Coors strike and boycott

The Coors Brewing Company is a Colorado-based brewing company that was founded in 1873 by German American Adolph Coors. By 1975, it had grown to become the fourth-largest brewing company in the United States, and its brewery in Golden, Colorado was the single largest brewing facility in the world.[1] That year, the company did approximately $440 million in sales. Its product was notable at the time for being one of the few beers created in the United States not to be pasteurized, which required the beer to be constantly refrigerated to prevent going stale.[1][2] The company was also notable for only selling its products in 11 states in the American West, as opposed to the national distribution of its main competitors: Anheuser-Busch, the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, and the Pabst Brewing Company.[1] This limited market area led to considerable bootlegging of the product to the eastern United States.[1] Organized labor activities at the brewery began in the 1930s,[note 1] when Adolph Coors II (who had succeeded his father as chief of the company) invited a labor union to organize at the location.[4] However, in the following decades, the company had a troubled relationship with organized labor, with the AFL–CIO claiming that the company had destroyed 19 different unions at their facilities, including local unions representing boilermakers, electricians, and ironworkers, among other groups.[5]

Executive Vice President Joseph Coors

By 1975, several members of the Coors family held leadership positions in the company, including Executive Vice President Joseph Coors and Chairman of the Board William Coors, both grandsons of Adolph's. The family was well known for their support of conservative political causes, with Joseph in particular described by The New York Times as an "ultraconservative zealot". During the late 1960s to early 1970s, Joseph served as a member of the Regents of the University of Colorado, during which time he took a hardline stance against student activism.[1] He also opposed the creation of a chapter of the United Mexican American Students on campus, as well as the creation of courses regarding Chicana/o studies.[6] Contemporary regents, from both the Democratic and Republican Parties, criticized Coors' actions as regent. In 1974, he was nominated by U.S. President Richard Nixon to the board of directors for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. However, his nomination was later killed by the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, which expressed concerns over potential conflicts of interest after it was revealed that he had donated money to the John Birch Society.[1] Joseph later donated money towards Ronald Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign,[1] and he additionally provided grants and funding to conservatives groups including The Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation,[7] and the National Right to Work Committee.[4]

Starting in 1966, the Colorado chapter of the Hispanic veterans' organization American GI Forum, along with the Denver-based group Crusade for Justice, initiated a boycott against Coors due to the company's discrimination against Mexican Americans.[6] Specifically, they cited the fact that Hispanic workers constituted only a small fraction of the total employees at Coors, with only 27 of the 1,330 employees in 1968 being Mexican Americans (approximately 2 percent of Coors' total workforce). Additionally, many of the jobs held by Hispanic employees at Coors were menial labor positions.[2] Women also constituted a very small portion of Coors' workforce, with only 56 women (44 of whom were white) working for the company in 1967.[8] In August 1970, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission found the company guilty of firing a worker due to his race.[6] The commission ultimately ruled against the company on two separate occasions in the early 1970s for discriminating against African American workers.[1] A September 1975 complaint filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleged that almost all of the African Americans and Mexican Americans at Coors worked in unskilled or semiskilled positions and that almost all of the women were employed in either office or service positions, or as clerical workers.[1] That month, the EEOC filed a lawsuit against the company with the United States District Court for the District of Colorado, with the company settling out of court in 1977.[9]

In addition to employment discrimination, Hispanic activists also singled out Joseph Coors' actions while university regent and the Coors family's response to the Delano grape strike. During the strike and associated boycott, which had been organized by the United Farm Workers, the Coors family supported non-union grape growers, and the Crusade for Justice's newspaper El Gallo published images reportedly showing Coors trucks being used to transport grapes harvested by non-union farmers to markets.[6] In 1969, 43 students at Southern Colorado State College protested Coors by blocking people at a local pub from ordering Coors beer. 15 of the students were arrested, and the college later filed a restraining order against the protestors. The same year, the boycott grew nationwide, with the national chapter of the American GI Forum instituting a boycott against Coors. This action was supported by several other national organizations representing Hispanics and Mexican Americans,[6] including the Mexican American Youth Organization and the Raza Unida Party.[2] Representatives from the American GI Forum had several meetings with William Coors during this time to address the issues they were protesting, but the discussions proved fruitless.[6]

Activist Harvey Milk (left) helped coordinate an alliance between San Francisco's gay community and labor unions to boycott Coors.[10]

Another point of contention between the company and protestors involved the use of polygraph tests on job applicants, a process that the company had implemented following the 1960 kidnapping and murder of Adolph Coors III.[6] These tests, conducted during the applicant's background check, were a significant point of contention among union members at the company, with the union alleging that the questions asked violated privacy and led to discrimination.[11] Questions asked during the testing covered topics including the use of marijuana, personal debts the individual owed, political affiliations of the application (specifically regarding "subversive, revolutionary or communist activities"),[4] and a question that read, "Is there anything in your personal life that might tend to discredit or embarrass this company if it were known?"[11] Multiple sources also reported that applicants were asked about their sexual orientation.[12][13][14] While critics of the testing alleged that the company used the information collected to prevent people from being hired based on political affiliations or sexuality, the company denied this.[12] According to William Coors, approximately 45 percent of applicants failed the polygraph testing, primarily with regards to questions over drug use.[15]

Despite the company's claims, Coors became known throughout the LGBT community for its homophobic practices, and by 1973, the boycott had expanded to include members of that community.[16] The LGBT community also began to forge an alliance against Coors with local unions, who resented the company's anti-unionism.[16] Around this time, president Allan Baird of Teamsters Local 921, which had organized Coors distribution workers in San Francisco, worked with activist Howard Wallace (an openly gay truck driver and Teamsters member[17]) to organize a largescale boycott in the Bay Area,[18] leading to numerous gay bars refusing to carry Coors products.[18][1] Gay rights activist Scott Smith was also involved in the boycott and brought it to the attention of Harvey Milk,[14] a noted gay activist and politician, who met with Baird in 1973 and helped coordinate the boycott, strengthening the alliance between the traditionally conservative Teamsters union and the area's gay community.[10] Through Milk, the boycott spread throughout the Castro District, the city's gay neighborhood.[16] Milk also encouraged the Teamsters to hire openly gay people and to oppose the Briggs Amendment, a California ballot measure that would have banned LGBT teachers from employment.[17] Activist Cleve Jones was also involved, and he later claimed that the Bay Area boycott was the first-ever instance of collaboration between labor unions and the gay rights movement.[19] Activist Tami Gold later claimed that the boycott was "perhaps one of the first major public demonstrations of the links between class and sexual identity".[16]

In 1985, Pete Coors took over the company's day-to-day operations from his father Joseph and immediately began negotiating with the AFL–CIO on an agreement that would end the boycott. The AFL–CIO rejected Coors' initial offer in February 1987, but on August 19, they announced that they had come to an agreement with the company and would end their boycott.[31] Among the concessions, the company agreed to use union workers in the construction of their new facility in Virginia.[32] This had been a point of contention that prevented the February agreement from being approved.[33] Additionally, the AFL–CIO and the company claimed that the agreement would make it easier for worker organization efforts at Coors facilities,[32] However, any union vote would be overseen by a third party such as the American Arbitration Association rather than the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).[22] Shortly after the agreement, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) announced their intent to start organizing drives at both the Elkton and Golden facilities, while the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE) and the United Auto Workers (UAW) also expressed interest in organizing Coors workers. An AFL–CIO representative at the time of the announcement claimed that it was "arguably the biggest victory in my time at the federation, and that covers 18 years",[32] while AFL–CIO president Lane Kirkland called the boycott "a complete success, a resounding success"[33] and commented on the "more positive approach taken by (the new) management" at Coors.[24] However, some union members criticized the agreement, as Coors did not guarantee a union contract.[22] At the time, union membership in the United States had been on the decline, with activist and writer Jonathan Tasini stating, "Organized labor has been in such desperate straits that the Coors settlement has been perceived as a victory – even though the workers at Coors are still without a union."[22]

At the time of the agreement, the Teamsters were attempting to organize workers at the Golden facility. The Los Angeles Times reported that the AFL–CIO saw this as a threat to possible union efforts by the IAM, IUOE, and UAW. As part of the agreement, only AFL–CIO unions would be guaranteed an expedited vote on union representation.[33] Following the agreement, the Teamsters continued their efforts to organize at the Golden plant.[34] In late 1987, the Teamsters became an AFL–CIO affiliate.[22] Following this, the Teamsters were the AFL–CIO union tasked with the organization at the Golden plant. In September 1988, it was reported that the Teamsters and Coors disagreed on whether a union vote would include only brewery workers (favored by the Teamsters) or an additional 2,000 container workers who were less favorable to unions (favored by Coors). The dispute was at the time being settled by the NLRB.[24] Ultimately, only the brewery workers participated in the union vote.[35][note 5] On December 15, 1988, workers at the Golden plant voted against unionizing with the Teamsters.[36][35] The vote came after 18 months of campaigning, with the final vote being 1,081 against to 413 in favor of unionizing.[35] Among the issues presented during the campaign, the Teamsters cited increased wages and pension plans with Teamsters members at Anheuser-Busch as examples of what could happen with a union at Coors. However, Coors rebutted that Anheuser-Busch was larger than Coors and could therefore afford the larger pay and benefits.[36][35]