Brewdog, the Scotland-based brewery that has exploded into an international business in the last 15 years, is never far from the headlines. It held a competition to brew the world’s strongest beer and created another named Speedball after the drug cocktail of cocaine and heroin. The company has been happy to not so much court controversy as to seek it out.
Playing to the gallery is always a high-risk approach. Take, for example, Brewdog’s opposition to the World Cup being hosted in Qatar in late 2022. The beer company promised that various profits would go to human-rights charities but was criticised when it transpired that they were selling their produce in Doha.
The latest fuss is overblown, however. The company will no longer pay the ‘real living wage’ – a voluntary pledge, cooked up from a charity staffed by smiley types who wouldn’t blink if all their private-sector ‘partners’ went bust tomorrow and had to be nationalised in the name of love and cuddles and fairness.
The ‘real living wage’ is separate from the actual statutory minimum wage for those under 23, and the actual statutory ‘living wage’ as calculated by those callous Scrooges at the ‘Low Pay Commission’ in the Department for Business.
In short, the ‘real’ living wage is not the real living wage. It is a wheeze to try to coerce businesses into paying people more than the market gives them. Like the expanding leviathans of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ in big corporates, this is all well and good in a time of rock-bottom interest rates and fantasy economics.
But today, as war still rages on the European continent, as the Royal Navy is fighting to keep international shipping lanes open against Iranian-backed pirate madmen, as energy costs, high inflation and interest rates are biting, the ‘real’ living wage is facing real life.
Facing an operating loss of £24 million last year, Brewdog has decided to stop being what the BBC calls a ‘living wage employer’. They actually raised the wages of staff outside London but that did nothing to stop the angry howls. Commentators accused Brewdog of treachery, hypocrisy, greed, among other sins. The Independent called the company ‘problematic’ and a petition against its ‘awful decision’ has garnered some 15,000 signatures.
Yet Brewdog should be praised for grasping that, as Milton Friedman put it, ‘the business of business is business’ – and no amount punk posturing can change that economic reality.
It’s not like these guys aren’t already pretty good employers. Each venue shares a portion of the profits with their team (when the real living wage isn’t causing them to make a loss, that is), management gets a chunk of equity every year, and they all get that greatest of gifts in the UK – private healthcare.
Why? Because despite being thirsty for publicity, the founders seem like decent people who understand that business (and capitalism more broadly) is a human endeavour.
Brewdog should ignore the complaints of those who’ve never tried to run so much as a whelk stall. It is a company that, for all its faults, provides a decent product at a decent price. It is also, at a time of declining national productivity, a British – yes, despite the company’s flirtation with the SNP, British – success story. It has done the bravest thing in this day and age, which is to face reality as it is. We should all toast that.
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