by George Hetling
420 workers in the Teamsters Union have now been striking for more than two months, with no end in sight after Molson Coors offered a 5 cent wage increase in retaliation for the strike.
Student journalists at TCU recently interviewed workers on the picket line. Talmadge Spivey said, “They started taking back more of our benefits and just the morale of the place kind of went down after that.”
The striking workers in Fort Worth demand guaranteed employment against industrial decline, automation and mass layoffs, as well as ending two-tier employment systems which decreases wages for the majority of workers. These demands are found among their class brothers and sisters nation wide.
This strike began three weeks before the contract deadline for 5,000 workers at Anheuser-Busch InBev job sites. The contract with AB InBev was hastily pushed through at the eleventh hour, with many workers unable to even read the contract before the vote, a ploy from the bosses and the union leaders in their pockets.
The AB InBev contract left workers completely unprotected from the beer monopoly’s ability to shut down or automate breweries, leaving many unionized workers at risk of losing their jobs. This also weakens the abilities of the workers in Fort Worth to continue striking, or to demand better terms than their counterparts in other union locals. Despite this, Teamsters president Sean O’Brien claims, “… Our members deserve the best contract. That is what we fought for and won today.”
Molson Coors’ chief communications officer Adam Collins brags about their exploitation of scab labor and the company’s ability to shift production around the isolated striking plant. Collins told the Dallas Morning News a month ago, “We’re still brewing, packaging and shipping out of Fort Worth and have actually exceeded our production expectations each week since the strike began. Our other five U.S. breweries are absorbing extra production, and we deliberately built up distributor inventories earlier in the year.”
photo: Molson Coors brewery workers rally in Fort Worth, IBT media
