Editor’s note: I’m reworking the Fingers publishing schedule to accommodate a shifting workload here at HQ. Dispatches may be a bit sporadic for the next couple weeks as I sort this out on the fly. Thank you for your patience!—Dave.
“There are people making money here,” a craft brewery worker once told me, “but it’s not us.” Such is the American economy’s “deal,” generally speaking, and the United States’ brewing industry is not exempt. Sometimes, things have shaken out workers’ favor anyway, with the rising tide lifting all boats in an approximation of Milton Friedman’s trickle-down fantasy; other times they have not.
But the income gap between owner and worker at your average craft brewery is not very big, because your average craft brewery is not very big. The larger the firm gets, the more vulnerable labor is to getting hosed by the relentless upward redistribution of wealth generated by their hard work. One way to measure this fuckery is the income gap: the ratio of compensation for a given firm’s top executive compared to its median worker. And buddy, that ratio gets breathtakingly out-of-whack as you move away from craft beverage producers and towards the “mega-corporate” end of the spectrum.