morale came to a head in mid-July, he says, when his manager and Heather Sanborn had conversations with him about his negative attitude toward his job. However, he says he was told his attitude or behavior never led to any customer complaints. (This former employee admits he was unhappy working closely with the public in the taproom. At another brewery job he held in the years before joining Rising Tide, this was point of contention for which he'd been disciplined.) In late July, Heather Sanborn met him in Rising Tide’s parking lot and terminated his employment.
“The reason given to me was that I was clearly too unhappy to work there and that I was having a negative effect on team morale and cohesion,” he says.
He claims, however, that other employees with workplace violations were not reprimanded for things like tardiness, arguing with management, and drinking on the job. He believes it was his efforts to unionize employees and to raise safety concerns that led to his firing.
The reasons for his firing are in dispute and are now the subject of the NLRB investigation. He says that when he and other employees first began trying to organize last year, it was, in part, because they appreciated Rising Tide as a company. Despite communication difficulties between owners and workers, he calls Rising Tide “a better place to work than most breweries,” adding that owners paid brewers above the state minimum wage.
During his tenure in production, in which time he was promoted from cellarman to production assistant to brewer, his pay increased from its original rate of $12 per hour to $15.50 per hour. (Portland’s minimum wage increased to $12 per hour in January; a living wage calculator maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology indicates a living wage for a single adult with no children in the state of Maine is $12.48 per hour.)
Originally, employees hoped that the Sanborns would see the union effort as an opportunity for the brewery and voluntarily recognize it, especially given Heather Sanborn’s Democratic political affiliation.
“We wanted to raise Rising Tide’s profile, like, ‘Look at this company that’s doing something for its workers,’” he says. “We felt we were in a good place to form a union, establish some standards, and encourage other breweries locally and far away to do so.”
But the failure of Rising Tide’s production employees to successfully organize may now serve as more of a cautionary tale than an encouraging one. No doubt brewery employees nationally, not just those at Rising Tide, await the findings and resolution of the NLRB’s investigation.
Words by Kate Bernot