An 11-week strike is ending after 1,400 Kellogg’s cereal workers have accepted a contract deal. The workers, concentrated in Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, had rejected a previous offer, then faced threats from Kellogg that it would hire permanent replacements.
All the workers will get wage increases and cost-of-living adjustments, but a two-tier system that had spurred strong opposition will remain largely intact—on that front, the current offer that workers accepted was unchanged from the one they recently rejected. Workers hired after 2015 have had lower pay and weaker benefits than their longer-tenured coworkers. Under the new deal, workers who have been at Kellogg for more than four years will get veteran worker status, and each year of the deal, another 3% of a plant’s headcount will be moved up to the veteran tier.
Trevor Bidelman, a local union leader, told HuffPost’s Dave Jamieson that he thought the threat of being permanently replaced had shifted votes. That makes sense, given how central elimination of the two-tier system had been to workers’ demands. But without a strike, they wouldn’t have chipped away at the two-tier system at all, and rejecting the previous offer did expand cost-of-living adjustments to all workers.
“Our striking members at Kellogg’s ready-to-eat cereal production facilities courageously stood their ground and sacrificed so much in order to achieve a fair contract. This agreement makes gains and does not include any concessions,” Anthony Shelton, the president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union said in a statement.
The workers had drawn significant support from President Joe Biden and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, with Biden making a statement decrying the company’s threat to permanently replace the workers, and Walsh visiting them on a picket line. The support from politicians was bipartisan: Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts wrote to the CEO of Kellogg, hailing the workers’ contributions to the company’s strength during the pandemic.
This was one of several major strikes by BCTGM workers in 2021, including workers at Frito-Lay and Nabisco. And the contract at issue in the Topeka, Kansas, Frito-Lay strike will be up in Sept. 2022. That’s just one of many union contracts that will be up in 2022, including those covering 195,000 food and beverage workers (including the Stop & Shop workers who went on strike in 2019); Longshore workers in Washington, Oregon, and California; 30,000 oil refinery and petrochemical plant workers; 118,000 hospital workers; and 268,000 education workers.
All the workers will get wage increases and cost-of-living adjustments, but a two-tier system that had spurred strong opposition will remain largely intact—on that front, the current offer that workers accepted was unchanged from the one they recently rejected. Workers hired after 2015 have had lower pay and weaker benefits than their longer-tenured coworkers. Under the new deal, workers who have been at Kellogg for more than four years will get veteran worker status, and each year of the deal, another 3% of a plant’s headcount will be moved up to the veteran tier.
Trevor Bidelman, a local union leader, told HuffPost’s Dave Jamieson that he thought the threat of being permanently replaced had shifted votes. That makes sense, given how central elimination of the two-tier system had been to workers’ demands. But without a strike, they wouldn’t have chipped away at the two-tier system at all, and rejecting the previous offer did expand cost-of-living adjustments to all workers.
“Our striking members at Kellogg’s ready-to-eat cereal production facilities courageously stood their ground and sacrificed so much in order to achieve a fair contract. This agreement makes gains and does not include any concessions,” Anthony Shelton, the president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union said in a statement.
The workers had drawn significant support from President Joe Biden and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, with Biden making a statement decrying the company’s threat to permanently replace the workers, and Walsh visiting them on a picket line. The support from politicians was bipartisan: Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts wrote to the CEO of Kellogg, hailing the workers’ contributions to the company’s strength during the pandemic.
This was one of several major strikes by BCTGM workers in 2021, including workers at Frito-Lay and Nabisco. And the contract at issue in the Topeka, Kansas, Frito-Lay strike will be up in Sept. 2022. That’s just one of many union contracts that will be up in 2022, including those covering 195,000 food and beverage workers (including the Stop & Shop workers who went on strike in 2019); Longshore workers in Washington, Oregon, and California; 30,000 oil refinery and petrochemical plant workers; 118,000 hospital workers; and 268,000 education workers.