Breweries, alone among industries, don’t have absentee problems involving employees who abuse alcohol. : Breweries’ Free-Suds Policy Is Going Flat

“Personally, I saw it coming for a long time,” veteran brewery worker Randy Anderson said of Anheuser-Busch’s decision to stop serving free beer to workers in its Van Nuys plant.

The 1,000 blue-collar workers at the plant can still do what brewery workers have always done--sample, even guzzle, the beer they brew throughout the workday.

A bottler on his seven-minute-per-hour break can go into a company lounge and throw down one or more cold Buds, Bud Lights, Michelobs, even a low-alcohol LA or two, before going back to the assembly line.

Some workers do not indulge at all. But Anderson, 36, of Lancaster, a maintenance supervisor at the Van Nuys plant until he left last week for a non-brewery job, recalled: “I’ve known guys who could drink a case and a half a day, without even bothering.”

Not much longer.

Free Beer a Tradition

Free beer has traditionally been written into union contracts within the industry. But the brewer’s time-honored right to a brew was dropped in the contract approved in February by Anheuser-Busch and its workers in the Teamsters Union. The company had banned workday drinking by its 350 non-union employees in 1982.

Last call at Anheuser-Busch is April 30, 1986. After that, a brewery worker with a Bud in hand will be subject to discipline, even dismissal, for drinking on the job, just like virtually everyone else in America.

Instead of all the beer they can drink on breaks, union workers will be allowed to take home two free cases of beer each month, plus three cents more an hour.

When the free suds stop in the Van Nuys plant on May 1, 1986, the breweries of the world’s leading beer maker will be as dry as a church picnic in Utah. Anheuser-Busch’s lead is expected to be followed by the rest of the industry, which looks to Southern California, where more beer is produced than anywhere else in America, for brewing trends.

Other Brewers Favor Ban

Officials of Miller Brewing Co. in Irwindale and the Stroh Brewery Co. in Van Nuys said that they, too, would like to see a ban on beer drinking at work. Neither company would say whether plantwide Prohibition would be proposed in union contract negotiations later this month.

Officially, Anheuser-Busch’s decision was portrayed as reflecting the company’s desire to change with the times.

“The traditional practice of providing free beer in the work place is an anachronism in the age of computerized brewing,” said the company’s Los Angeles spokesman, Neal Rosen.

Among themselves, beer makers seem to agree that Anheuser-Busch did what had to be done. For reasons that include growing indignation over drunk drivers to the industry’s fear of lawsuits, the idea of free beer for brewers has gone flat.

“Everybody feels that this is the best thing for the industry as a whole,” Miller spokesman Victor Franco said.

Well, not everybody.

Resents Loss of Suds

Bottler Roosevelt Williams, 46, of Gardena, who has worked for Anheuser-Busch for 18 years, thinks the ban is dumb, even though he himself doesn’t drink beer. The lost suds represent an erosion of worker privilege that he resents, he said. On the other hand, his own union approved the contract that said goodby to beer.

“This was in the contract,” he said. “We had a pretty good contract. We weren’t gonna go out just because they were taking our beer away.”

Before artificial refrigeration, when frigid winters were needed to make the ice stored to preserve summer brew, Milwaukee was the beer capital of the United States.

In the age of air conditioning, the sunny Los Angeles area is beer city, producing 18.5 million barrels a year. Milwaukee, which brews 14.5 million barrels a year, is second. St. Louis, where Anheuser-Busch has its headquarters, is third, with a production capacity of 12.6 million barrels a year.

Largest Local Brewer

Anheuser-Busch is the largest Los Angeles brewer by far, able to make 11 million gallons a year at its Valley plant. Miller can produce 4.5 million barrels a year in Irwindale near West Covina. Stroh makes up to 3 million barrels annually in Van Nuys, according to the U.S. Brewers Assn. in Washington.

Like Anheuser-Busch, the local Miller plant has already taken steps toward a total beer ban. According to spokesman Franco, Irwindale’s 750 unionized workers are allowed to have a Lite or Loewenbrau on company time and at company expense. But, since Jan. 1, beer has been off limits at work to the plant’s 250 salaried employees, including himself. “We’ve had no complaints,” he said. “Nobody’s said that it’s unjust.”

All 500 of Stroh’s employees may drink the company’s beer in the Van Nuys brewery, according to Christopher Lole, Stroh vice president.

To some observers, Anheuser-Busch’s move is overdue.

MADD Sought Ban

Mothers Against Drunk Drivers has been urging Anheuser-Busch to ban company-time imbibing since 1982, when the group first learned, to its horror, that beer-drinking, as well as beer-making, takes place every day in breweries.

On Aug. 14 of that year, a worker in the Van Nuys plant, Mario Cornell, finished his shift after a workday of beer drinking, drove out of the parking lot onto Roscoe Boulevard and struck and killed a 16-year-old pedestrian, Frank Mock.

The Reseda-based Los Angeles chapter of the militant mothers’ group alerted MADD founder Candy Lightner to Mock’s death. A national campaign to end the brewery drinking practice was begun, a spokeswoman in Lighter’s Texas office said.

Workers at the local Anheuser-Busch plant speculate that the accident encouraged the company’s ban on beer, begun for salaried workers three years ago.

In their cautious comments on the current push toward total sudlessness, beer executives have cited the industry’s desire to spruce up beer-making’s image and a humane wish to discourage anyone, especially a beer maker, from drinking and driving. But some observers think the breweries want to stop the custom before someone slaps one of them with a so-called dramshop liability suit.

In recent years, courts have held servers of alcoholic beverages, ranging from bar owners to party hosts, liable for accidents caused by drunks who subsequently go out and hurt themselves or others.

Whether lawsuits do more than conscience to motivate a drinking ban, no one knows for sure. But Miller’s Franco said he has no doubt that fear of legal action is a factor in the newly abstinent mood in breweries, including his own. He added, however: “I haven’t seen anything come across my desk.”

Although some workers decry the demise of the beer break, others shrug it off. For most brewery employees, free beer is no big deal, according to Xavier Hermosillo, who was Miller’s West Coast spokesman from 1980 to 1984.

“It’s no different from working in a chocolate factory,” said Hermosillo, who now has his own consulting firm in West Covina. “After a while, it becomes passe. It’s like the guy who works at a hamburger stand. If you work for McDonald’s long enough, eventually you yearn for a Taco Bell.”

Although brewery workers may yearn for ice-cold 7-Up, nationally they drank 44,206 barrels of beer at work last year, about 500,000 cases, or a little more than a barrel per worker, according to brewery reports to the U.S. Treasury Department.

High Alcoholism Rate Denied

Beer makers say that their industry has no more alcoholism than others and no special safety problems. But interviews with workers suggest that brew on tap makes breweries unique workplaces.

“I never drank before I went into the brewery,” Randy Anderson said at his going-away party last week, as he sat with a dozen brewery buddies in the Mona Lisa, a dimly lit bar across from the Van Nuys plant.

“When I saw how much they paid and that you were allowed to drink as much beer as you wanted, I felt like a kid in a candy store. I drank at every break because it was there. I bought cases at their beer sales. I even started cooking with beer. And the only time I tapered off was when they cut it off. I wanted to keep my job and so I stopped. But there are some guys who still sneak, especially on weekends, when there aren’t as many supervisors around.

“In fact, I used to sneak sometimes,” Anderson said. He predicted that, when the beer coolers disappear from the break rooms, workers will begin pilfering more beer from the assembly line.

“That’s the best beer to drink,” he said. “It’s unpasteurized.”

Encourage Drinking Limits

Companies such as Anheuser-Busch provide employee-assistance programs for workers with personal problems, including alcohol abuse, which affects an estimated 10% of all drinkers, wherever they work. The major breweries encourage workers to drink responsibly and remind them that responsible drinking is good for an industry that is good to them.

Intoxication was never permitted in the brewery, Anderson said, even when drinking was. He said he rarely, if ever, saw a reeling drunk on the job.

But brewery life is different from life in an auto plant, the workers agreed.

As one explained: “A brewery this size is like a city under a roof. You get all types. I’ve seen flare-ups develop because people have had a little too much to drink.” Such incidents have included fights and an occasion when an assembly-line worker between beer breaks allegedly urinated where he stood.

Woozy Misconduct

Before salaried staff members lost their beer-drinking privileges, Anderson said, there also was occasional woozy misconduct by supervisors with more than beer bottling on their minds.

“A salaried person could get intoxicated or have a little more than he should have and use his power as a supervisor to make suggestions to a female worker, if you know what I mean,” he said.

The only workers who aren’t tempted to overindulge, at least at first, are the brewers who deal with beer at its rawest, according to a 27-year-old Glendora Bud maker who did not want his name published.

“When you’re inside the tanks, cleaning them out, and you fall down a couple times and get that beer smell all over you, you don’t want to sit down and drink beer,” he said.

Few Absentee Problems

Some people, however, want to drink beer all day, which is why breweries, alone among industries, don’t have absentee problems involving employees who abuse alcohol. An alcoholic brewer isn’t going to let a hangover keep him off the job.

One such brewery employee who rarely missed a day was Richard Dueweke, a Detroit man who worked for Stroh for 25 years until he bled to death in 1978 after his esophagus ruptured, a complication of his alcoholism.

Dueweke’s widow, Ilene, is seeking widow’s benefits from Stroh, claiming that its free-beer policy contributed to his death. According to her attorney, Ronald Gricius, Irene Dueweke stands to collect about $100,000 if she wins her case later this month before Michigan’s Workers’ Disability Compensation Board. Liability attorneys and beer makers both report they are watching the case closely.

Irene Dueweke declined to be interviewed, except to say: “If there wasn’t any beer served, things would have been a lot different. That’s for sure.”

Dueweke Legally Intoxicated

According to her attorney, Richard Dueweke was legally intoxicated on company beer when he died. “The only time he ever really drank was on the job,” the attorney said. Dueweke refused to take vacations, Gricius said.

Gricius believes Richard Dueweke was addicted to alcohol and that free beer in the plant was as dangerous to him as other workplace chemicals might be to workers with allergies.

“Probably when he got up at 5 o’clock in the morning to go to work, he was chomping at the bit, not to work, but to get those first couple beers to get him going,” Gricius said. “It’s amazing when you talk to the guys he worked with. They said he wasn’t a drunk. He had no problems. He drank the same amount as they did.”

According to legal experts, including Massachusetts lawyer Ron Beitman, no brewery has been a party in any of the growing number of recent cases involving alcohol-related accidents. Courts have ruled that bars, companies that host boozy Christmas parties and other servers of alcohol share legal liability for accidents or other damage caused by people who have drunk too much. Beitman publishes a monthly newsletter called the Dramshop and Alcohol Reporter.

Policy Destined for Lawsuit

But Gricius and others think it’s just a matter of time until a brewery with a free-beer policy is named in such a suit, probably after an auto accident involving an intoxicated worker. And Gricius wants to be the lawyer who gets 10% of the settlement in that landmark case.

“I’d really love to get somebody who was hit by one of these guys at Stroh,” he said. “I’d go after the brewery right away. Maybe nobody’s thought of the theory but greedy me.”

According to Beitman, courts appear to be more willing to extract big money from corporate servers than from individuals. And such awards do tend to be substantial.

“I settled one eight weeks ago for $3,971,000,” Beitman said. In that case, a Chinese restaurant agreed to pay that sum to a person injured by one of its customers who had bellied up to the bar and slurringly demanded one more for the road. The drunk driver was ordered to pay $80,000.

Sobering News

Such news is sobering for the beer industry. In California, a state statute passed in 1978 limits dramshop liability to cases in which alcohol is served to an intoxicated minor. That law was passed to counter a 1978 California Supreme Court decision that extended liability to “social hosts,” including people who pour too much wine at a dinner party.

According to Berkeley attorney James Mosher, who tracks dramshop suits, California courts had led the nation in establishing the liability of servers in drunken accidents until the 1978 statute was passed, after furious lobbying by the alcohol industry. Since then, the national trend has been toward greater server responsibility, not less.

In California, Assemblywoman Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, has proposed legislation that would replace California’s permissive law with one protecting only social hosts from dramshop suits, not bars or package stores.

“It’s not clear whether an employer would be considered a social host,” Mosher said. “My bet is it wouldn’t.”

In a landmark alcohol-related case last year, a Texas engineering firm was found liable after a drunken employee was walked to his car and caused an accident while driving home. That decision already has many companies, including local breweries, forking up cab fare for workers who shouldn’t drive--no matter how they became intoxicated.

Miller Has Cab-Fare Policy

A Miller executive in Irwindale, who requested anonymity, explained that Miller already has a policy of keeping workers whose judgment seems to be impaired away from their cars.

“We call the family,” he said. “If we can’t get the family, we call a cab. If we can’t get a cab, we call the police.”

In the last six months, he said, the police have been called twice to take workers home. In both instances, he added, the employees were believed to be high on something other than beer.