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Four Roses workers at both the distillery in Lawrenceburg and the warehouse complex and bottling plant in Bardstown, Kentucky voted to go on strike on Friday, September 7 at 3:30 pm. Four Roses workers are represented by the National Conference of Firemen and Oilers, Chapter 320 and the Union Food and Commercial Workers Local 10D and Local 23D. The strike is reported to involve over 50 employees.
Four Roses is owned by the Japanese brewing company Kirin, and recently finished a $55 million expansion of their two Kentucky plants that would effectively double the distillery’s output.
The employees object to terms in their new contract involving sick leave, seniority and vacation. In an advertisement in the local paper, The Anderson News, they called it “the worst contract proposal since Prohibition.”
This is almost two years after workers at Jim Beam briefly went on strike in their own contract dispute. The Bourbon Boom has been a double-edged sword for the industry’s workers overall. While workers have had plenty of overtime and the substantially increased paychecks that go with it, at the same time the grind of long hours, year after year, has taken its toll on many bourbon industry workers and their families.
