When I was a kid there were four breweries near my hometown
of East Orange, NJ. Rheingold was in
Orange, and was a 15-minute walk my house. I often passed it walking to the Y
on Saturday mornings. Pabst, in Newark, was a 15-minute bike
ride away, and on the way to my grandparents’ house in Newark. Ballantine, also in Newark, was a
20-minute drive away, and we passed through its huge complex whenever we went
to the Newark Drive-In. Anheuser-Busch, with its huge animated
flying eagle sign, was the one we saw the least. It was only 18 minutes away,
but we only saw it when we went to Newark Airport, and that wasn’t all that
frequently.
Of those four breweries from my childhood, all but one were
gone by 1987, taking hundreds of jobs with them. Ballantine, once bigger than
Anheuser-Busch, closed its plant and sold its brands in 1972. Rheingold, a
local favorite since the 1800s, folded in 1976. And Pabst closed its Newark
brewery in 1986; leaving only Anheuser-Busch brewing in Essex County.
And we won’t even talk about the Schaefer, Piels, Ruppert, and additional Rheingold
breweries across the river in New York City.
What caused the closing of 75% of the breweries in North
Jersey?
I’ll tell you one thing for sure…it wasn’t “immigrants
taking the jobs from ‘real’ Americans.” In fact, most of those breweries were founded
by immigrants. It also wasn’t the jobs being shipped south of the border, to
where cerveza could be made more cheaply. So then what was it?
One thing was the inability of what had been strong regional
brands like Rheingold and Ballantine to compete with expanding national brands from
Pabst, Anheuser-Busch, and Miller. Another…and perhaps the biggest thing…was
modernization. When Pabst closed its Newark plant in 1986, they moved
production to a much larger, and more efficient, facility in Northeastern
Pennsylvania; a plant that was able to brew many different brands of beer with
fewer people.
Now let’s move up to Central New York, where I live now, and
let’s talk about modernization again. There’s a chocolate plant in Fulton that closed
as a result of that. Once again, it wasn’t immigrants taking jobs away from
“real” Americans; and it wasn’t the plant being moved south of the border, closer
to where the cocoa beans came from. It was that there was a larger, more
efficient, centrally located facility out in the Midwest.
The big air conditioning company in DeWitt…that we stole from
Newark back in the 1930s? They did move south…closer to where their
customers were. After all, why build air conditioners in Upstate New York and
ship them to North Carolina, when you can build them in North Carolina to begin
with? No immigrants involved here.
Then there are mergers and acquisitions…always big job
killers. When the fire engine company in Florida bought the one in Central New
York, all they really wanted was the customer list and the intellectual
property. They didn’t need a factory up here; they already had excess capacity in
a very efficient facility down there. Do you see any immigrants taking jobs
away in this scenario?
Oh…and the big plant nearby that made soda ash for over 100
years using the Solvay Process. Those jobs abruptly disappeared in 1985 when a natural
source for soda ash was found out west…where it could be mined much more
cheaply. Who was to blame for those jobs disappearing, and can anyone
bring them back?
No. No matter what anyone says, those jobs, like Little Sheba, are gone, and ain’t coming back. But maybe, just maybe, rather than
trying to bring back the “good old days” that never were, there’s something new
and better on the horizon that takes a bit of imagination to see and bring
about…imagination that we haven’t been using because we still want to do things
the old ways, and are unwilling to adapt to new realities.
And because it’s easier to blame someone else than to make
those changes.
¿Entiendes?
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