United Brewery Workers

UNITED BREWERY WORKERS. Practitioners of an ancient craft, brewery workers of the nineteenth-century United States were largely skilled immigrants from central Europe and England (or Ireland, by way of England). Members of the earliest industrial union outside extractive labor, they epitomized the rise and fall of Germanic influences upon American socialism.

Between the mid-nineteenth century and 1900, brewing was rapidly transformed from an old-fashioned craft to highly mechanized, modern factory work. As befits their central European and artisanal origins, the first brewery workers’ organizations in the United States were mutual benefit associations, which counted both employers and workers among their members. Sustained unionization was slow and difficult given the small, isolated character of workers in the lesser breweries as well as the united resistance of the emerging large-scale manufacturers. The formation of the National Union of Brewery Workers (NUBW) in 1886, and the designation of the New Yorker Volkszeitung as the union’s official organ, placed brewery workers squarely in the middle of the socialistic labor movement.

With an almost entirely German-speaking membership up to the mid-1890s, the NUBW was steeped in the ethnic socialist culture, close to the motherland in spirit and style. Especially in New York and Chicago, where the largest locals were situated, the leaders (who also made up the union’s national executive board) remained committed socialists. The union’s own newspaper, the Brauer Zeitung (Brewers Journal), endorsed socialist candidates and reported socialist progress in Europe. Within the Socialist Labor Party and later the Socialist Party, leaders saw political education as central to their mission—a cause especially promoted with the founding of the Brauer Zeitung in 1887. The union was active in socialist municipal election campaigns in New York and Milwaukee and supported the convicted Haymarket anarchists in Chicago. In contrast to most American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions, it opposed anti-Chinese legislation on the West Coast and tried to organize Black brewery workers and beer drivers into unions.

From its beginnings, the union was open to any workers in North American breweries, regardless of task, training, or background. The union thus became one of the earliest and most viable industrial unions in the United States. At the same time, the brewery workers’ union also remained faithful to tenets of traditional artisanal labor relations: early contracts negotiated by many locals emphasized the craft status of workers and the hierarchy of apprentices and journeymen. The organization of brewery workers into different craft locals (brewers, maltsters, bottlers, etc.) also underlined the craft character of the union.

While the brewery workers’ union was not without internal conflicts, many of the problems the union encountered were over jurisdictional conflicts with other unions. Many of these confrontations had political undertones. Usually the NUBW represented the more radical socialist German American groups while other groups, such as the Knights of Labor affiliates in the 1880s and 1890s and craft unions later on, were politically more conservative (and English-speaking). In 1907 a long-simmering dispute with the AFL over the affiliation of firemen and engineers led to a one-year expulsion of the NUBW by the federation. This action had a radicalizing effect on some brewery workers’ locals that also had a primary affiliation with the American Labor Union and wanted to affiliate with the emerging Industrial Workers of the World. One of the leading dissenters, William Trautmann, a former editor of the Brauer Zeitung, did indeed defect and became secretary-treasurer (1905–1908) and then general organizer (1908–1913) of the Industrial Workers of the World. But Trautmann remained the exception, and much of the rank and file of the brewery workers’ union as well as its leaders remained faithful to the AFL and reentered the federation in 1908. Despite this conflict, for most of its pre–World War I history the brewery workers’ organization demonstrated in an exemplary way how the pragmatic unionism of the AFL could well be combined with socialist politics.

Two almost concurrent developments brought the history of the brewery workers as a German American socialist organization to an end: World War I and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The losing battle against Prohibition took up much of the union’s resources after about 1910. The outbreak of World War I, and the hostility against Germans, German Americans, and socialists which followed, eliminated the cultural basis for the organization. Although the union survived Prohibition as the International Union of United Brewery, Flour, Cereal and Soft Drink Workers of America and reconstituted itself as part of the brewing industry in 1933, it never reached its former importance and finally merged with the Teamsters in 1973.

Laslett, John H. M. Labor and the Left: A Study of Marxist and Socialist Influences In the American Labor Movement, 1881–1924. New York: Basic Books, 1970.

Schlueter, Herrmann. The Brewing Industry and the Brewery Workers’ Movement In America. Cincinnati: International Union of United Brewery Workmen of America, 1910.

Schneider, Dorothee. Trade Unions and Community: The German Working Class of New York City, 1870–1900. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

United Brewery Workers Records. Collection Overview. George Washington University Libraries. https://searcharchives.library.gwu.edu/repositories/2/resources/22