Matt W. Barrow wrote:

A very long time ago, I believe it was Coors Brewing "decertified"
the union at Coors after years of thug tactics by the union. This has
to be a good 25 or 30 years ago. It really raised some dander, but it
CAN happen.
A company, IIRC, can refuse to recognize a union, but the PR and other
side-effects don't lean to using that course of action. Today might be
different, but the MSM would raise holy hell regardless of what
"pranks" the union engaged in.


The company didn't de-certify the union the workers did. I've posted a wiki
article below.

That said there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about labor law in
this conversation. Which is understandable because it is a very complex set
of laws on both the federal and state level. But to simplify..

The federal law recognizes two different types of strikers. Economic
Strikers and Unfair Practice Strikers.

If the workers strike for raises the employer may replace and the workers
and there is no law requiring that the striking workers get their jobs back.

If the workers strike based on unfair labor practices and the employer is
found to have indeed carried out unfair labor practices the workers not only
get their jobs back but are also entitled to back pay.

Economic strikers have gained some additional protection over the years but
in a lot of cases they can still be replaced and not rehired.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coors_Brewing_Company


Labor Issues
In April 1977, the brewery workers union at Coors, representing 1,472
employees, went out on strike. The brewery kept operating with supervisors
and 250 to 300 union members, including one member of the union executive
board, who ignored the strike. Soon after, Coors announced that it would
hire replacements for the striking workers.[3] About 700 workers quit the
picket line to go back to work, and Coors replaced the remaining 500
workers, and kept making beer uninterrupted.[4] In December 1978, the
workers at Coors voted by greater than 2:1 to decertify the union, ending 44
years of union representation at Coors. Because the strike was by then more
than a year old, striking workers could not vote in the election.[5]

Labor unions organized a boycott to punish Coors for its labor practices.[6]
One tactic was to push for state laws to ban sales of unpasteurized canned
and bottled beer.[7] Because Coors was the only major brewer not
pasteurizing its canned and bottled beer, such laws would hurt only
Coors.[8] Sales of Coors suffered during the 10-year labor union boycott,
although Coors said the declining sales were also due to an industry-wide
downturn in beer sales, and to increased competition. To maintain
production, Coors expanded its sales area from the 18 western states to
which it had marketed for years, to nationwide distribution.[9]

The AFL-CIO ended its boycott of Coors in August 1987, after negotiations
with Pete Coors, head of brewery operations. The details were not divulged,
but were said to include an early union representation election in Colorado,
and use of union workers to build the new Coors brewery in Virginia.[10] In
1988, the Teamsters Union, which represented brewery workers at the top
three U.S. beer makers (Anheuser-Busch, Miller, and Stroh), gained enough
signatures to trigger a union representation election. Coors workers again
rejected union representation by more than 2:1.[11]