Abstract

"The Business of Brewing Labor: Labor-Relations Strategies in Milwaukee and New York Breweries, 1885-1891"

Robert Kaminski, University of Florida (robert.p.kaminski@gmail.com)

In the late nineteenth century, many pre-modern labor practices coexisted with the second industrial revolution in America’s booming brewing industry. As Thomas Cochran and Alfred Chandler influentially noted, brewers applied science to industry while developing continuous throughput processes that created economies of scale. They consequently replaced much of workers’ customary knowledge with technical expertise and machinery that not only substituted for physically demanding labor but also allowed for unprecedented control over the brewing process. Yet traditional days of fourteen or more hours, paternalist control over workers’ residences, and the customary right to enjoy free beer while working remained common in late nineteenth-century breweries. Meanwhile, the harvest cycle and higher summertime demand for beer meant that brewers retained their traditional rhythm even after pioneering refrigeration technologies.
This seasonal production and marketing schedule combined with beer’s status as a working-class beverage to empower brewery workers and maltsters as they organized one of America’s first modern industrial unions and repeatedly struck for concessions across the 1880s. Brewery proprietors from Milwaukee to New York joined their German counterparts in building on precocious networks of regional and national trade associations to coordinate their responses to this challenge from labor—and the uncertainties it wrought. Nevertheless, the commonalities ended there. After a brief truce, the New York Brewers Association would coordinate a citywide lockout in 1888, which would neuter their employees’ unionization efforts for a decade—paralleling efforts by German brewery proprietors to establish an anti-boycott mutual-aid fund. After some brief conflicts with brewery workers’ unions, however, the Milwaukee Brewers’ Association—like their St. Louis counterparts—would embrace closed-shop corporatism by 1891. This paper will explore how the sociocultural context and marketing strategies of brewers in these cities shaped their labor relations strategies across the 1880s and early 1890s.