Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) members, about 1400 of them, are on strike at Kellogg’s cereal factories in Michigan, Tennessee, Nebraska and Pennsylvania after contract talks broke down over the company offshoring jobs (The Guardian, emphasis mine):
Trevor Bidelman, president of BCTGM Local3G and a fourth-generation employee at the Kellogg’s plant in Battle Creek, Michigan, explained workers are on strike against a proposed two-tier system for current and new employees proposed by Kellogg’s. Bidelman said Kellogg’s wants to not offer pensions to new employees, remove cost of living provisions, and make changes in holiday pay and vacations.
“We’re fighting for our future,” said Bidelman. “We made it very clear from the onset of negotiations that this was not something we’ll be able to accept.”
Shortly before the strike, Kellogg’s announced plans to cut 212 jobs at the Battle Creek, Michigan, plant over the next two years, including 174 positions represented by the union. The plant currently employs about 390 workers. Kellogg’s cited plans to streamline efforts and relocate cereal production to other facilities in North America as reasons for the job cuts.
“This is after just one year ago, we were hailed as heroes, as we worked through the pandemic, seven days a week, 16 hours a day. Now apparently, we are no longer heroes. Very quickly you can go from hero to zero,” added Bidelman. “We don’t have weekends, really. We just work seven days a week, sometimes 100 to 130 days in a row. For 28 days the machines run then rest three days for cleaning. They don’t even treat us as well as they do their machinery.”
The union took issue with Kellogg’s threatening to outsource jobs from the US to Mexico if workers refuse to accept their proposals.
Seriously, watch this:
“They want to complain about what our wage is, and they want to talk about what our wage is,” says one worker. “Well, if you didn’t make me work every single Saturday and Sunday, if you didn’t make me work every single holiday, my annual income wouldn’t be at these levels that you wanna spread around like it’s a bad thing.”
“It’s like a death of 1,000 cuts. They’re slowly eliminating jobs out of the Lancaster plant,” said Kerry Williams, who works in processing maintenance at the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, facility. “We had to work through this Covid for the last two years and they’ve just shown disrespect for the union name. They even want to remove our union logo from the cardboard cereal box.”
Will Bunch writes at The Philadelphia Inquirer:
“It’s all about corporate greed,” Kerry Williams, the president of Local 374G of the BCTWGM union at the Lancaster plant, told me this week, echoing the most common refrain on the picket line. “They’ve been paying their shareholders and bonuses to their top executives.” But now the men and women on the assembly line want their fair share — just like Kellogg’s CEO, Steven Cahillane, who made $11.6 million in 2020, or the shareholders boosted by a major stock buyback.
If a large, old-fashioned labor strike — nationwide, some 1,400 union members have walked out at four main Kellogg’s cereal plants — feels like a nostalgic oddity, it won’t feel that way for long. Experts say the food-industry icon is on the cutting edge of what they’re calling a “strike wave” that will hit America this fall. The Guardian reported that week that planned work stoppages — from other traditional factories to hospitals, college campuses, and even Hollywood — could number tens of thousands before autumn is done.
On the West Coast, as many as 35,000 nurses or other unionized staffers for the health-care giant Kaiser Permanente are either already on strike or planning walkouts, burned out by the long-running COVID-19 crisis and now insulted by lowball wage increases proposed by the company. In Hollywood, a whopping 60,000 workers are threatening what would be the first major strike against the film industry since World War II, with union members seeking more pay after longer workdays and what they say were unsafe working conditions during the pandemic. The recent roundup by the Guardian pointed to a score of other planned work stoppages, from transit and public works employees to John Deere factory workers to university grad students.
The pandemic’s isolation and shutdowns, for those who stayed home, and the relentless grind of risking one’s life for a paycheck has, Bunch writes, “caused millions of Americans to rethink their fundamental relationship with work.” But “artificial persons” employing them are not prone to self-reflection.
It was probably inevitable that this new take-this-job-and-shove-it mentality would make its way into those labor unions that have survived the shrinkage of the latter 20th century. The upside-down condition of the job market has fed-up workers more inclined to fight back and call their bosses on their threats (like moving more work to Mexico, as Kellogg has suggested). The fact that so many employers are desperate for help in 2021 has given workers who choose to strike a potential safety net that didn’t exist a generation ago.
COVID-19 is not the only plague around. Economic inequality fits the definition in what is widely memed as “late capitalism.” (The Atlantic‘s Annie Lowrey offers an explainer.) But it is not only economic inequality at issue. As unions lost ground, the balance of power between employers and employees has shifted for decades in the direction of the investor/employer class, as the testimony of Kellogg’s employees makes clear.
Bunch adds that “legacy” union members earn an average of $35.26 an hour (and more with overtime). That is pretty good pay, and “a measure of what unions once accomplished.” But the Kellogg’s strike is, in our “stupendously individualist culture,” about more. It is a refreshing sign of solidarity among workers with those coming up behind them that the power imbalance fostered by metastasized capitalism needs serious readjustment.
You don’t have to be the Red Army Choir to see that.