The Craft Brewery Workers’ Alliance of Canada (CBWAC) is a collective of brewery workers committed to improving working conditions, promoting equity, and fostering a respectful, collaborative culture throughout our industry. We believe that these changes can best be brought about by building collective power amongst workers in breweries across Canada. Together we are stronger and can change our industry for the better.
As a collective, we are committed to the following values:
- Organizing and solidarity We are driven by a commitment to building worker power through organizing throughout the craft brewing industry. We recognize the need for workers at every stage of the craft brewing process to come together to demand better conditions. From servers to brewers to administrative workers, we are committed to building solidarity and organizational capacity at breweries across Canada.
- Building community We believe our collective power depends on the open and democratic exchange of strategic information about issues facing craft brewery workers. Our ability to fight against sexual harassment, discrimination, and managerial overreach and to fight for better wages, safer workplaces, and respectful cultures is underpinned by an inclusive, unified, and activated worker community.
- Education and outreach Brewing and the labour movement share a closely connected history. As a collective, we are committed, not only to recognizing and sharing this history but to creating a better and more just foundation for its future. Furthermore, we believe it is critical that craft brewery workers and the industry as a whole acknowledge and celebrate the crucial role marginalized workers have played in building this history.
- Mobilization and capacity building Following a historical period where organized labour has been on the defensive, we are currently witnessing a resurgence in working-class power and worker organizing. Workers are in the best position to know what actions need to be taken to improve conditions at their workplaces. We are committed to assisting workers at all stages of the organizing process by offering strategic support at individual breweries and developing tools that can be adopted at an industry-wide scale.
- Anti-oppression and workplace justice In recent years, countless testimonials have revealed the deep levels of oppression that are poisoning our industry culture. The pervasive culture of harassment, bullying, exclusion, and abuse that has long characterized our industry must be pulled out by the roots. Together, workers have the power to change this culture by demanding new workplace policies, instigating new anti-oppressive initiatives, and holding perpetrators accountable using whatever means we have at our disposal.
- Solidarity with the international workers’ movement The conditions we face in Canada’s craft brewing industry are not unique. We are part of an international community of craft brewery workers, and, as such, are committed to practicing solidarity with our colleagues around the world. Just as workers are stronger when we come together in a workplace, the workers’ movement is stronger when we come together around the globe.