Earlier this week, a federal labor judge ruled that the Woodford Reserve bourbon brand violated labor law when it busted a 2022 union drive at its Kentucky distillery. Now, it must bargain with the union anyway.
The decision from the National Labor Relations Board’s administrative law judge, Hizzoner Andrew S. Gollin, runs 29 single-spaced pages, and Woodford Reserve’s parent company, the multinational liquor conglomerate Brown-Forman Corporation, told the Associated Press it is reviewing the decision. (It did not respond to Fingers’ request for comment.) The firm can still appeal. Regardless of whether it does, Gollin’s ruling is of interest here at Fingers HQ for two reasons.
First, rather than call for a new union election to replace the results of the corrupted vote that the union lost in 2022, it requires B-F to simply begin negotiating with Teamsters Local 651 (with which some 60 Woodford Reserve production employees had originally tried to organize nearly two years ago.) Such a “bargaining order” is a new standard1 adopted by the NLRB in 2023 to try to correct for the obviously deficient2 remedy of holding another election years after the first one was busted, once the original workers who organized the union have left or been fired. If a firm illegally busts a union—boom, it gets a union. “Fuck around and find out,” but make it labor law. This is not legal advice, and it’s a lot more complicated than that, but you get the idea.
The second reason the ALJ’s ruling is worth digging through is because it provides a detailed report of how major beverage-alcohol manufacturers go about the sordid task of union-busting these days. The “union avoidance” tactics B-F used to to cut rank-and-file support for Local 651 out at the knees in 2022 are classic techniques ripped straight from the anti-union playbook. They haven’t changed much in decades, not because so-called “persuaders” (anti-union consultants) aren’t creative, but because the old tricks still largely work today. So it’s worth reviewing them when the opportunity arises, and thanks to the ALJ ruling against B-F, one has—squarely in Fingers’ wheelhouse, no less.
Here’s how Woodford Reserve successfully flipped the vote on its fledgling union in 2022. (All screenshots are from Gollin’s report, which you can read in full on the NLRB’s website here. All highlighting is mine.)