The 1953 Brewery Strike: Seventy-Six Days

On May fourteenth, nineteen fifty-three, approximately seven thousand workers at six Milwaukee breweries walked off their jobs. The breweries were Schlitz, Pabst, Miller, Blatz, Gettelman, and Independent. The union was Local Nine of the United Brewery Workers, affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The dispute was wages and hours. Milwaukee's brewery workers were paid less and worked longer hours than brewery workers in comparable cities. They wanted parity.

The strike lasted seventy-six days. Milwaukee, which had been the largest brewing center in the world, produced almost no beer for nearly three months in the summer of nineteen fifty-three.

The settlement came in late July when Blatz, one of the smaller companies in the employers' group, broke ranks and began negotiating separately. The other five followed. The workers voted to accept new contracts on July twenty-ninth. The contracts addressed the main wage and hours concerns.

What the strike illustrated was the degree to which Milwaukee's industrial identity was inseparable from its labor identity. The city that had elected three Socialist mayors and memorialized the Bay View Massacre was also a city where the workers in its signature industry had enough organization to shut it down for seventy-six days and win.

One dimension of the nineteen fifty-three strike is not fully documented in the accessible public record: the extent to which Black workers were represented in the skilled brewery trades at the time, and whether the union contracts that resulted extended equally by race. The Wisconsin Labor History Society archives hold more detail on this question than the published secondary literature, but the full picture is not yet established from sources available here.