The experiences of workers in breweries varied significantly based on the size, scale, and place of production.  

Things to know

• In January 2020, Anchor Brewing workers ratified a union contract. 
• There is a Brewery and Soft Drink Conference of the Teamsters Union. 
• The project An Oral History of West London's Brewery Workers contains oral histories with the people who worked in the three main Thames side breweries in West London: Griffin Brewery (Fuller's) in Chiswick, the Ram Brewery (Young's) in Wandsworth and the Stag Brewery (Watney's) in Mortlake. These breweries were major employers and dominated a part of London for hundreds of years.

Recommended publications

• Brantley, Allyson P. Brewing a Boycott : How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.
• Chris Carlsson, "Brewery Workers," FoundSF blog, photos from San Francisco History Room, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, CA. 
• Hermann Schlüter's, 1910, The Brewing Industry and the Brewery Workers' Movement in America, International Union of United Brewery Workmen of America. 
• International Union of United Brewery, Flour, Cereal, and Soft Drink Workers of America. 1918. Brewery, flour, cereal, and soft drink workers' journal. Cincinnati: International Union of United Brewery, Flour, Cereal, and Soft Drink Workers of America.
• International Union of United Brewery, Flour, Cereal, and Soft Drink Workers of America. 1886. The Brewery worker. Cincinnati: [International Union of United Brewery, Flour, Cereal, Soft Drink and Distillery Workers of America].
• McGahan, A. "The Emergence of the National Brewing Oligopoly: Competition in the American Market, 1933-1958." Business History Review 65, no. 2 (1991): 229-284.
• Mittelman, Amy. 2008. Brewing battles: the history of American beer. New York, NY: Algora Pub.
• Strangleman, Tim. 2019. Voices of Guinness: an oral history of the Park Royal Brewery. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Archival Collections and Materials 

• United Brewery Workers Records at George Washington University. 
  • Collection description: The United Brewery Workers Records consists of convention proceedings, Officers’ and Presidents’ reports, General Executive Board minutes, miscellaneous printed matter and general correspondence microfilm. The materials range in date from 1888-1977.
  • Note: there is also a Teamster Union Archive at George Washington University. 
• International Union of United Brewery, Flour, Cereal, Soft Drink, and Distillery Workers of America Records at the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries Special Collections. 
  • Collection description: The National Union of the Brewers of the United States (later the International Union of United Brewery, Flour, Cereal, Soft Drink, and Distillery Workers of America) was founded in Baltimore, Maryland on August 29, 1886. In 1941, the union was suspended from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and merged with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 1973. The items in this collection originate during the time period between the Brewers’ AFL suspension and their merger with the Teamsters, and include agreements, by-laws, constitutions, dues books, union cards, an authorization form, and several issues of a union magazine. 
  • Learn more about this group on Wikipedia 
• International Union of United Brewery, Flour, Cereal, Soft Drink and Distillery Workers Records at the Western Reserve Historical Society. 
  • Collection description: The International Union of United Brewery, Flour, Cereal, Soft Drink and Distillery Workers  [next hit]  was founded in 1886 as the National Union of United Brewery Workmen. The union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor in 1887 and merged with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 1973. The union was open to all employees regardless of craft, making it the first industrial union in the United States. The union had locals representing brewery and soft drink employees in Cleveland, New Philadelphia, Akron, Norwalk, and Sandusky, Ohio. The collection consists of membership dues ledgers, membership journals, permit holder journals, and statistical ledgers.
• International Union of United Brewery, Flour, Cereal, Soft Drink, and Distillery Workers of America, Local 67 and Local 144 Records. University of Pittsburgh Library System Archives & Special Collections.
  • Collection description: Workers at western Pennsylvania beer breweries were represented by three locals of the International Union of United Brewery, Flour, Cereal, Soft Drink, and Distillery Workers of America. Local 22 represented the brewers, Local 67 represented the drivers, and Local 144 represented the bottlers. This collection includes the records of Locals 67 and 144 at various breweries in western Pennsylvania, as well as records of the Joint Local Executive Board. 

Links to search results pages

• su:Brewery workers. - World Cat
• Brewery Workers' Movement in America - Google Scholar 
• Brewery Workers' Movement in America history - Google Scholar
• Brewers unions - Google Scholar
• Brewers unions history - Google Scholar
• Brewers unions history america - Google Scholar
• brewery union strike - Google Scholar
• brewery union strike - Google Search
• brewery union strike - 1Search@OSU (limited to newspapers)

Things to know

• Hop harvests in Oregon commanded a seasonal labor force of thousands. Growers advertised in newspapers to recruit urban families and provided cabins or tents, water, and other necessities for the hop-pickers, but because the work was “unskilled” pickers were recruited from all over the region for the short harvest season. Women and children were hired for their perceived picking dexterity (and lower wage demands), and a diversity of workers were found in the fields (racial, economic, geographic). 
  • “Bitter Harvest — This Land” is an essay about Oregon's Chinese hop growers, with three short video pieces by Ivy C. Lin in collaboration with writer Putsata Reang. It was part of the Oregon Humanities “This Land / Your Land, My Land” exhibit exploring land ownership issues in minority communities in Oregon.
  • The photographs featured in Dr. Kenneth Helphand's book Hops: Historic Photographs of the Oregon Hopscape portray pickers of all backgrounds—children, nuns, families, immigrants, and students in fields, hop driers, and tent camps. The photos range from the candid to the highly professional, including images from Dorothea Lange’s iconic Farm Security Administration work.
  • Dr. Peter Kopp's book Hoptopia: A World of Agriculture and Beer in Oregon’s Willamette Valley includes information about field labor in Chapter 4 "Hop-Picking Time."
  • In 2016, Dr. Ryan Dearinger gave a talk entitled "Hop Picking Cultures in the Pacific Northwest," in which he talked about race and place. 
  • In 1982, the Benton County Historical Society conducted oral history interviews with pickers, growers, and scientists. 
• The August 3, 1913 Wheatland Hop Riot was a violent confrontation during a strike by agricultural workers demanding decent working conditions at the Durst Ranch in Wheatland, California. 
  • DiGirolamo, Vincent. "The women of Wheatland: Female consciousness and the 1913 Wheatland hop strike." Labor History 34, no. 2-3 (1993): 236-255.
  • Eldridge, Paul W. "The Wheatland Hop Riot and the Ford and Suhr Case." Indus. & Lab. Rel. F. 10 (1974): 165.
  • Street, Richard Steven. "'We Are Not Slaves': The Photographic Record of the Wheatland Hop Riot: The First Images of Protesting Farm Workers in America." Southern California Quarterly 64, no. 3 (1982): 205-226.
  • Whitten, Woodrow C. "The Wheatland Episode." The Pacific Historical Review 17, no. 1 (1948): 37-42.
• On September 7, 1885, in violence occurred on a hop farm in Squak (later renamed Issaquah), the eastern King County, Washington, white and Native Americans attacked Chinese pickers hired by the Wold Bros. to pick hops at a lower price. 
  • See Priscilla Long's 2000 HistoryLink.org essay "White and Native American hop pickers attack Chinese workers in Squak (Issaquah) on September 7, 1885" and Tim Greyhaven's 2010 paper "Finding the Site of the Attack on the Chinese Laborers in Squak Valley."
  • Kinnear, George. Anti-Chinese Riots at Seattle, Wn., February 8th, 1886. G. Kinnear, 1911.
  • Monahan, Tom, and Steve Anderson. "China Grove."
  • Pfaelzer, Jean. Driven out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 2007.
• Growers placed advertisements in local newspapers when they needed pickers and stores advertised supplies. For example:
  • Search Historic Oregon Newspapers for hop pickers
  • Search Washington Digital Newspapers for hop pickers
  • Search California Digital Newspaper Collection for hop pickers
  • Search Chronicling American for hop pickers
• For more information on hops, see the Ingredients tab on this guide. 

Recommended publications

• Adams, Richard Laban, and T. R. Kelly. A study of farm labor in California. No. 193. Division of Agricultural Sciences, University of California, 1918.
• Bauer Jr, William J. "“We Were All Migrant Workers Here”: Round Valley Indian Labor in Northern California, 1850–1929." Western Historical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2006): 43-63.
• Blosser, John H., and D. Curtis Mumford. "Harvest labor efficiency on hops in Oregon." (1944).
• Dearinger, Ryan. "Dirty Work: Hop-Picking Cultures and the Perils of Diversity in the Pacific Northwest." (2017).
• Jamieson, Stuart Marshall. Labor unionism in American agriculture. No. 836. US Government Printing Office, 1946.
• Kopp, Peter A. "'Hop Fever' in the Willamette Valley: The Local and Global Roots of a Regional Specialty Crop." Oregon Historical Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2011): 406-433.
• Landis, Paul H. "The hop industry, a social and economic problem." Economic Geography 15, no. 1 (1939): 85-94.
• Landis, Paul H. "Seasonal Agricultural Labor in the Yakima Valley." Monthly Lab. Rev. 45 (1937): 301.
• MacLean, Annie Marion. "With Oregon Hop Pickers." American Journal of Sociology 15, no. 1 (1909): 83-95.
• Majka, Theo J. "Regulating farmworkers: The state and the agricultural labor supply in California." Contemporary Crises 2, no. 2 (1978): 141-155.
• Mason, Robert George. "Farm labor demand for six Oregon crops." (1989).
• Raibmon, Paige. "The practice of everyday colonialism: Indigenous women at work in the hop fields and tourist industry of Puget Sound." Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 3, no. 3 (2006): 23-56.
• Rutherford, Malcolm. "Field, Undercover, and Participant Observers in US Labor Economics: 1900–1930." History of Political Economy 44, no. suppl_1 (2012): 185-205.
• Schweitzer, Pam, and Dianne Hancock. 1991. Our lovely hops: memories of hop-picking in Kent. [England]: Age Exchange Theatre Trust.