1973 Coors strike inspires Amazon organizing

In 1973, San Francisco beer delivery drivers were at odds with local beer distributors over low wages, union-busting efforts and employment discrimination. Distributors of the Colorado-based Coors Brewing Co. were particularly notorious — their parent company went as far as to require pre-employment polygraph tests to weed out supposedly undesirable hires.

The drivers, members of the Teamsters union Local 888, decided to strike and to call for a boycott of Coors beer. By fall 1974, the boycott included LGBTQ consumers, Chicanx and Latinx organizations, Black activists and Native American community leaders in the Bay Area.

Though it is 1967’s Summer of Love, the student-led strikes at what was then San Francisco State College in 1968 and the Indians of All Tribes’ 18-month occupation of Alcatraz Island from 1969 to 1971 that made the Bay Area a famous hub of countercultural radicalism, this lesser-known, coalition-based effort against Coors also left a major mark. Now, as San Francisco once again becomes a hub of coalition organizing, labor and community activists are revisiting the boycott’s innovative movementbuilding approach to take on a presentday corporate goliath: Amazon.

What initially inspired the 1970s Coors boycott was antagonism for the company’s labor practices. But as the boycott grew, the Coors family’s politics became its focus. Third-generation executives Joseph and William Coors were closely linked to conservative politicians and generously funded right-wing organizations like the Heritage Foundation.

By challenging Coors, boycotters saw themselves as fighting “conservatism, anti-unionism and racism,” as a Bay Area Teamster publication put it.

But these coalitions required more than an enemy; cementing a movement required organizers who moved in and out of LGBTQ, labor and other activist circles. One such organizer was Allan Baird, a Korean War veteran, musician, and Teamster who worked out of his home in the Castro District. With the help of Andris Cirkelis and other Teamsters, Baird dispatched striking beer drivers to grocery stores. Using picket signs, leaflets and a red-and-white bullhorn, they got many stores to remove the offending cans from their shelves.

As these protests fanned out, Baird and his team built connections outside the labor movement. Baird had only to go around the corner from his home to spark one such connection — with camera store owner, aspiring politician and gay-rights activist Harvey Milk. As the two became fast friends, Milk emerged as a key supporter of the boycott, on the condition that Baird and the Teamsters guaranteed jobs for LGBTQ drivers. With Milk on board, other LGBTQ activists joined the fray, including Cleve Jones, Milk’s assistant and future union leader, and Howard Wallace, co-founder of a radical organization called the Bay Area Gay Liberation, or BAGL. After BAGL meetings, which became hotbeds of Coors organizing, members would hit gay bars to convince patrons and owners to join the fight.

Baird and Cirkelis also forged alliances with other activist communities, from radical Chicanos to Black civil rights leaders. In November 1974, a coalition of over a dozen organizations, including the American Indian Movement and Black Panthers, endorsed the boycott and a ground-breaking Teamsters affirmative action plan that prioritized LGBTQ and applicants of color for open driver positions. Shortly thereafter, Milk editorialized in the Bay Area Reporter that “the union of beer drivers, blacks, Chicanos and Latinos and gays fighting together” had planted “the seeds of joint battles.”

After a decade of boycotting that extended to the East Coast — Fenway Park in Boston ousted Coors from its concession stands — most of the boycott coalitions broke up. The movement’s success in prompting changes in Coors’ employment practices, as well as company efforts to infuse hundreds of millions of dollars back into boycotting communities, made the boycott less urgent. Still, original boycott organizers take pride in the fact that Coors beer has never touched their lips.

Fifty years later, activists, and young Teamsters in particular, see that boycott as a blueprint for the “massive long-term task” of organizing Amazon’s fast-growing and highly precarious workforce. Coalition-building is integral to these efforts. In San Francisco, where Amazon is planning a distribution center southeast of downtown, Teamsters have partnered with a diverse group of organizations — union locals, transit riders, nonprofits, neighborhood advisory boards — to create the San Francisco Southeast Alliance.

Founded in 2021, the alliance seeks not to stall the Amazon project but, rather, to guarantee that the company make a “meaningful long-term investment” in affordable housing, commit to environmental standards and guarantee union jobs.

The coalition has worked with the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to enact an 18-month moratorium on new parcel delivery facilities to give time for thorough studies of environmental and community impacts. After the moratorium passed in March 2022, Amazon said it would pause construction on this new facility to re-evaluate long-term priorities and work with community partners.

As activists across the country work to contain Amazon’s expansion and unionize its warehouses — from the long-running organizing campaign in Bessemer, Ala., to the most recent victory on Staten Island, N.Y. — Bay Area activists are looking back at their own playbook. They are following the footsteps of Baird and other Coors boycott organizers.