Here Are All the Pages of Sapporo-Stone’s Union-Busting Playbook (So Far)

Many companies would rather their workers didn’t form unions, because union workers tend to make more money and take less shit than non-union workers, and don’t have to pretend they think of their bosses like “family.”

So companies will often try to kibosh their workers’ organizing efforts. Owners and managers like to call this practice “union avoidance,” or simply “persuading,” which is somehow both less and more revealing. Workers, unions, and their allies have another term for it: “union-busting.”

Regardless of what you call it, Sapporo-Stone Brewing is currently doing it.

Late last month, I broke the news that workers at Stone’s plant here in Richmond, Va., were organizing with Teamsters Local 322, a branch of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The drive began in 2023 shortly after Sapporo USA unceremoniously handed Anchor Brewing Company’s 150-plus-year legacy over to liquidators and pivoted its American ambitions to the East Coast outpost of the San Diego-based craft brewery it’d bought the year prior. Stone Richmond workers told VinePair they were organizing for all the standard stuff: better pay, conditions, and scheduling.

In early June, before the drive even went public, Sapporo-Stone Brewing (SSB) caught wind of it. There are few secrets in brewhouses, after all. The firm, which had just completed a $40 million renovation on the brewery to boost its capacity to pump out fresh Sapporo Premium for the U.S. market, did something pretty standard, too. It began trying to bust the union.

It’s important to be explicit that this doesn’t have to happen. Stone workers who want to be represented by Teamsters Local 322 signed union cards saying so; the union told me it went public with around 70 percent of cards signed from workers in the proposed bargaining unit (more on this in a moment). If Stone wanted to, it could run a card check, see if the union did indeed have majority support among its workers, then voluntarily recognize the union.

This is the easy way. No workers get fired, no bosses get their feelings hurt, no journalists have to dedicate another f*cking column to corporate union-busting. For reasons noted above, companies don’t like this option. But it has merits!

Dare to dream. In Richmond, SSB has chosen the hard way forward for itself and its workers. The hard way is basically:

Convince your workers that unions are bad before they organize.
Convince them not to sign cards once they start to organize.
Convince them to vote against being represented by the union after they sign cards.

On paper, these steps seem absurdly straightforward, even impotent. But they’re remarkably effective, and have been for years, because bosses have two extremely formidable weapons at their disposal:

Time, because they can force a union election through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which often takes months. Stone’s is currently scheduled for Oct. 3 of this year. “Time is huge, and employers know that, especially in a place like a brewery,” one labor scholar who has studied the craft brewing industry told Hop Take for a column about the acrimonious anti-union campaign Creature Comforts Brewing Co. waged against its workers for much of last year. That drive eventually went to an NLRB election nine months after going public; the union lost.
“Persuaders,” which is the NLRB’s jargon for the consultants, some of them former union members themselves, who fly in to help bosses flip union elections in their favor. These hired guns “play a crucial role in keeping U.S. union membership near a historic low — and they are well rewarded for their efforts,” wrote labor journalist Dave Jamieson in an excellent package for HuffPost last year shining light on the murky, lucrative industry. “Many now earn more than $2,000 per day.”

On July 19, a full month and a half before workers at its brewhouse had even gone public with their drive, SSB struck a deal with Government Resources Consultants of America, Inc., (GRCA) according to a mandatory filing by the latter firm with the Office of Labor Management Standards at the U.S. Bureau of Labor. An analysis by the independent pro-labor watchdog Labor Lab found that the firm took in over $3 million in fees in 2022 for its work “persuad[ing] employees to exercise or not to exercise, or persuad[ing] employees as to the manner of exercising, the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.” Only one “persuader” firm took in more cash than GRCA from companies trying to bust their unions that year. It is notoriously aggressive, even among its bare-knuckled peers.

GRCA did not respond to a request for comment. SSB’s spokesperson declined multiple requests to comment on hiring the infamous firm, or any of my other questions about the drive.

Pro-union workers inside Stone Richmond have told Hop Take what GRCA’s sub-contracted operatives are up to at the plant since arriving two months ago. Combined with Stone’s in-house bosses’ own tactics, it amounts to color-by-numbers union-busting.

As is often the case, SSB went with the carrot first. The company sent workers “a big letter telling us they love us and know they f*cked up and hope we can forgive them,” a pro-union worker told me via text. Richmond supervisors began scheduling round-tables with workers “who have had experiences with unions in the past” to share their experiences with coworkers, and sent out messages to an internal communication board soliciting stories from workers who “experienced, accomplished, or valued something during” their time working at the company, “and how Sapporo-Stone enabled it.” In late July, it issued a round of purportedly pre-planned raises.

The company also formed a Richmond-specific “Cultural Action Team” with local bosses and employees, which eventually produced an ice-cream social in mid-August that would allow managers to rub elbows with workers on a visit to Virginia. Workers tie-dyed shirts and ate frozen desserts alongside members of SSB’s executive team, including chief executive Zach Keeling, who is not based in the River City.

“It felt like a combination of the classic ‘pizza party’ move, plus [Richmond managers] trying to show off to the executives that we sometimes have fun,” another current worker told me, referring to a popular pro-labor meme.

As it became clear these tactics hadn’t stalled the drive, SSB switched to the stick. All workers within Stone’s Richmond plant who spoke to Hop Take did so on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation during the drive. This is not an idle concern: A week before the drive went public, SSB fired a vocally pro-union worker in Richmond. The union has since filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) against the firm alleging the termination violated federal labor law.

The initial filing with the NLRB specified the proposed bargaining unit would only include workers at the Richmond warehouse, not SSB’s separate warehouse east of the city; Teamsters Local 322 has since agreed to loop in workers at that warehouse at the company’s request. “They’re trying to dilute the [pro-union] vote, and they know it’s creating more work for me,” Local 322’s Dwayne Johnson told Hop Take by phone Wednesday. This seemingly innocuous gambit puts organizers in a bind. Either agree to the expansion and dilute the vote, or fight the company before the labor board and give the impression it doesn’t want the workers covered by the proposed expansion in the union, sapping time and momentum in the process. “It’s a little bit of an uphill battle now that they added” around 10 warehouse workers to the proposed unit, conceded Johnson, but he said the union eventually planned to organize the warehouse anyway. “Why make ‘em wait?” The total unit, including shift leads (which the company is also fighting to exclude from the election, apparently because it considers them as likely pro-union voters), now stands at around 100 workers.

The company also began handing out a series of anti-union flyers to workers, each titled “Just the Facts.” (I’ve obtained all of them so far, and uploaded them to Google Drive so you can check them out in full.) It may not shock you to learn that they are not, in fact, just the facts. The unsigned flyers, each of which features the logos of Sapporo and Stone up top and a checkbox graphic at the bottom that says “UNION NO,” are riddled with common near-falsehoods and alarming half-truths about organized labor that bosses have used to bust drives for literal decades. They’re so common there’s a whole book about them (“Confessions of a Union-Buster,” a mea culpa from a 20th-century practitioner of GRCA’s trade) and a whole website, too (UnionBustingPlaybook.com, a resource maintained by the Communications Workers of America). Because they’ve been so well-covered, I’m not going to bother addressing each point here. Here’s a taste, though. The flyers ominously cast the Teamsters Local 322 as an “outside third-party,” even though they were almost certainly written by GRCA or its agents — outside third-parties themselves. Hmm!

Will this union-busting playbook work in Richmond? Who knows. But it will certainly cost SSB a lot of money either way — money it could use to, y’know, simply pay its employees.

“Where a company has invested to support their success as a business, they should be supporting the success of their employees,” says Andreas Addison, a Richmond city councilmember who is currently running for mayor. He tells me he supports Stone workers’ drive with an unequivocal “yes.” He’s not a neophyte on union negotiations, either — in 2023, when the city’s transit board negotiated with its union to increase bus drivers’ starting pay 40 percent to address labor shortages, Addison was serving as its vice chair, a position he still holds. “We’re in a housing crisis in the city of Richmond right now, and a lot of that comes down to what our workforce is compensated,” he tells me. Imagine that.

Obviously, this is a smart stance for a politician to take when running for office in a relatively blue city like Richmond. Then again, with pro-labor sentiment at historic highs nationally, it could be a smart stance for SSB, too. If only the firm would take a page out of that playbook.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

Nobody outside the One Percent has accused the modern National Football League of being affordable family fun, and nobody should. But even fans who that think they know what they’re signing up for may want to check the price of beer at their team’s stadium before laying out for tickets. The Washington Commanders led the league this year, charging a staggering $16.49 per 16-ounce beer, more than double the price of the same liquid at a Cincinnati Bengals game ($6.80 apiece). Sure, the Boston Celtics of the National Basketball Association were charging an absolutely obscene $19.87 for 16 ounces of beer during the 2023 season, so it’s not like football teams are alone in gouging John and Jane Q. Guzzler, but still, who’s paying these prices?! Anyway, I’m sure private equity’s looming incursion into the NFL will work wonders on this front. Coming soon to a stadium near you: Beer Now, Pay Later?

📈 Ups…

On-premise draft beer sales were up 8 percent for NFL opening weekend nationwide, according to BeerBoard… The Kroger-Albertsons merger is far from dead, but the Federal Trade Commission has been hammering the firms over the deal in federal court… Congrats to Tom O’Connell, New Belgium Brewery’s new chief supply-chain officer… Firestone Walker is now rolling out 8ZERO5, the non-alcoholic extension of its popular 805 blonde ale… Think you’ve got what it takes to be the next chief executive of the Brewers Association? Well, the job listing is now open, so…

📉 …and downs

After snatching Modern Times Beer Co. out of insolvency in 2022, Craft ‘Ohana is shuttering the San Diego brand’s production facility, contracting out production to AleSmith Brewing Co., and laying off 57 workers… California’s Anderson Valley Brewing Co. puts itself up for sale after winning a four-year court battle with mega-distributor Reyes Beverage Group…

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