Coors strike and boycott

The Coors strike and boycott was a series of boycotts and strike action against the Coors Brewing Company, based in Golden, Colorado, United States. Initially local, the boycott started in the late 1960s and continued through the 1970s, coinciding with a labor strike at the company's brewery in 1977. The strike ended the following year in failure for the union, which Coors forced to dissolve. The boycott, however, lasted until the mid-1980s, when it was more or less ended.

The boycott began in 1966 as a regional affair coordinated by the Colorado chapter of the American GI Forum and the Denver-based Crusade for Justice. These two Hispanic groups initiated a boycott due to the Coors Brewing Company's discriminatory practices that targeted Hispanics and African Americans. Additionally, they opposed the Coors family's support of right wing political causes. Soon afterward, the boycott expanded through much of the American West. By the 1970s, the boycott covered much of Coors' market area and involved Hispanic, African American, and women's rights groups, as well as labor unions and LGBT activists. The latter group opposed Coors' practice of using a polygraph test during their hiring process, which they alleged allowed them to discriminate against LGBT individuals. In San Francisco, the city's LGBT community and the Teamsters union allied to promote the boycott that involved noted gay rights activist Harvey Milk.

In April 1977, members of Brewery Workers Local 366, which represented over 1,500 workers at the company's flagship Golden, Colorado brewery, went on strike over noneconomic issues related to, among other things, the company's use of polygraph testing and their 21 grounds for dismissal. Shortly after the strike started, the AFL–CIO (the United States' largest federation of labor unions) initiated a nationwide boycott of Coors. The strike lasted for over 20 months, during which time a majority of the union members went back to work without a contract after the company began replacing strikers with strikebreakers. The company initiated a vote the following year over whether the local union would be dissolved, with a majority of workers voting to dissolve Brewery Workers Local 366. Despite this, the AFL–CIO continued their boycott. By the 1980s, Coors began making deals with several minority groups to do more business with minority companies and hire more minority workers. Despite this, the boycott continued and expanded to include numerous other groups, such as the National Organization for Women and the National Education Association. However, in August 1987, the AFL–CIO agreed to end the boycott, with Coors making several concessions that included using union labor to build a new facility in Virginia and an agreement to an expedited union vote at its Golden facility. In December 1988, workers at the Golden brewery voted against unionizing by a margin of over 2 to 1.

The strike and boycott had a direct economic impact on Coors. The company's market share in several western states dropped from over 40 percent to as low as 17 percent in the case of California. Additionally, the boycott may have encouraged the company to expand nationally, as the company expanded its presence from 11 states in 1975 to 49 states by 1988. In the LGBT community, the boycott left a lasting impact, as several groups and activists still object to Coors over the company's past actions and the family's continued support of conservative politics. As late as 2019, Coors beer was difficult to find in any gay bar in San Francisco.