Sapporo-Stone Brewing Spent Over $100K Busting Its Union. Here’s Why.

Apropos of the Trump administration’s ongoing anti-constitutional purge in Washington, D.C., shoutout to the federal bureaucracy, man. For decades, it’s been trendy to shit on this tangle of acronymic entities that gathers data, delivers services, and regulates industry on behalf of the United States’ executive and legislative branches. There are valid critiques to be made of the lowercase-l liberal administrative state, ways it could be improved to function better. One thing it continues to do decently well, though, even as it suffers reckless, illegal swipes from white-supremacist welfare-enjoyer Elon Musk’s gilded chainsaw, is generate public records.

Amid all the chaos of President Donald Trump’s trade war, Musk’s self-serving raid on Social Security et al., and the group chat grotesques of Signalgate, one particular such filing caught my eye. Roughly five months after Sapporo-Stone Brewing (SSB) defeated a union drive at its Richmond, Va., plant, it submitted its required “employer report” to the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) earlier this month. The form finally reveals how much money the Japanese macrobrewer’s American subsidiary spent on the outside consultants — “persuaders” in official parlance, “union-busters” in labor parlance — it hired to help rout its workers bid to collectively bargain with the Teamsters.

The document, known as an LM-10, was filed on March 6, 2025. On it, SSB discloses three payments totalling $114,124 to Government Resources Consultants of America (GRCA), a notoriously aggressive union-avoidance firm, each made between Sept. 25 and Oct. 31, 2024. You can view it in full here.

A box that SSB checked on the LM-10 designates these cash payments were made in exchange for services, arranged starting July 19, 2024, “to persuade employees to exercise or not to exercise, or as to the manner of exercising, the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.”

If you’ve never witnessed the grinding hothouse vibe of a workplace in the midst of a union drive, that line item probably sounds fairly anodyne. Ditto, the emailed statement SSB chief executive officer Zach Keeling offered Hop Take through a company spokesperson. “We gained valuable insights from our Richmond, Va. team during the union campaign last year and we remain committed to partnering directly with our team to build a positive workplace here at Sapporo-Stone,” he wrote, declining to provide more details on what he described as “union education services” the brewery purchased from GRCA last summer, as well as my request for a phone interview to discuss the same. Reached by phone, GRCA’s treasurer, Raymond Rosenbach, also declined to comment.

As longtime labor reporter Dave Jamieson wrote in his award–winning 2024 package for HuffPost, “The Persuaders,” though, this stuff is anything but anodyne in practice. “[P]ersuaders play an undeniable role in suppressing union membership,” he wrote. “They help employers craft a playbook against the union. They figure out who supports the union, who opposes it and who sits on the fence. They hold group and one-on-one meetings that sow doubt about what a union can accomplish. Some push the boundaries of what’s legal and even step over them, according to labor board case files.”

I’ve seen no evidence that the persuaders SSB hired broke labor laws during their time on retainer. But as Hop Take reported in mid-September 2024, roughly three weeks prior to the National Labor Relations Board-sanctioned election in which Stone’s workers in Richmond would ultimately reject representation from Teamsters Local 322, GRCA and its subcontractors certainly ran the “union-busting playbook” against the drive. Workers leaked me the misleading flyers the consultants distributed among brewery employees, and described how they coordinated meetings for anti-union employees to share unverifiable anecdotes about bad individual experiences at other unionized workplaces. In a classic union-busting trick known as “third-partying,” GRCA also smeared Local 322 as a deceitful interloper — even as it was deceitfully interloping itself.

The pressure worked. After collecting signed union cards from around 70 percent of eligible workers at Stone’s Richmond brewery over the summer, the union lost 32-58. It’s hard to say how much of the defeat was directly attributable to the six-figures’ worth of face-to-face persuading, and how much was due to SSB’s procedural gambit with the National Labor Relations Board to include workers at its warehouse outside of town in the voting bloc. (Local 322 acceded to that request, a common management tactic to dilute pro-union voting blocs, to avoid the potentially awkward optics of trying to keep some workers out of the union while encouraging others to vote for it.) But it’s easy to say how much SSB paid its “persuaders” to help engineer this outcome, now that the brewer filed its LM-10, and it was a bundle.

“That money should’ve been put towards the workers,” Local 322’s Dwayne Johnson tells Hop Take. During the drive, Stone workers told me Richmond’s rising costs of living were a key reason why they wanted to unionize. That $114,124, Johnson points out, wouldn’t include the travel costs for the senior SSB executives who came to Richmond late last summer to do “persuading” of their own during the drive. “That’s just a small portion of the cost that they used to fend off the union that they could have invested in their employees instead,” he says.

This is technically true. It’s also revealing, because $114,124 divided across the 90 workers eligible to vote in last year’s election works out to less than $1,300 a head. It’s virtually guaranteed that Local 322 would’ve negotiated a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) that cost SSB more in salaries and benefits in the first year alone. Hell, if SSB spent 10 times more on union busters to smother Local 322 — call it an even $1 million — that math still probably pencils out. Union busters are expensive, but they’re cheaper than unions, all the more so given the U.S.’s laughably loose labor laws, low penalties for violating them, and (now) a Trump-crippled NLRB that will struggle to enforce transgressions. SSB played the hand it was dealt from a deck stacked in its favor.

One more thing. That $114,124 that SSB spent on its GRCA contract is surely less than the Richmond brewery’s labor costs would’ve been under a Teamster CBA. But it’s hardly a drop in the bucket barrel compared to the $91 million impairment charge Sapporo Holdings (SSB’s Japanese parent company) recently took on Stone itself, which it acquired for $165 million in 2022. We talked about this a bit the other day. Sapporo’s recently minted largest shareholder is ripshit mad about it, accusing the firm of “destroy[ing] shareholder capital through acquisition[s]” like Anchor Brewing Co., Sleeman Breweries, and Stone; SSB tells Hop Take in a statement that despite the near-nine-figure write-down, it grew revenues for Stone and Sapporo last year and is set up well for the future.

Time will tell on that. But one conclusion you could draw right now is that this company’s executives have wasted a lot of money on bets that have yet to pay off. This bears on the question of why SSB splashed out on pricey consultants to defeat the drive in Richmond last summer, rather than bet on itself by investing in its workforce. I suspect the answer is less to save money than to maintain unilateral control over its newly upgraded plant in the River City.

In this, SSB follows a brewing-industry example established by August Busch III during the 100-day Teamster strike on the macrobrewer’s St. Louis plant back in 1976. The stoppage cost A-B some $30 million in lost sales, but “The Chief” won something more valuable: continued unilateral control over the family’s brewery. “They wanted written into the contract that they would have the right to approve or disapprove any changes in production before we could implement them,” he said, as captured in William Knoedelseder’s “Bitter Brew.” Keeping that out of the eventual CBA was worth $30 million, if not more, to arguably the best brewing boss of his — or any — era.

The workers at Stone’s Richmond brewery never got that far. And those days are long gone for both the American brewing industry and organized labor. But it helps to wrap your head around why SSB would spend $114,124 to stop a union drive even as it was en route to wiping almost an order of magnitude more value off its books. Money spent to bust a union is money well spent. Money spent on a craft brewery that turns out to be worth less than half as much after less than three years at the helm? That’s just the bosses’ call, man.

🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now

The United States imports an enormous amount of barley from Canada, but here’s the thing — it also exports an enormous amount of malt to Mexico. In fact, our neighbors to the north sell us more of the crop than any other country, and our neighbors to the south buy more of the semi-finished product than any other country. (Canada also buys a bunch of barley from this country. Global trade: it’s complicated!) Thanks to President Donald Trump’s destructive, pointless trade war, both those relationships are in unprecedented jeopardy, and American farmers are feeling the squeeze. “We are scared almost to death about tariffs,” Montana Grain Growers Association vice president Steve Sheffels recently told Reuters. More like Malt-pocalypse Now, amirite?! (Sorry, I know this is serious.)

📈 Ups…

Anderson Valley Brewing Co., one of California’s oldest still-operating craft breweries, has been sold to a new, local owner… Roughly a year and a half after acquiring Anheuser-Busch InBev’s defunct energy-drink brand, Tilray Brands will return Hi*Ball to Whole Foods’ shelves… The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau quietly withdrew its proposed rules for ingredient labeling last week, considered a potentially existential burden by craft brewers…

📉 …and downs

Anheuser-Busch InBev pulled out of its St. Louis Pride sponsorship after 30 years of support… The Teamsters called on Trump to levy tariffs on “low-road Mexican companies” that export beer stateside, as though that would help domestics somehow… Bill Renspie, the chief customer officer of Constellation Brands’ Beer Division, stepped down suddenly last week after two decades at the firm… That, as Citi downgraded Constellation’s stock in the face of Trump’s trade war… Man, only six Major League Baseball teams have signed on to Anheuser-Busch InBev’s “American, not domestic” messaging, outta 30…

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