BrewDog and the Intersections of Abuse
Last night, a group of more than a hundred former BrewDog employees posted an open letter to the company charging it with creating a toxic workplace fueled by fear.
It doesn’t matter which part of the business we worked in; production, bartending, sales, operations, packaging, quality, marketing or HR, we all felt that in our day to day working lives, there were at best hurdles, and at worst genuine safety concerns. We felt that no matter how these were raised, the likelihood was we would be met with some variation on “that’s just the way things are”…. We believe these toxic attitudes towards junior staff trickled down throughout the business from day one, until they were simply an intrinsic part of the company. So many of us started our jobs there eagerly, already bought into the BrewDog ethos, only to very quickly discover that “fast-paced” meant “unmanageable”, and “challenging” meant “damaging”.
Put bluntly, the single biggest shared experience of former staff is a residual feeling of fear. Fear to speak out about the atmosphere we were immersed in, and fear of repercussions even after we have left.
The collective set up a Twitter account that has already attracted ~10,000 followers and counting, and the letter has garnered news stories in dozens of outlets, including most of the major British newspapers. The letter specifically called out co-founder James Watt as the locus of toxicity, and he has responded. The company is also doing damage control, trying not to dismiss the charges while also distancing itself from them.
Nobody following the beer industry will be surprised by these allegations. BrewDog has long embraced the Silicon Valley tech-bro ethos of “moving fast and breaking things”—with predictable results. Toxicity was BrewDog’s brand pose, so I’m not exactly shocked to hear it was embedded in company culture, too. In fact, we learned just three months ago of transphobia in the US wing of the company. Now that the dam is breaking, employees may feel safe enough to detail other dimensions of abuse—sexism/misogyny, racism—which often surface in companies like this. I have no idea whether BrewDog harbored those pathologies, but that’s typically how culture functions. When those with power in a company are allowed to demean and dehumanize the people they manage, it tends not to stay in neat categories of abuse, but bleed across lines.
The scholar and lawyer Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw created a conceptual framework for these layers of abuse: intersectionality. She observed that the law tended to treat victims as if they had a single identity. The concept emerged from a legal case in which five Black women charged General Motors with discrimination. “Anti-discrimination law look[ed] at race and gender separately,” she said, describing how the concept developed. “The consequence of that is when African American women or any other women of color experience either compound or overlapping discrimination, the law initially just was not there to come to their defense.”
Over the decades, it has come to describe how this phenomenon is embedded into culture more broadly. We are never reducible to a single identity, and those overlapping identities—gender, race, age, nationality, class, physical disability, sexuality and sexual identity—all contribute to the ways we’re treated or mistreated. When we see environments where abuse happens, we usually see forms of “compound discrimination,” to use Crenshaw’s language.
The BrewDog employees’ letter wasn’t sui generis, even in the craft beer world—it follows a wave of allegations against breweries in the UK and US. Indeed the BrewDog letter-writers even cite these developments as important precursors for their campaign. I noticed that intersectionality as I read through the collection of complaints Brienne Allan assembled. They contained charges of sexism or sexual harassment, but not just those things. Those behaviors were often seated in an overall culture of abuse that might target different vulnerable employees given the manager/owner’s whims at the moment. Specific abuse may be part of a larger pattern.
The US is passing through a moment where workers have less power than they have in decades, where lawmakers have weakened laws protecting workers, and where employers have broad latitude to treat workers badly. The balance of power between workers and owners has shifted far in the owners’ direction. BrewDog’s toxic culture is what results from this imbalance. And critically, the abuse will land much harder on some employees than others. The letter-writers alluded to this dynamic:
Some people (no names, but as a group we know who they are) quickly discovered that this could be exploited, and allow them to treat other staff however they liked without repercussions – making them feel belittled and/or pressured into working beyond their capacity, and often eventually feeling forced out of the business – because that was perceived as the way the company operated, and if we didn’t like it, we should leave. Every single one of us worked with at least one of these people, who often quickly rose through the ranks as someone loyal to James and his preferred ways of working.
Craft breweries are not uniquely bad. Toxic workplaces are sadly widespread, reflecting the larger culture in which they reside. But neither are craft breweries uniquely good, standing above these problems in a shiny community of diversity and inclusion. Despite all the excitement and praise directed at breweries (much of it warranted!), they are no different than any other entities.
Yet these revelations create an important moment of accountability and could be an opportunity for self-reflection. Craft beer has a problem of exclusion. White men overwhelmingly dominate leadership and brewing roles. That sets up a dynamic where White men more often control workspaces where abuse happens, which reinforces the exclusion others feel. Recognizing that there’s a natural power imbalance here, breweries have an opportunity to make important change.
Company cultures aren’t something remote to the problem of diversity in beer—they’re at its center. When breweries create environments of respect and equity, they create opportunities for employees who aren’t White and male to flourish. And that in turn makes healthy workplace culture and creates the diversity craft beer says it wants. BrewDog is one of the most influential craft breweries in the world, and how they handle this moment of accountability will affect the industry. Let’s hope they get it right.