Doctor’s prescription: Less snacks, more strikes!

Many of the labor articles on this website have described strikes and struggles at smaller and less well-known factories and workplaces. Today, a strike is taking place at the maker of products that everyone in the country knows. No more Oreos, Ritz Crackers, or Chips Ahoy! Nabisco’s on strike. The purpose of this article is to explain the current strike at Nabisco and what it, along with the recent strike at Frito-Lay, tells us about the situation in that industry.

More than 1,000 members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union are on strike at plants in Aurora outside of Denver, Norcross, Georgia, the two Illinois factories in Addison and Chicago, a large facility in Portland, Oregon and one in Richmond, Virginia. These are all of Nabisco’s main bakeries. The strike began at the Portland plant on August 10 and has now been extended nationally. It’s the first strike at Nabisco since 1969. Management has been trying to keep production going using supervisors and scabs at some facilities. The union is generally maintaining twenty-four hour picket lines and there have been a number of lively solidarity demonstrations.

The backdrop to the strike is the growth in snack food sales during the pandemic. This has led to both great profits for the employers and demands for greater production from workers in the bakery industry. Nabisco is owned by Mondelez International which made $1.8 billion in the second quarter of this year, almost double the $454 million that they made in the second quarter of 2020. Earnings per share exactly doubled from 38 cents to 76 cents in the same time period. Mondelez did not wish to rest on its laurels, however. Management wished to make the most of the current increase in snack food purchases. This means running production at full steam, 24/7.

Suicide shifts

This issue goes to the heart of the strike and also of the recent strike at Frito-Lay. The expensive machinery on the production line needs to run the entire time. Obviously, workers are needed to run it all day and night. This is what created the famous “suicide shift” at Frito-Lay. Workers at the PepsiCo/Frito-Lay plant in Topeka would sometimes have to work twelve hour shifts seven days a week. Other times, with minimal notification, workers finishing the 7:00 AM-3:00 PM shift would have to clock back in at 3:00 AM the next morning for four hours mandatory overtime before their shift. This issue was at the center of the strike by 850 Frito-Lay workers for three weeks in July.

Now a reasonable person might say, “With all this production and money coming in, why not just hire more workers?” The answer is that for the bosses it’s cheaper to pay overtime than it is to hire new workers who would get pension and insurance benefits as well as their hourly pay. Overtime does not increase pension and insurance payments for existing workers, so it’s cheaper for the bosses to hire one worker to work for eighty hours than it is to hire two workers to work forty hours.

Current negotiations

The previous contract expired in May. Three issues have dominated the negotiations. Obviously, scheduling and overtime is the first one. Healthcare is the second one. Management has proposed a two-tier system with newly hired workers having to pay more. The third issue is outsourcing. This issue is a real one. A thousand union jobs were lost earlier this year when Nabisco closed plants in Georgia and New Jersey. In 2015 Mondelez laid off 600 workers at its flagship Chicago plant and moved production to Salinas in Mexico. The company said that they would stay in Illinois if the workers lowered their own wages by $46 million to come to Mexican levels.

It’s crucial that workers realize Nabisco is the enemy, not Mexican workers. The right approach of labor internationalism was shown by BCTGM Local 364 business agent Cameron Taylor, who said, “There’s no animosity on our part towards the Mexican workers. Our animosity is towards the company. The Mexican workers are just getting exploited.” This is exactly the right approach. Our aim is to help the Salinas workers increase their wages by that $46 million so that workers are not competing against one another to work for lower wages.

Solidarity

There have been demonstrations and statements of solidarity across the country. In one unusual incident Danny DeVito’s Twitter account was suspended after he made a statement in support of the union! Twitter claimed that the timing was entirely coincidental and that the suspension was due to another issue.

The most important solidarity has been in the Pacific Northwest. Here workers have successfully appealed to rail workers to honor their picket lines and have therefore stopped trains carrying cooking oil, sugar, and flour from entering the plant. In this regard, take a careful look at the picture at the top of this article. It’s not three strikers. It’s one brave picket sandwiched between two security guards. This picket’s fortitude and courage show the spirit of the strikers. It should be an inspiration to us as we build solidarity for this important strike.