The twisty-mustache fantasy

<p>You know how there seem to be a lot of union drives at coffee shops, craft breweries, and artisanal bakeries these days, and you don’t really get it because you always figured that since their products were so much more delicious than their corporate counterparts, they must treat their workers much better, too? What’s up with that?</p><p>So glad you asked. Today on The Fingers Podcast and exclusively for paying Friends of Fingers, I’ve got an interview with Benjamin Anderson, a Ph.D. candidate and instructor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. Ben studies the labor movement in the so-called contemporary “craft” sectors—breweries, distilleries, coffeehouses, and so on. Basically, if it’s local, artisanal, or farm-to-table, he’s probably researched the conditions of the people that make it. His work has been published in a variety of <a target="_blank" href="https://glrc.info.yorku.ca/files/2021/08/Benjamin-Anderson-The-Forgotten-Labour-of-Craft.pdf">journals</a> and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/llt/2019-v84-llt05057/1066547ar/">collections</a>, and he’s finishing up his doctorate as we speak. </p><p><em>🤝 Paying subscribers get access to this and every full-length interview on The Fingers Podcast. </em></p><p><em>I depend on reader support to fund the boozeletter’s independent journalism. To unlock more reporting, </em><em>buy a subscription today</em><em>!—Dave.</em></p><p>During our recording session in mid-March, Ben and I got into a ton of tactical and philosophical questions about the labor movement’s role in the craft brewing business, including the unique challenges of unionizing small shops, how the “we’re a family” myth at work keeps many employees from realizing their collective power, and the ways workers of different backgrounds are able to organize based on shared conditions in “craft” contexts. We also talked about the misleading myth of craft brewing’s “twisty-mustache fantasy;” I snuck in a garbage reference to the Avett Brothers and <a targe