Yuengling (pronounced Ying-ling) Beer is made by the oldest family-owned brewery in the U.S. From that you might think the beer is located in a small town in a very old brewery. Until fairly recently, that was the case. The brewery was an old brick building on Mahantongo Street in Pottsville.
Now Yuengling has gone national, on sale pretty much everywhere, with a huge new plant about a mile east of Pottsville and another in Florida. According to a recent article in the Morning Call, the owner, Dick Yuengling, has a net worth of $1.4 billion.
The brewery had been union, organized by the Teamsters, but Mr. Yuengling broke the union by threatening to close the Pottsville location and move out of state. Now he, along with the Koch Brothers, is pushing Gov. Corbett to support legislation to make Pennsylvania a “Right to Work for Less” state, which will drop Pennsylvania wages down to the levels of states like Alabama and Mississippi.
Today we had a big rally in Pottsville, with over 300 union members massing on Mahantongo Street and then marching to the Schuylkill County Courthouse for speeches, including one by Allentown Mayor Pawlowski. We had a police escort and the support of the Pottsville mayor.
Carbon County was represented by six of us, including Linda with a bullhorn leading the whole group in chants such as “What’s disgusting? Union busting? Union busting--that’s disgusting.”
I always have a hard time with unmitigated greed. Why would a man worth $1,400,000,000 want to take away the union rights of workers in a county where the median household income in 2010 was $43,457? Schuylkill’s median income, incidentally, has dropped since 2010. I don’t know about Dick Yuengling’s income.
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