Down on South Broadway near the Anheuser-Busch Brewery sits the Gambrinus Hall, nowadays the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ Union Hall. But the strange name of the hall alludes to its previous use as the headquarters in St. Louis of the International Union of the United Brewery Workmen of America, before their merger with the Teamsters in 1973. Organized labor has a long history in St. Louis, and it is certainly not surprising that the men who brought beer to St. Louis would unionize as well. Recently discovered documents from 1910 reveal what such labor agreements would have looked like, how much workers were paid, and the working conditions of the men who worked in the famous breweries before Prohibition.
Gambrinus, sometimes depicted as a king, remains one of those shadowy figures from the Middle Ages. Credited with creating beer with hops, as spurious as a claim as that is, he nonetheless embodied the role of the “patron saint” of the rank and file of the brewery world. As far as identification with an actual historical figure, the first and more common remains John the Fearless, one of the Dukes of Burgundy (and whose funerary sculptures were displayed at the Saint Louis Art Museum several years ago). The other one revolves around Jean Sans Peur, another medieval figure. Regardless, the current hall from 1966 on the site of the former Home Brewery—whose rubble-filled lagering cellars still lie below the street—contains relics of the previous location, including a giant terra cotta seal with the Latin-German hybrid motto, Vivat Das Edle Handwerk Der Bierbraver, or “Long live the noble work of the beer brewer.”
The series of labor agreements cover all of the workers at the breweries in St. Louis. Of particular interest are the management signatories in 1910—despite the reputation of the city for having dozens of breweries, the consolidation of many of them into the Independent Breweries Company and the St. Louis Brewing Association limited the number of entities. Along with those two conglomerates, there was of course the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association and the William J. Lemp Brewing Company. Two smaller breweries, the Union Brewery and Schorr-Kolkschneider, had chosen not to consolidate to compete with the giants, A-B and Lemp. Of interest, and what would later on cause considerable trouble for St. Louis-based Falstaff in California, the 1910 agreement was between all of the breweries collectively and the brewers’ union.
Perhaps what is most interesting, besides the now-outdated wages, revolve on how modern the labor agreements sound. For example, the brewers and maltsters were guaranteed eight hours as a full day’s work. For every four hours of work, a 15-minute lunch was allowed. Work was tightly restricted to the hours between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. However, the loading of beer, presumably because of the importance of the product getting to its customers was allowed outside of those hours as well as on Sunday. Also, the workers were given the opportunity to live wherever they wanted, a break from the common practice of many breweries providing barracks for their men to sleep and eat while off work. While the weekly rate was $19, for men in perhaps more taxing or sensitive areas such as the cellars or malt house, the pay was no less than $20. In a time when workers once worked over sixteen hours a day, these concessions to the unions were considerable.
Of importance of both management and labor was the distribution of beer to employees while on duty. Also, it’s interesting to see that the more skilled brewers and maltsters union’s contract was several pages, while the laborers’ union contract fits onto one page. Wages for laborers were much lower as well, and negotiated by day at $2.25, not by week. The status of women was also laid out in the agreements. They were not to engage in manual labor except when absolutely necessary.
The documents serve a critical role in demonstrating how St. Louis came to terms with organized labor. The infamous Streetcar Strike of 1900 had sown violence and mistrust throughout the city, with upwards of 14 people killed. Consolidation of streetcar companies had led to poor working conditions, and when the strike was announced, the owner of the St. Louis Transit Company, Edwards Whitaker, fired thousands of his employees. The turmoil around the city forced St. Louisans to realize that labor relations had reached a new low. The labor agreements of 1910 between the breweries and their employees show how the beer barons were working to prevent that violence from spreading to their industry.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at [email protected].
