Some 5,000 Teamsters working for Anheuser-Busch have voted overwhelmingly to authorise a strike if a new contract is not reached before the current one expires on 29 February.
The union members, who work at 12 US breweries, represent more than a quarter of Anheuser-Busch’s US workforce.
“Our members’ work, talent and sacrifice are what put Anheuser-Busch products on the shelf, and we are committed to winning a contract that rewards and recognizes their hard work,” said Teamsters President Sean O’Brien. “If Anheuser-Busch executives can’t get their act together and negotiate an agreement that respects workers, we will see them out on the streets.”
The union said 99% of members voted to authorise the strike on Saturday. Anheuser-Busch InBev said it was aware of the vote.
“We are committed to negotiating in good faith with the union to reach an agreement that recognises and rewards the talent, dedication and drive of our employees,” the company said in a statement.
Strike authorization votes – and landslide votes in favour of a strike – are an extremely common part of labour negotiations, as unions signal that their members are ready to strike if they don’t agree to a deal. But the vast majority of labour contracts are negotiated without the union following through on strike threats. For example, the Teamsters union authorised a strike by some 340,000 members at UPS, but reached a deal to avert the walkout about a week before the August 1 strike deadline.
Strikes have become much more common over the past year. A database of US work stoppages by the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations shows that in 2023 there were 70 strikes involving 100 or more workers that lasted more than a week, a 59% increase on the number of such significant strikes in the same period in 2022.
Unions have had significant success in negotiations – both in taking action and in averting a strike. Nearly 1 million union members won immediate pay rises of 10% or more in contacts reached in the last 12 months, with most of these gains coming in the last six months.
Many of these gains have come from companies that are reporting record or near-record profits and can more easily afford to meet union demands. Anheuser-Busch suffered a sharp drop in sales over the course of last year due to controversy over its decision to use transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in a social media promotion for its Bud Light brand, prompting a boycott by some conservatives.
As a result, Bud Light lost its title as the best-selling US beer brand and total US revenue per 100 litres, a key measure of beer sales, fell 13.5% in the third quarter.
In July, Anheuser-Busch InBev responded by cutting its US workforce by nearly 2%, or about 400 jobs. The company said the layoffs would not include front-line employees such as “brewery and warehouse staff, drivers and field sales, among others”. The 5,000 union members cited by the Teamsters in its news release about the strike vote is about 750 fewer than the number of Teamsters employed under the Anheuser-Busch contract as of 31 December 2022, according to a company filing.
