Is Coors the One?

THE MOST PUBLICIZED CORPORATE dispute in America sparked campus debate last week, as the Coors controversy came to Cambridge. Outside Harvard University's Science Center on February 24, 200 student protesters picketed William Coors, Chairman of the Adolph Coors brewing company, chanting "Contras drink Coors," and "Racist, sexist, anti-gay. Coors beer, no way." Inside, 400 students listened attentively as the affable executive defended his family's brewery's policies.

Over the past twenty years, various advocacy groups have targetted the Denver-based brewery for policies that they perceive as anti-environment, anti-union and anti-civil rights. Resorting to economic warfare, they have called for a nationwide boycott of Coors products.

Until 1977, Coors spokesmen rarely discussed the brewery's politics and policies in public. The offense gained momentum in 1977 when the AFL-CIO joined the boycott at the request of one of its local affiliates which was battling with Coors. Since then, William Coors and other company spokespeople have more actively discussed their company and have aggressively denied most of the boycotters' allegations. Wednesday was no exception, as Coors spent most of his hour-and-a-half speech denying charges of racism, sexism, union-busting and employee harassment. Arguing that the boycotters make him out to be an ogre, Coors said in an interview after the speech, "I think it's important sometimes that people see me and judge for themselves whether I'm all that monstrous."

The boycotters eagerly point to a combination of the Coors family's political views and brewery employment practices as the reasons behind their boycott. Most boycott literature portrays William Coors and his brother, Company Vice Chairman Joseph Coors as somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun.

Typical of the calls for a boycott are resolutions such as the National Organization for Women's (NOW), which claims, "The Coors family has made significant contributions to organizations which oppose the rights of women, Third World, lesbian and gay people, as well as anti-union organizations," and that there are "clear relationships between the beer we buy, Coors family profits and large donations to these ultra-conservative groups."

The boycott for some has become more than simply an effort to get a consumer products company to change certain practices. It has become a crusade against a family-owned brewery. The boycotters are not interested in small tactical victories; the fight is to the death.

Although the crusade is not over, certain of the battles are. Considering the company's policies apart from the family's politics, it seems that many of the boycotters' gripes have been resolved. But because Coors has yet to appease the union, the boycott continues and the anti-Coors forces manage to get a great deal of mileage out of criticizing the family's private donations.

A great deal of the Coors family money is donated through the Adolph Coors Foundation, which gave out $3,752,000 in 1985. Most of the foundation's money goes to education and community service programs, and only 20 per cent funds 'public affairs' organizations, such as Accuracy in Media and the right-wing National Forum Foundation. In 1985, $100,000 went to the conservative Heritage Foundation--a think-tank that funds research calling for a substantial decrease in federal student financial aid and an increase in funding for the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars). Joseph Coors is a founder and trustee of the Heritage Foundation.

Although the Coors family funds many conservative causes, William Coors claims that he is "very strongly moderate," and cites his support for the Equal Rights Amendment and opposition to the Contras fighting in Nicaragua. Joseph was not available to comment on his political stands.

The family maintains that it has a right to take whatever political positions it pleases and vehemently denies almost all of the allegations pertaining to their company's practices.

"When the AFL-CIO takes you on, they can do your reputation a tremendous amount of damage," William Coors said in an interview. Whether or not his reputation deserved the damage is where Coors and the boycotters disagree.

AFL-CIO Coors boycott director, Dave Sickler, argues, "If our allegations are untrue, why haven't they sued us for libel?" Meanwhile, William Coors has offered $10,000 to anyone who can substantiate any of the charges against the company.

Allegation and counter-allegation, charge and counter-charge: none of the participants see the Coors controversy in shades of gray; for them the facts are simply black or white.

The two sides even disagree on specific facts, matters which would seem to be necessarily true or false. For example, Sickler, who worked for Coors during the 60s and 70s, says that employees were subjected to polygraph tests before being hired and while employed. In sworn affidavits before the House subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations, Sickler and three other former Coors employees stated that they were asked personal questions during their preemployment lie detector sessions, including questions such as "What is your sex preference?," "Are you a Communist?," and "Have you ever smoked marijuana?"

William Coors maintains that the lie detector tests only occurred before an employee was hired and that they never asked any questions about sexual or political practices. And, he suggests that the whole point is currently moot because Coors no longer asks any potential employees to take polygraph tests. Instead, all prospective Coors employees are asked to take a urinalysis test.

MANY OF THE STATED PRACTICES which led to the boycott have since been changed by the brewery. Coors spokespeople, however, deny that the boycott has had any effect in changing the company's employee relations practices.

The boycott coalition has charged Coors with discriminating against minority employees, and point to a 1975 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) suit against the brewery, which was settled out of court. At the time, Coors agreed to an affirmative action plan which met with the approval of the EEOC. Today, Coors' workforce of 9400 is 4.4 per cent Black and 9 per cent Hispanic--roughly equivalent to the respective populations in the Denver area.

Coors officials say they feel their company has taken a bum rap, and have been working hard to insure that the brewery is a model corporate citizen. Fred Rasheed, the national director of the NAACP economic opportunity program agrees that Coors, "has come a long way."

But a few years ago, Rasheed might have said that Coors had a long way to go. After William Coors reportedly made some racist statements before a group of minority business leaders in 1984, the NAACP started a boycott in Southern California and initiated negotiations with the brewery. The result was a series of fair-trade agreements or covenants between Coors and the NAACP and several Hispanic organizations--Rasheed was a key negotiator of these agreements.

Although Rasheed acknowledges that "the Coors as a family seem to have conservative Republican politics," he maintains that the covenants have helped serve the NAACP's interests. "Our primary concern was to generate more jobs and more business opportunities for Black Americans," he says.

Others argue that the covenants were simply an attempt to buy off groups that needed the money. Boston City Councillor David Scondras argues that "the extent to which you are systematically impoverished is the extent to which you are willing to participate in that kind of deal." But, regardless of Coors' motives, the covenants have helped to ensure that Coors provides substantial assistance to minorities.

Last year the company bought over $37 million in products from minority vendors and deposited over $9.2 in minority-owned banks. The Miller brewing company, which is over twice the size of Coors, purchased about $31 million worth of goods from minority vendors and deposited less than $1 million in minority-owned banks. Coors has four Black-owned and nine Hispanic-owned distributors; Miller has five and four respectively. Miller, though, has an excellent record in working with the minority community. The figures simply suggest that whether or not Coors discriminated against minority vendors in the past, it is presently at least on par with the rest of the beer industry.

In addition to its changed hiring and spending policies, Coors has also taken a more active role in funding minority artists and performers such as the nationwide tour of singer Jeffrey Osborne and the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble. But Sickler counters, "If you can get two cockroaches to race, Coors will show up with a T-shirt and sponsor it."

Some say that regardless of what they see as token gestures on Coors' part, the brewery will never live down its past. According to Richard Zayas '88, "All of a sudden Coors is helping the Hispanic community...But the ads, the scholarships, can't replace the record that they already have."

CHARGES OF RACISM, SEXISM AND homophobia aside, the main dispute between the boycotters and the company is over Coors' labor practices. The AFL-CIO says its strike against Coors began over human dignity issues, such as forced lie-detector tests and illegal search and seizure. But William Coors stridently denies that the lie detector tests were at issue in the strike, and claims that there have only been four cases of search and seizure over the past fifteen years, all of which involved alleged drug use.

The AFL-CIO and Coors could not agree on the causes of the strike; they could not reach a settlement either. Indeed, the resulting strike has yet to be resolved, although over two-thirds of the striking workers have returned to the brewery. Almost two years after the strike's start, the non-striking workers voted to decertify the AFL-CIO affiliate, Brewery Workers Local 366. The striking workers were unable to vote in the decertification election.

Responding to charges of union busting, Coors states, "If you think it's possible for a company to bust a union, I suggest you read the National Labor Relations Act and find out whether it is or not. I challenge you to find a way to do it." But labor experts claim that it is possible to eliminate unions through various bargaining strategies, and that Coors has employed union-busting strategies whenever it could. In a Rocky Mountain News editorial on the brewery shortly after the strike, the newspaper noted that, "unions are vulnerable. They can be busted by companies that negotiate but don't sign."

Whether or not the Coors company is anti-union, more than nineteen unions have come and gone over the last twenty-five years. There is presently a union of Operating Engineers but unlike most unions, membership is not obligatory. It has about 30 members; Coors has more than 9000 employees. Brewery Workers Local 366 had about 1500 members when it went on strike.

William Coors admits he doesn't like unions. "Unions are a consequence of unenlightened management...management that is not sensitive to the basic needs of the people." He argues that if managers would pay more attention to employees' needs, as he suggests he does in his brewery, there would be no need for workers to unionize. Additionally, Coors equates strikes with warfare, and is happy to declare himself the winner. He notes, "Where unions have gone out on strike with our company, they have not gotten back in." However, according to a Coors spokeswoman, three strikes in the past 30 years were settled without ousting the unions.

Coors seems to oppose 'closed shops'--companies in which all workers are required to join the plant union. Instead, he feels that employees should be able to decide whether or not they want to join. And he puts the company's dollars behind this--the brewery donates to organizations such as the National Right to Work Committee, a group dedicated to the concept, "everyone must have the right but not be compelled to join labor unions."

Labor activists suggest that such groups are inherently anti-union, because without automatic union membership, workers can avoid paying union dues and still receive the benefits of the union's bargaining power.

And so the boycott over Coors' union policy continues. According to John Laughlin of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, the boycott will end, "When either Coors allows a free undeterred [union] election or when they settle a collective bargaining agreement with Brewery Workers Local 366."

But even if the AFL-CIO were to settle its disputes with the company, many boycotters would not be satisfied, for they object not just to brewery policy, but to the organizations which the Coors family funds with their brewery profits. Scondras typifies this position with his claim, "It would be self-destructive for gay people or black people or progressive people to be financially supporting a family that makes it very clear through their behavior that they're interested in dealing with gay people, black people and progressive people in a very disrespectful manner." Scondras' assertions are based on a belief that several of the organizations funded by Joseph Coors promote policies which are harmful to civil rights.

But Coors supporters say that boycotters should separate Coors the company from Coors the family and that the boycott should be based on the former. Coors spokesman Joe Fuentes suggests that the family tries "to separate the political involvement versus the company involvement."

Scondras rejects this assertion, replying, "it is like saying that a man earning $16,000 a year who stands at the corner on a soap box saying that all women should be in chains and a man who earns $100,000,000 a year and says all women should be in chains and here is $50,000,000 to ensure some day they get enchained [are equal]."

The degree to which the Coors are ultraconservative is a subject for debate. Joseph Coors' charitable contributions as well as those of the Adolph Coors Foundation have long supported right-wing organizations such as the Heritage Foundation. But for all the conservative think tanks and policy groups that the Coors family funds, they provide even more money to schools, hospitals and community service centers.

Both sides of the controversy feel that their positions are gaining strength. Coors shipped a record number of beer barrels last year and continues to expand and do well in its new markets. Meanwhile, the boycott groups claim they are increasing outreach and educational efforts.

Coors continues to expand into new states and the boycott continues to follow. And boycotters maintain that as long as Coors exists, they will too. Hilary Richard, manager of Harvard Law School's pub, which does not sell Coors, says, "to the extent that [the family has] politicized themselves, I don't think that they can separate their politics from their business."

After 20 years, both sides have become accustomed to the accusations and counter-accusations. The only happy ending for most of the boycotters' would be for the brewery to go out of business. But Coors' demise is far from imminent, so the brewery and the boycotters battle on, digging new trenches in a case of consumer warfare that is certain to continue for some time.