MANY OF THE STATED PRACTICES which led to the boycott have since been changed by the brewery. Coors spokespeople, however, deny that the boycott has had any effect in changing the company's employee relations practices.

The boycott coalition has charged Coors with discriminating against minority employees, and point to a 1975 Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) suit against the brewery, which was settled out of court. At the time, Coors agreed to an affirmative action plan which met with the approval of the EEOC. Today, Coors' workforce of 9400 is 4.4 per cent Black and 9 per cent Hispanic--roughly equivalent to the respective populations in the Denver area.

Coors officials say they feel their company has taken a bum rap, and have been working hard to insure that the brewery is a model corporate citizen. Fred Rasheed, the national director of the NAACP economic opportunity program agrees that Coors, "has come a long way."

But a few years ago, Rasheed might have said that Coors had a long way to go. After William Coors reportedly made some racist statements before a group of minority business leaders in 1984, the NAACP started a boycott in Southern California and initiated negotiations with the brewery. The result was a series of fair-trade agreements or covenants between Coors and the NAACP and several Hispanic organizations--Rasheed was a key negotiator of these agreements.

Although Rasheed acknowledges that "the Coors as a family seem to have conservative Republican politics," he maintains that the covenants have helped serve the NAACP's interests. "Our primary concern was to generate more jobs and more business opportunities for Black Americans," he says.

Others argue that the covenants were simply an attempt to buy off groups that needed the money. Boston City Councillor David Scondras argues that "the extent to which you are systematically impoverished is the extent to which you are willing to participate in that kind of deal." But, regardless of Coors' motives, the covenants have helped to ensure that Coors provides substantial assistance to minorities.

Last year the company bought over $37 million in products from minority vendors and deposited over $9.2 in minority-owned banks. The Miller brewing company, which is over twice the size of Coors, purchased about $31 million worth of goods from minority vendors and deposited less than $1 million in minority-owned banks. Coors has four Black-owned and nine Hispanic-owned distributors; Miller has five and four respectively. Miller, though, has an excellent record in working with the minority community. The figures simply suggest that whether or not Coors discriminated against minority vendors in the past, it is presently at least on par with the rest of the beer industry.

In addition to its changed hiring and spending policies, Coors has also taken a more active role in funding minority artists and performers such as the nationwide tour of singer Jeffrey Osborne and the Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble. But Sickler counters, "If you can get two cockroaches to race, Coors will show up with a T-shirt and sponsor it."

Some say that regardless of what they see as token gestures on Coors' part, the brewery will never live down its past. According to Richard Zayas '88, "All of a sudden Coors is helping the Hispanic community...But the ads, the scholarships, can't replace the record that they already have."

CHARGES OF RACISM, SEXISM AND homophobia aside, the main dispute between the boycotters and the company is over Coors' labor practices. The AFL-CIO says its strike against Coors began over human dignity issues, such as forced lie-detector tests and illegal search and seizure. But William Coors stridently denies that the lie detector tests were at issue in the strike, and claims that there have only been four cases of search and seizure over the past fifteen years, all of which involved alleged drug use.

The AFL-CIO and Coors could not agree on the causes of the strike; they could not reach a settlement either. Indeed, the resulting strike has yet to be resolved, although over two-thirds of the striking workers have returned to the brewery. Almost two years after the strike's start, the non-striking workers voted to decertify the AFL-CIO affiliate, Brewery Workers Local 366. The striking workers were unable to vote in the decertification election.

Responding to charges of union busting, Coors states, "If you think it's possible for a company to bust a union, I suggest you read the National Labor Relations Act and find out whether it is or not. I challenge you to find a way to do it." But labor experts claim that it is possible to eliminate unions through various bargaining strategies, and that Coors has employed union-busting strategies whenever it could. In a Rocky Mountain News editorial on the brewery shortly after the strike, the newspaper noted that, "unions are vulnerable. They can be busted by companies that negotiate but don't sign."

Whether or not the Coors company is anti-union, more than nineteen unions have come and gone over the last twenty-five years. There is presently a union of Operating Engineers but unlike most unions, membership is not obligatory. It has about 30 members; Coors has more than 9000 employees. Brewery Workers Local 366 had about 1500 members when it went on strike.

William Coors admits he doesn't like unions. "Unions are a consequence of unenlightened management...management that is not sensitive to the basic needs of the people." He argues that if managers would pay more attention to employees' needs, as he suggests he does in his brewery, there would be no need for workers to unionize. Additionally, Coors equates strikes with warfare, and is happy to declare himself the winner. He notes, "Where unions have gone out on strike with our company, they have not gotten back in." However, according to a Coors spokeswoman, three strikes in the past 30 years were settled without ousting the unions.

Coors seems to oppose 'closed shops'--companies in which all workers are required to join the plant union. Instead, he feels that employees should be able to decide whether or not they want to join. And he puts the company's dollars behind this--the brewery donates to organizations such as the National Right to Work Committee, a group dedicated to the concept, "everyone must have the right but not be compelled to join labor unions."