Hence the union cannot strike a union brewery without helping non-union breweries, ultimately shrinking and hurting the union itself. This article, by the way, is not an invitation to argue. Our feature on Christmas beers Dec. How could a publication such as yours display a product of a company with a record as bad as Coors?
With the letter came a half-inch stack of photocopies from the AFL-CIO, clearly intended to seal the guilt of the Adolph Coors Company and lead to support for a boycott of its products. Upon examination, however, the union-provided materials proved to be filled with undocumented accusations, half-truths, exaggerations, contradictions and out-of-date information.
It is already on tap in many local taverns. The union-sponsored boycott against Coors began officially in , during a strike by Brewery Workers Local in Golden, Colorado. As with all previous strikes at Coors, the union lost. In December , the employees held a recertification ballot and voted out Local by a margin, The scenario is not unusual. From to , unions lost more than half of all representation elections and three out of every four recertification elections.
In the United States, union membership has declined to Bureau of Labor Statistics. Former year Coors employee and Local president David Sickler continues to lead the boycott which chases Coors around the country, targeting union councils, city councils, college students and the press.
Caught in the middle of pro- and anti-boycott publicity is Owasco Beverage Corporation of Syracuse. Although Owasco has good union relations with its Teamsters Union employees, General Manager Bob Merriam is concerned by the negative publicity that follows the Coors company.
But if the experience of other cities holds true, you will hear plenty of accusations and rumors on your way to the cooler. Common charges include claims that the company engages in racist, anti-union, anti-gay and anti-woman employment practices, forces employees to take lie detector tests, conducts frequent search-and-seizure raids and pollutes the environment.
Lie detector tests were discontinued in August , and the last employee complaint about abuse of the practice occurred in The last documented case of search and seizure occurred in Many outside sources verify that worker satisfaction is high. The company receives 50, job applications each year, with only a 3 percent annual turnover. In trying to establish racist employment practices, for example, AFL-CIO materials avoid current figures and feature a statement from David Sickler noting that in he was aware of only one Black and four or five Mexican-Americans at the brewery.
When Coors reached a similar agreement with Hispanic leaders two months later, AFL-CIO spokesmen and Hispanic leaders who were not involved in the agreement called it a sham and a gimmick to promote beer sales. In supporting the anti-woman charges, AFL-CIO materials again avoid recent figures, and those cited contradict one another. One study says 3 percent of the brewery workforce was female in ; another puts it at 7 percent in , two years earlier. National boycott leader Sickler, in fact, might wish he could take back a few words he said to Mike Wallace on the September 26, , edition of 60 Minutes :.
Wallace: They got rid of the union. Despite this admission, and even though Coors discontinued all employee polygraph testing on August 31, , the polygraph charge is still being made on numerous pieces circulated by the AFL-CIO.
The 60 Minutes segment also investigated the charges of forced searches and seizures. Sickler was asked if he knew of any instances in the past five years prior to From his total experience, Sickler offered only Jerry Berella, a Coors employee who was fired after marijuana was found in his truck.
Coors is known to be one of the best places to work in Denver. The same article, however, notes Coors was one of companies using the site, and the dumping was legal. The acres now hold million gallons of toxic waste. Coors literature and third-party sources, on the other hand, cite the Coors company as a leader in the recycling of energy, oil, glass, plastic and aluminum, as well as in water treatment, air-quality monitoring and advanced pollution controls.
In , Coors pioneered aluminum can recycling, manufacturing its own cans and offering a penny for every returned can. On the environment and other issues, the AFL-CIO uses another tactic: blurring the distinction between individual members of the Coors family and the company that bears its name. He was conservative as they come. I mean, he was a little bit right of Attila the Hun. One of the most famous flare-ups came in when William Coors was an invited speaker at a Denver association of Afro-American businessmen.
Coors was talking about the situation in Zimbabwe, the nation that used to be Rhodesia. By lunchtime, the article had been faxed to every union hall in the United States.
The race continued but in , Coors withdrew its sponsorship for logistical and financial reasons. The boycotts had a clear financial impact. Company profits also dwindled during this time, both to the boycott and increased competition from other breweries. But grudges against Coors continue, even though the company has an improved record of hiring minorities and women, and has reached out — both financially and through marketing — to communities that once actively boycotted its products.
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Learn how to explore music more deeply with Music Blocks! Our newsletters bring you a closer look at the stories that affect you and the music that inspires you. Listen Live. Need help? Hence the astonishment when a campaign was launched last month in the gay press featuring homosexual couples carrying six-packs of Coors Light to a picnic.
The initiative was promoted by Scott Coors, 33, the recently surfaced gay son of company chairman William Coors. Until then he had worked in obscurity as director in charge of 'product damage prevention'.
But, in a stinging rebuff to the company's change of heart, leading gay newspapers have refused to run the ad, citing the support of right-wing groups by the company's founders and their successors. The company's critics say the Coors clan boasts a long record of funding anti-gay groups such as Free Congress and the Heritage Foundation through the family-owned Castle Rock Foundation.
Jeffrey Coors, a Free Congress trustee, was the group's chairman in when it filed a complaint in a Hawaii court case over gay marriage, calling homosexual sex 'an infamous crime against nature'. The Free Congress website announces 'our main focus is on the Culture War' - a term used by Pat Buchanan as a coded threat to gay and lesbian rights.
Free Congress is credited with funding the The Homosexual Network and Gays, Aids and You, two books by Catholic priest Enrique Rued in which the author railed against 'the evil nature' of homosexuality. In a recently circulated email, Horowitz - who made headlines this year with campus newspaper ads suggesting black Americans had benefited from slavery - touted his opposition to the 'destructive agenda' of 'gay and lesbian liberationists'.
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