The Coors strike and boycott was a series of boycotts and strike action against the Coors Brewing Company, based in Golden, Colorado, United States. Initially local, the boycott started in the late 1960s and continued through the 1970s, coinciding with a labor strike at the company's brewery in 1977. The strike ended the following year in failure for the union, which Coors forced to dissolve. The boycott, however, lasted until the mid-1980s, when it was more or less ended.
The boycott began in 1966 as a regional affair coordinated by the Colorado chapter of the American GI Forum and the Denver-based Crusade for Justice. These two Hispanic groups initiated a boycott due to the Coors Brewing Company's discriminatory practices that targeted Hispanics and African Americans. Additionally, they opposed the Coors family's support of right wing political causes. Soon afterward, the boycott expanded through much of the American West. By the 1970s, the boycott covered much of Coors' market area and involved Hispanic, African American, and women's rights groups, as well as labor unions and LGBT activists. The latter group opposed Coors' practice of using a polygraph test during their hiring process, which they alleged allowed them to discriminate against LGBT individuals. In San Francisco, the city's LGBT community and the Teamsters union allied to promote the boycott that involved noted gay rights activists Harvey Milk and Cleve Jones.
In April 1977, members of Brewery Workers Local 366, which represented over 1,500 workers at the company's flagship Golden, Colorado brewery, went on strike over noneconomic issues related to, among other things, the company's use of polygraph testing and their 21 grounds for dismissal. Shortly after the strike started, the AFL-CIO (the United States' largest federation of labor unions) initiated a nationwide boycott of Coors. The strike lasted for over 20 months, during which time a majority of the union members went back to work without a contract after the company began replacing strikers with strikebreakers. The company initiated a vote the following year over whether the local union would be dissolved, with a majority of workers voting to dissolve Brewery Workers Local 366. Despite this, the AFL–CIO continued their boycott. By the 1980s, Coors began making deals with several minority groups to do more business with minority companies and hire more minority workers. Despite this, the boycott continued and expanded to include numerous other groups, such as the National Organization for Women and the National Education Association. However, in August 1987, the AFL–CIO agreed to end the boycott, with Coors making several concessions that included using union labor to build a new facility in Virginia and an agreement to an expedited union vote at its Golden facility. In December 1988, workers at the Golden brewery voted against unionizing by a margin of over 2 to 1.
The strike and boycott had a direct economic impact on Coors. The company's market share in several western states dropped from over 40 percent to as low as 17 percent in the case of California. Additionally, the boycott may have encouraged the company to expand nationally, as the company expanded its presence from 11 states in 1975 to 49 states by 1988. In the LGBT community, the boycott left a lasting impact, as several groups and activists still object to Coors over the company's past actions and the family's continued support of conservative politics. As late as 2019, Coors beer was difficult to find in any gay bar in San Francisco.
Background
Coors and organized labor 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. 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. 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. This limited market area led to considerable bootlegging of the product to the eastern United States. Organized labor activities at the brewery began in the 1930s, when Adolph Coors II (who had succeeded his father as chief of the company) invited a labor union to organize at the location. 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.
The Coors family and social issues
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. 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. 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. Joseph later donated money towards Ronald Reagan's 1976 presidential campaign, and he additionally provided grants and funding to conservatives groups including The Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, and the National Right to Work Committee.
Boycott begins
Hispanic and African American groups 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. 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, compared to 15-20% of the population statewide). Additionally, many of the jobs held by Hispanic employees at Coors were menial labor positions. 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. In August 1970, the Colorado Civil Rights Commission found the company guilty of firing a worker due to his race. The commission ultimately ruled against the company on two separate occasions in the early 1970s for discriminating against African American workers. 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. 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.
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. 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, including the Mexican American Youth Organization and the Raza Unida Party. 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.
Polygraph testing and LGBT response
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. 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. 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"), 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?" Multiple sources also reported that applicants were asked about their sexual orientation. 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. According to William Coors, approximately 45 percent of applicants failed the polygraph testing, primarily with regards to questions over drug use.