Brewing a Boycott

How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism

Allyson P. Brantley

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469661049
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

In the late twentieth century, nothing united union members, progressive students, Black and Chicano activists, Native Americans, feminists, and members of the LGBTQ+ community quite as well as Coors beer. They came together not in praise of the ice cold beverage but rather to fight a common enemy: the Colorado-based Coors Brewing Company. Wielding the consumer boycott as their weapon of choice, activists targeted Coors for allegations of antiunionism, discrimination, and conservative political ties. Over decades of organizing and coalition-building from the 1950s to the 1990s, anti-Coors activists molded the boycott into a powerful means of political protest. In this first narrative history of one of the longest boycott campaigns in U.S. history, Allyson P. Brantley draws from a broad archive as well as oral history interviews with long-time boycotters to offer a compelling, grassroots view of anti-corporate organizing and the unlikely coalitions that formed in opposition to the iconic Rocky Mountain brew. The story highlights the vibrancy of activism in the final decades of the twentieth century and the enduring legacy of that organizing for communities, consumer activists, and corporations today.

PART I

CHAPTER ONE

Coors Is Trying to Destroy the Union

The Sportsman Barber Shop in downtown Golden, Colorado, had only two chairs. One was often occupied by a Coors man, getting a touch-up on the family’s signature crew cut. From the difficult years of Prohibition to the economic boom of post–World War II America, Adolph Jr. and his sons—Ad, Bill, and Joe—would make the three-block trek from the Coors campus to the barbershop with regularity. Such devotion to routine and precision, even in the business of procuring a haircut, bolstered the family’s reputation as “instinctively modest” with a “stiff-backed, tight-lipped devotion to craft.”¹

Quiet and committed to the business of brewing, Coors men were rarely involved in public politics before the 1960s, though their silence did not mean that they lacked strong opinions. The Coorses saw themselves as on the front lines of a battle in defense of the free market, protecting the family business from government intrusion (most bitterly embodied by Prohibition), labor unions, and other third-party meddlers. Thus, the family often supported antilabor, probusiness Colorado politicians; sought to weaken existing unions in their operations; and frequently espoused the benefits of the free market to their employees.²

These employees and local labor leaders, like the head of the Colorado Labor Council (CLC), Herrick Roth, knew well the threats that the taciturn but dogmatic Coors family posed to the labor movement.³ Based on his work with unions that included employees of the Coors Brewing Company, Roth believed that the Coors brothers “have no other intent than to have either no union or a company type union under their domination in any Coors operation,” as he wrote in a 1969 letter to Karl Feller, president of the United Brewery Workers (UBW). Roth noted bitterly that “the real problem is whether or not any decent trade union … can or will survive the Coors operation for many more years.”⁴ Even boycotts, he worried, could be only “partly successful” in such a hostile environment.⁵

In his letters, political activism, and his 1970s public television program “Roth’s Roundup,” Roth articulated a narrative about Coors that many others experienced firsthand: that the “down-to-earth” family and management actively fostered an antiunion environment in the brewery, among their regional distributors, and in the state and region more broadly.⁶ Between 1957 and 1973, workers and organizers in Colorado and California resisted such an environment. On at least three separate occasions, workers went on strike. In the years between, unions filed unfair labor practice charges against the company, and workers complained of oppressive and shifting work rules. And when shop floor action fell short, as it often did in the face of the company’s intransigence, union members launched the first of many boycotts of Coors’s famous Rocky Mountain brew, using the market to place additional pressure on the company’s bottom line. Workers and organizers clearly saw the contours and depth of Coors’s antiunionism and responded through these strikes, boycotts, and other forms of resistance. In these early years of the boycott, they also learned the very real limits of anti-Coors activism, whether on the shop floor or in the consumer market.

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COORS EXEMPLIFIED A NEW WAVE of business conservatism in the mid-twentieth century, which combined paternalistic language with intransigence in contract negotiations; overtly antiunion messaging on the shop floor; the hiring of both temporary and permanent replacement workers during strikes; and the pursuit of representation elections to decertify unions. As scholars have demonstrated, this period was not—as was once suggested—one of labor-management “accord.” Instead, these were years of what was at best an “armed truce” between business and labor.⁷ For political leaders and businessmen, anti-union campaigns during these years “resembled laboratories for the conservative movement,” allowing them to try a variety of strategies to undercut unions.⁸

In Colorado—a state that had benefited immensely from defense contracts and development during and after World War II—boosters and politicians alike pursued antiunion strategies to circumscribe labor’s power and attract and retain large employers like Coors.⁹ Notable among these was a 1943 state law, the Colorado Labor Peace Act (CLPA), which dramatically restricted unions’ ability to engage in collective bargaining and collect union dues. In spite of its innocuous moniker, the CLPA struck at the heart of the state’s labor movement, requiring a two-thirds supermajority to certify a union in a secret ballot election and forbidding mass picketing, wildcat and sympathy strikes, and political donations by unions.¹⁰ Four years later, the U.S. Congress added insult to injury, passing the antilabor and probusiness Taft-Hartley Act (over President Harry Truman’s veto)—a move that, as Nelson Lichtenstein writes, “prefigured and codified much of labor’s postwar retreat.”¹¹

Emboldened by state and national efforts to restrict union power, conservative business owners like Coors, as well as a new crop of antiunion consultants, refined their battle strategies in the 1950s. In particular, “a militant set of entrepreneurial, family-owned firms were the shock troops in capital’s battle to undermine union power.”¹² A regional producer in a competitive industry—and one that had already suffered intensely from outside intervention during Prohibition—Coors was representative of these “shock troops.”

In particular, Coors employed welfare capitalist rhetoric that cast its entire workforce as part of a tightly knit family and used contract negotiations, strikes, and elections as opportunities to rid themselves of bothersome unions. The Colorado brewery did so under the guidance of its go-to labor attorney and antiunion consultant, Erwin “Bud” Lerten. Originally from Pennsylvania, Lerten had moved to Beverly Hills, California, in the 1950s, where he built a career out of fighting unions—namely, representing companies as they appealed rulings of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). By 1954, he had also argued two such cases before the Supreme Court.¹³

Into the 1960s, Lerten’s client list featured prominent beer distributors and brewers—among them Coors—on whose behalf he would supervise contract negotiations. Union representatives who sat in on negotiating sessions with Lerten remember his theatrical and stubborn approach to negotiations: the bespectacled attorney would plug his ears, stomp his feet, shout or sing, and take strategic long bathroom breaks to interrupt and undermine union negotiators.¹⁴ In these sessions, Lerten and Coors sought both to force the union to make concessions and to provoke strikes. When union members walked out, Coors would hire replacements and, where possible, use those replacements to force a representation election to remove or decertify the union.¹⁵ Coors’s forays into the use of permanent replacements and decertification elections—tactics more at home in the 1970s and 1980s—suggests that business leaders were testing these strategies well before their heyday.¹⁶ And in the 1950s and 1960s, working folks at Coors experienced this firsthand.

While Coors increasingly controlled the terms of strikes, labor leaders looked to the boycott, a long-standing and proud tradition in the American labor movement, to build power and gain leverage. For nearly 150 years, trade unionists in the United States had wielded the tool of nonconsumption to bolster or, in some cases, replace strikes. While the first trade union boycott dates to 1806, the tool was not widely used—or even called a boycott—until the 1880s. In that decade, the term made its way to the United States from Ireland, after Irish peasants launched a campaign of social ostracism against an oppressive English landlord, Charles Cunningham Boycott. Working-class immigrants and their unions thus began using the tool with great frequency, primarily to shame and pressure nonunion or antiunion employers.¹⁷ Early methods for implementing, organizing, and publicizing a boycott were myriad, ranging from promises not to patronize a boycotted business; threats against anyone (or any other business) who continued to support a boycotted entity (otherwise known as a secondary boycott); advertisements, letters to the editor, or itemized “do not buy” lists; and picketing of boycotted shops.¹⁸ By the early twentieth century, trade unions regularly used this “most effective weapon of unionism,” especially in situations where strikes were prolonged, weak, or deemed too risky.¹⁹ Central labor councils—nodes of regional and local leadership within the broader labor movement—took the lead, and boycott organizers crafted leaflets, letters, and speeches for local unions to use in publicizing boycott efforts and appealing to notions of working-class solidarity.²⁰

In Golden, in 1957, Local 366 of the UBW drew from this wellspring of traditional trade union boycotts, centered around strike actions, union networks and publications, and a consumer-oriented articulation of class consciousness. These brewery workers and organizers viewed the boycott, as they wrote in an appeal to consumers, as “the surest way of convincing Coors that it IS dependent on the labor movement’s goodwill and patronage wherever it sells its beer.” Unions representing Coors beer deliverymen in California and members of Denver’s Building and Construction Trades, fighting Coors in the 1960s, also shared this hope. However, all three groups had to contend with an employer that, according to Local 366, was overtly hostile to unions and even bragged that it had no fear of any union boycott.²¹ Workers’ experiences of Coors’s antiunionism on the job and their own often abortive efforts to organize counteroffensives would lead them—and others—to rethink the effectiveness of the boycott in standoffs with business conservatives like the Coors brothers, whom Roth panned as “otherwise mature men who speak as if the final answer has been ordained to them, all rules of legal and moral codes of equality to the contrary.”²²

The First Boycott

The most prominent union at Coors, UBW Local 366, which represented production and maintenance workers, was neither an old nor a particularly militant organization. Local 366’s origins reportedly lay in the benevolence of Adolph Coors Jr., who “felt the brewery needed a union” in the wake of the 1933 repeal of Prohibition. According to the company, Coors “invited the union in and encouraged employees to join.”²³

The truth was more complicated. Brewery workers had exercised the power of the strike well before the 1930s and even in the midst of Prohibition, earning the ire of the Coors family—which saw striking workers as ungrateful and bothersome.²⁴ When the UBW International led an organizing drive in 1933 and 1934 to bolster union membership in recently reopened breweries, Coors was featured prominently on its list of unfair employers that refused to recognize brewery workers’ unions. If Coors did indeed invite the union in, it was because the UBW had pushed the door open.²⁵ And when the invitation was extended and a charter issued for Local 366 in 1934, it became clear that Coors’s benevolent and allegedly voluntary offer was a bargaining chip: your union for loyalty and a promise of labor peace.²⁶ As Jay Dee Patrick, an AFL-CIO field representative from Colorado, later noted, “Relations between the union and the company have been good as long as the union accepted paternalism.”²⁷

In the 1950s, the first cracks in Coors’s own brand of a tenuous “labor-management accord” began to emerge.²⁸ “A younger generation of the Coors family took over management of the brewery,” wrote organizers for Local 366 in an informative pamphlet, “bringing with them a pronounced antiunion atmosphere, which was to grow stronger each ye...