Over the course of a long winter, I wrote about the brewery strike in Toronto in 1904 because people I know within the industry had become interested in organizing labour in Ontario’s small breweries. Although I didn’t write about it in Lost Breweries of Toronto, which was designed to be short, linear histories of individual breweries, I knew there was something there to examine. I hoped it might be interesting to people, but it was a long form piece with a lot of quotations from newspapers, so I think the best you can say is that it might have tickled the odd fancy.
If nothing else, The 1904 Brewery Strike was the only precedent for labour organization I knew of in this market that you could say occurred from scratch. It was at the dawn of the labour movement in North America. But of course, if we’re honest, there’s already organization in the beer industry. Molson has a union. Labatt has a union. Sleeman has a union. The Beer Store has a union.
When you consider that something like 70% of the volume sold in Ontario comes from union shops, you start to feel that maybe we’re overlooking something pretty obvious about the nature of the industry. I’d bet you those big breweries are more environmentally sustainable in addition to having negotiated employee protections. For the time being, we won’t even mention economies of scale, but with inflation the way it is that’s unavoidable.
The other day, a poll popped up relating to this presentation from Craft Beer Professionals. It suggests that while 70% of Brewery Owners enjoy their jobs, the number drops sharply to 26% for Brewery Operators. Imagine that only one out of every four people who works in a brewery actually likes their job.
In 1904, it is pretty clear that the labour conditions were, in fact, much worse than they are now. People worked something like 55 hours a week, which might have been four twelve hour shifts and a seven hour day on a fifth day. Many of the same problems faced Toronto then as now: The housing market was becoming unreasonably expensive, inflation was significant, a lack of diversity in the workforce caused strife, and wages, although recently improved, were still very low.
It was a period of significant dissatisfaction not just in brewing, but among industrialized workforces across the city. Eventually, by leveraging market weaknesses and threatening to make alcohol illegal within the city of Toronto via the local option, the brewery workers got their way.
The thing is, the brewery workers in 1904 were not under any illusions. 700 or so employees worked for seven or eight large breweries within the city, the majority of which brewed really significant volume. O’Keefe made 500,000 barrels a year by 1910, and while we don’t have figures for many of the other breweries at that point in time, I would suggest that the smallest would likely have been over 50,000 barrels. There was not, properly speaking, innovation. Lothar Reinhardt brewed Paulaner Salvator under license, and that was exotic. A brewery might make four or five beers as part of their portfolio.
Brewing was separated into discrete tasks within the plant, in the same way that it sometimes is today. The difference being that prior to mechanized canning lines, the packaging line might have been twenty people as opposed to one. The majority of it was unpleasant physical work. Solidly blue collar graft that did sometimes result in death, but almost certainly ground you down over the course of your time doing the job. In some ways, preferable due to the fact that there was upward mobility possible within the organization. They were large companies and you could eventually advance.
At no point during any of the articles in the run up to the brewery strike is mentioned a flavour profile, a mania for innovation, a sense that the breweries occupied a moral position, an antipathy to the use of adjuncts, or whether any of the breweries might or might not count as breweries because of their size.
I want to introduce you to the concept of kayfabe; willing suspension of disbelief in order to facilitate narrative.
The story of Craft Beer, that there were great Carlylian figures who single handedly changed the face of the brewing industry and smote a terrible blow against the evil empire of macro breweries bent on making sure that you had to drink fizzy yellow beer? That’s pro-wrestling. It’s the story meant for the people in the audience.
It’s a story that has pretty largely fallen by the wayside these last several years with brewery mergers and acquisitions. The benefit of the kayfabe pro-wrestling version is that there was a bad guy, and since the small breweries weren’t the bad guy, they must be the good guys. There’s a sort of Quixotic romantic element to the idea. Maybe you, too, could be one of the good guys and join the fight against the evil empire.
It’s no wonder that there’s a lot of dissatisfaction. Imagine doing the same job someone did in 1904 and needing a Masters degree to do it. It turns out that in a version of North America with 10,000 breweries, you can’t keep that good vs evil narrative going, especially as people ten years into their careers have knee braces. It turns out that having people with no experience managing employees, intellectual property, environmental sustainability, accounting, and social media is not a recipe for an unstained escutcheon. Brewing is not a particularly glamorous job, and by the way, the fact that 30% of brewery owners don’t like their jobs should alert you to the fact that many of you are in the same boat. That’s a significant problem.
The majority of breweries in Canada, according to Beer Canada’s 2021 report, make less than 2000 hL. That’s 960 out of 1210 breweries. The majority of those are probably toward the bottom end of that scale. It begs questions like “what’s the minimum number of employees you can effectively unionize?” and “how big do you have to be before the brewer is technically part of management?” and, given the recent piece in the Globe and Mail, “are they fiscally solvent?”
One of the things that the workers in 1904 had going for them was a clear set of goals that were achievable on a large scale. By the end of the strike, everyone in the city was paid the same wage and had approximately the same hours. Real basic stuff. Replacing seven large breweries with something like seventy probably makes that inoperable. The fact that most people actually work alongside the owner instead of it being a massively hierarchical system is compromising as well since it’s hard to see someone you work with daily as adversarial even if they cut your cheque.
Near as I can figure it, the problem is that even the Globe and Mail in their recent explainer on the state of the industry, do not think of the “Craft Beer Industry” as the “Beer Industry.” There are not two industries. They are taxed by the same people, they are overseen by the same regulatory boards, and regardless of how many kilos of hops are added on the cold side, they are still subject to laws regarding sale and service. Any attempt to get, for example, a guild, off the ground is going to be hamstrung if you have anyone going into that process with magical thinking on board. It requires deprogramming.
Beer is not magic. Drinking good beer doesn’t necessarily make you a good person; it only means you have good taste. It is a luxury commodity (IE: not essential but highly desired) made throughout most of history by working class people that contains an addictive component which you are selling to the public, and fair play.
The brewery workers in 1904 knew all of this because they’d never had the extreme detriment of being programmed to believe they were the good guys. They started from the precept that they wanted to achieve reasonable goals which they set out. That’s all. The massive leverage that “Craft Beer” has over you is that it has its conceptual hooks sunk deep in your brain. Whether it ends up being a union or a guild, don’t for the love of God negotiate as craft beer people. Negotiate as workers.