Charlie Neibergall/AP Photo
Striking members of the United Auto Workers listen to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack speak outside a John Deere plant, October 20, 2021, in Ankeny, Iowa.
Striketober is over but strikes still persist. At tractor manufacturer John Deere, 10,000 workers have rejected two successive offers from the company and still walk the picket lines. At Kellogg, the union representing the 1,400 workers who turn out the nation’s breakfasts has refused the company’s offers, which have addressed none of the workers’ concerns. At Kaiser Permanente, 35,000 nurses and other health care workers are threatening to strike if the company institutes lower pay for new hires.
This year’s outbreak of strikes is clearly not comparable in scale to such larger strike waves as that of 1946, when at one time or another many if not most of the nation’s key industries were shut down by aggrieved employees. The difference, of course, is that in 1946, more than 40 percent of the nation’s private-sector workers were unionized, which is a precondition for legally sanctioned strikes, while today, after decades of employers’ campaigns (some legal, some not) to bust unions, a scant 6 percent of private-sector workers are organized.
As unions have shrunk, so have the number of strikes. Beginning in the 1980s, after President Reagan summarily fired the nation’s air traffic controllers for striking (despite the fact that theirs had been one of a small handful of unions to endorse Reagan’s candidacy), a number of the nation’s leading companies began provoking strikes, refusing to negotiate or demanding devastating concessions, and hiring permanent replacement workers. For most private-sector unions, strike avoidance became the norm, and the yearly number of major strikes, which had routinely numbered in the hundreds in the mid-20th century (a key reason why wages rose in tandem with productivity in those years), shrank to the low double digits and approached a single digit.
That’s why this year’s strikes are notable, and made more so by the fact that they coincide with record numbers of non-union private-sector workers quitting their jobs—the closest such workers can come to striking. The grievances of the strikers and the quitters (and there’s nothing pejorative in this usage of “quitter”) are much the same: lack of control over their time and their lives, a similar lack of assurance of any future economic security, and a steadily mounting transference of risk from their employers to themselves.
The other notable aspect to this year’s strikes is that, precisely because private-sector strikes have all but disappeared in recent decades, virtually none of the strikers have done it before.
Consider, for instance, the bakers.
Founded in the same year as the American Federation of Labor—1886—the roughly 70,000-member union (officially, the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, or BCTGM) has generally not been regarded as a trailblazer within the labor movement. This year, however, a number of its major contracts—with Frito-Lay, Nabisco, and Kellogg—expired and were up for renegotiation, and in all three instances, the workers went on strike.
Many of their jobs pay well by the standards of U.S. blue-collar employment. But in their industry—and at Kellogg in particular—the trade-off for the pay is the number of hours workers have been compelled to work, frequently 12-hour shifts or more. And those hours only rose as workers with COVID or exposed to COVID stayed home during the pandemic.
“Thirty-nine of our more senior workers retired as the contract came to an end,” says Dan Osborn, who heads the 470-member local at Kellogg’s Omaha plant, which produces all 27 types of cold cereal that Kellogg sells in the U.S. (and some other brands it sells in Canada). “We’d be down another 50 due to illness and injury. And when we’re short on workers, we do forced overtime. Kellogg says the overtime is voluntary, but that’s because we often agree to time slots for overtime to control our schedule. I’ll pick a time so I know they won’t come to me and say, ‘You’re on overtime,’ when I have to pick up my kids. Otherwise, they can come to you at 2:59 and say you have to work an overtime shift that starts at 3:00.”
That kind of forced overtime was a major factor in the Frito-Lay, Nabisco, and Kellogg strikes. Another was an all-too-common feature of recent labor relations: the two-tier contract, in which companies have one range of pay and benefits for current workers and a lower range for their new hires. That’s a major issue at Kaiser Permanente, which is proposing substantially lower pay for the nurses it will hire in the future; at John Deere, which has proposed to end pensions for its new hires; and across the baked-goods industry. Such contracts became widespread during the Great Recession, when the decline in company fortunes and the threat or reality of layoffs compelled many unions to accept such two-tier provisions. As the economy eventually came roaring back, the elimination of such two-tier provisions has been one of unions’ primary demands.
This year’s strikes, particularly when considered alongside the record rate of workers quitting their jobs, demonstrate the breadth of the rebellion against the indignities of work.
Due to their nationwide Nabisco strike, the Bakers were able to get the company to agree to end the two-tier arrangement for benefits, and to win overtime pay when employees worked more than eight hours (previously, they got overtime only when they worked more than 12). Kellogg, however, has not only remained committed to its two-tier arrangement but insists on worsening it. By the terms of its previous contract, the company pays less and offers reduced benefits to anyone hired after its 2015 contract took effect. Once those new hires reach 30 percent of the unionized workforce, however, and a senior worker retires, the most senior of those newer hires moves into the upper tier and receives the higher pay and benefits.
In its current proposal, however, Kellogg seeks to freeze all post-2015 hires in place, denying them both retirement and health benefits. As more senior workers retire, the post-2015s will remain in place, with neither the retirement nor health coverage senior workers have received, so that eventually, this lower tier becomes the only tier the company employs.
Not surprisingly, this has made workers angry. “The company’s made a fortune in recent years,” says Kevin Bradshaw, the vice president of the local at Kellogg’s plant in Memphis, “and they’re fighting to take away our necessities and all that the union has won.” In effect, by prolonging and even proposing to worsen the two-tier system, some companies, with Kellogg at the forefront, are demanding that workers continue to labor under the conditions pressed upon them during the Great Recession, even as corporations have long since put those recession conditions in the rearview mirror and have made record profits and reaped the rewards of rising share prices for years. In a time of unprecedentedly widespread concern and anger over economic inequality, the two-tier system only makes that inequality even more severe.
One assumption that underlies employers’ two-tier strategy is that more senior workers will approve a contract that continues to reward them, even if it sacrifices the interests of their newer members. The Bakers, like other unions, fiercely contest that assumption, perhaps nowhere more dramatically than in Omaha. There, Osborn estimates, around 70 percent of the plant’s top-tier workers are white, while about 90 percent of the bottom-tier employees are workers of color—reflective of the demographic changes in many Midwestern factory towns. Standing up for those workers, Osborn says, is both a moral and existential imperative for any union worthy of the name.
Nicole Hester/The Grand Rapids Press via AP
Kellogg’s cereal plant workers picket outside the plant in Battle Creek, Michigan, October 19, 2021.
While all this explains the strikes, it doesn’t mean that striking has come easily. “Ninety-eight percent of our members voted to authorize a strike,” says Darlene Carpenter, who’s a leader of the local at Nabisco’s venerable factory in Richmond, Virginia, “but this was the first time any of them had struck, the first time there’s ever been a strike at this plant.” In the communities where these factories have loomed large for many decades, however, their workers have long been part of the local warp and woof, and community support for the strikers has been overwhelming. “The first day we struck, we were scared,” says Carpenter, “but the community brought us food and Gatorade on the picket line; local unions brought us supplies from as far away as Cincinnati; even some members of IATSE came by to help.” Local elected officials and the leaders and members of church groups have turned out to help, as well (with one notable exception: The Memphis and Richmond locals, which are both heavily Black, have received crucial support from Black churches; in Omaha, by contrast, where both the Black community and Black local membership are smaller, and Black churches few and far between, church support, says Osborn, has been scarce).
The Kellogg workers certainly need that help, and more, as the company seems increasingly determined to shrink the share of company revenues that go to its overtime-burdened workers.
This year’s strikes, particularly when considered alongside the record rate of workers quitting their jobs, demonstrate the breadth of the rebellion against the indignities of work—stagnating pay, lack of control over hours, the assumption of risk and expenses that come with gig work, and over the past two years, the threat of infection. At a time of growing awareness of and dissatisfaction about the concentration of wealth at the top of the economy, both the strikes and the record-high level of support for unions are easily explicable.
Beyond what these strikes signify, however, what can they lead to?
Andy Levin, for one, hopes they can lead to a broad increase in worker power. The Democratic congressman from the suburbs of Detroit, who’s endeavoring to extend the kind of social democracy that the old-time UAW once fought for and, for a time, semi-established in one industry, believes that these kinds of worker action are necessary if the nation is to achieve a more progressive social order.
For now, Levin notes, the chances of Congress enacting the PRO Act, which would enable workers to form or join unions without risk of being fired, are almost invisibly slim. What would it take to enact it or something like it? “The only time in the past 100 years when Congress passed a law that helped workers win the right to organize was in 1935, when they enacted the Wagner Act [the National Labor Relations Act]. But workers were already in motion in the couple of years before 1935, striking, shutting down entire cities [San Francisco and Minneapolis], beginning to organize industry-wide unions. Only when the workers were in motion did the bosses say, ‘We need this to be controlled, to have a legal, orderly way this can be channeled.’ That’s what made Congress pass the Wagner Act.”
“That’s the significance and promise of Striketober,” Levin says. “We’re only likely to get labor law reform when workers rise up and demand change. These things have to come from the bottom up; things have to be a little out of control to win these reforms. Let’s hope that Striketober is the harbinger of a new movement that can’t come too soon.”
