Brewing a Boycott

Allyson P. Brantley provides an impressive account of just how complicated, significant, vulnerable, and forgotten consumer boycotts can be, based on the famous boycott of Coors Brewing Company in the late twentieth century. Brantley, an assistant professor of history at the University of La Verne, reveals how this iconic, evolving social movement began as a 1957 strike in Golden, Colorado, by United Brewery Workers Local 366, who then called a boycott based on Coors's union busting attempts and “Golden's draconian antipicketing ordinance” (p. 19). That boycott ended when the strike did, but it resumed in 1970 as a Chicano community–led effort to pressure Coors to hire more Latinos. The United Farm Workers' successful nationwide boycotts helped inspire this one, and it picked up supporters over the next two decades, including from the Lgbt (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community, African Americans, Teamsters, and labor and leftist groups. Local 366 reunited with the boycott when striking again in 1977, only to have the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations cancel the boycott in 1987 in exchange for Coors's promise of a fair union certification election. (The union lost again.) But many committed to boycotting Coors into the 1990s and early 2000s

Boycott · Economic history · Grassroots · Political science · Politics · American History and Culture · Anarchism and Radical Politics · History · Labor Movements and Unions · Law