In Bud Light Debacle Workers Should Fight Too

I stand firmly with the Bud Light boycott over the controversy surrounding putting transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney on their beer cans. And that's saying something since I am generally opposed to boycotts. However, when it comes to woke and cancel culture, which has permeated businesses of all kinds for some years now, I take a different stance.

Enough is enough.

The role of business is not to promote social causes or to necessarily have one position or another. It is to promote their products and services and make a profit. When they sway from this primary purpose, they jeopardize their ability to do that.

But it is not just owners and shareholders that suffer when a backlash happens. It's the workers who get hurt in the process as well.

Consumers who are unhappy with what a business is doing is going to make a stand against it with their wallets. As someone once was quoted as saying, "Every dollar we spend casts a vote for the kind of world we want to live in." In the case of the Bud Light controversy, consumers are speaking quite loudly about their unhappiness.

At some point the position the company is taking is going to affect the workers who produce the products and services and I think they should be fighting just as hard against this sort of thing as consumers are. It's their jobs at stake, after all.

Because let's not forget, while Bud Light is only one brand among many, consumers boycotting Bud Light aren't necessarily boycotting just that brand. They are boycotting the company behind it. Anheuser-Busch InBev. So, while one may consider that other brands being sold could pick up the slack, so to speak, that's not necessarily the case.

Workers need to stand up and tell the company they work for that this sort of thing doesn't do anyone any good. You are taking a stand for a group of people who represent only 1% of the population. The other 99% are standing against you and if profits fall, our jobs could be cut.

Granted, people in general do have short attention spans, and so it is reasonable to assume that perhaps this issue falls by the wayside sooner rather than later. Still, with losses looming around $7 billion and counting, and with woke and cancel culture becoming more and more disliked, the impact of Bud Light's decision to put Mulvaney on the can could well be a lasting one after all.

Part of the issue, I think, is that I don't think companies are necessarily getting the message clearly enough. The response from Anheuser-Busch InBev about the controversy, which was more of a non-response, seems to indicate that.

They sort of said to their customers, "We don't care what you think." And even if that's not word-for-word what they said, that's what customers heard. That was the essence of the company's response. "We are going to do what we want to do and you're just going to have to accept that and fall in line."

In other words, I don't think it is enough for just consumers to stop buying the products. I think other businesses should make a stand too and pull products from their shelves, and workers should step off the production line and say, "We're not returning to work until you understand your customers better."

You have to fight fire with fire. Because the woke and cancel crowd right now have all the fire, and a lot of it. The rest of us need to have as much fire individually as they do, because ultimately we will have more fire. We are the majority.

Whether or not workers would actually do this is debatable. Or even retailers. I understand, on a common-sense surface level why they might choose not to. Still, if the message is not delivered strongly enough, the other side will simply keep on winning, and the majority will have to continue to be bombarded with more of this nonsense that is becoming a deadly cancer on American business.

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