ONE HOPPY ENDING

AN OHIO brewery has a recipe to make America great again, and all it calls for is a dash of Midwestern practicality mixed with a healthy dose of worker empowerment. Sprinkle it with union-management cooperation and top it off with the secret sauce: trust.

These are the ingredients that have kept production booming at the MillerCoors Brewery in Trenton, Ohio, since 1991 — that’s 26 years with no factory layoffs or arbitration hearings between management and its union.

The relationship even held strong through multiple corporate mergers and the inevitable downsizing due to automation — something the Trenton plant has embraced to stay competitive.

That’s not to say the two sides haven’t had a few close calls.

“I don’t want to lead you down the primrose path here — we’ve been at the edge a few times,” John Holub, chairman of United Auto Workers Local 2308, said during a tour of the plant offered to the Daily News in early July.

“We’ve had arbitrators flown into town, had them sitting right down the road in a hotel just waiting for the call to come on over,” Holub said. “Thankfully, we’ve always been able to pull it back from the brink, because at the end of the day, we all really do want to work things out ourselves. We’ve invested our lives here.”

Holub is only able to draw that level of commitment from his workers because it’s matched by the other side — starting with plant manager Denise Quinn.

At MillerCoors Trenton Brewery, the UAW workers run the shop and the company is “very proud” of it, according to Quinn.