The heat of hot labor summer shows no sign of breaking as the calendar flips to fall. Now one of the country’s biggest unions has set its sights on the country’s biggest macrobrewer. The Teamsters are taking aim at Anheuser-Busch InBev, folks, and they say it’s been a long time coming.
“Teamsters having been picking up the tab for this company for too long,” Jeff Padellaro, director of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ Brewery, Bakery, and Soft Drink Conference, said in a statement released last week, one day after kicking off bargaining with the firm for a new contract that will cover the ~5,000 workers it represents at the firm for the next five years. (The current contract, ratified in 2019, expires at the end of February 2024.) “To Anheuser-Busch we say, ‘The next round is on you.’”
The Teamsters’ timing couldn’t be better. Right now is probably the best moment in 40 years to be renegotiating a union contract, with more Americans approving of unions than they have at almost any other point in your humble Hop Take columnist’s lifetime. Labor is still a shadow of its former self, but it is indisputably on the move.
11,500 workers with the Writers Guild of America (WGA) just this week came in off the picket line after 148 days, winning what are reported to be major gains against Hollywood studios and streaming giants. Actors with the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), 65,000 of them, are still
