Why hundreds of Nabisco workers behind Oreo and Ritz snacks are on strike in three states

Union organisers speak out against factory closures, outsourcing to Mexico and pay changes amid record company profits during pandemic ‘snack boom’. Alex Woodward reports

(REUTERS)

Nabisco workers across the US have ignited a nationwide strike alongside more than 200 workers at the company’s bakery in Portland, Oregon, where the people who help make Oreo and Chips Ahoy! cookies and Ritz crackers have staged a work stoppage after failing to negotiate a deal with the brand’s parent company.

Over the last week, the strike has spread to a call center in Aurora, Colorado and another bakery in Richmond, Virginia, as workers reach a breaking point amid factory closures, outsourcing to Mexico, and changes to pay and healthcare coverage that workers and unions say have undermined their labour, all during the coronavirus pandemic that has seen a “snack boom” with record profits.

Nabisco’s parent company, Mondelez International, one of the world’s largest snack producers, was created in 2012 after spinning off from Kraft Foods.

This year, it closed Nabisco facilities in Georgia and New Jersey, where the company’s decades-old bakeries employed roughly 1,000 workers combined.

Those shutdowns have triggered concerns among workers that the company could eliminate their union jobs and move production to Mexico, after shutdowns at its Chicago plant and a shift to production in Mexico in 2016 made headlines during that year’s presidential race.

“After years of Nabisco closing bakeries and moving thousands of [union] jobs to Mexico and threatening to move even more jobs to Mexico, our members are saying, ‘We’ve had enough and we’re not taking it anymore,’” said Anthony Shelton, president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ Union Local 364 in Oregon.

After Nabisco workers in Colorado and Virginia joined the strike, Mr Shelton said that union members “are telling Nabisco to put an end to the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico and get off the ridiculous demand for contract concessions at a time when the company is making record profits.”

The Independent has requested comment from Mondelez.

A representative for the company insisted to HuffPost that closures in Georgia and New Jersey were “not about Mexico.” A company statement said the company has intended to “bargain in good faith with [union] leadership across our US bakeries and sales distribution facilities to reach new contracts that continue to provide our employees with good wages and competitive benefits.”

Workers say the company intends to remove overtime and weekend pay scales to move towards 40-hour “straight-time” wages, ending a long-held pay system that guarantees time-and-a-half pay for workers on the clock for more than eight hours a day, with time-and-a-half pay on Saturdays, and double time on Sundays.

“We’re not on strike to secure huge gains. We’re on strike to keep what we’ve already got,” Local 364 business agent Cameron Taylor told HuffPost. “The job they want to give us wouldn’t even be worth fighting for.”

In a statement following the strike launch on 10 August, Mr Shelton claimed that “Nabisco has absolutely no regard for the well-being of the hardworking, dedicated men and women who make the products that create the company’s massive profits.”

The battle follows a 19-day strike among roughly 600 workers at a Frito-Lay plant in Kansas, where workers at one of the nation’s largest snack manufacturers demanded better pay amid the public health crisis, stronger workplace protections and an end to unpredictable overtime schedules and staff shortages that they say endangered their lives and ballooned their shifts into 84-hour weeks.

Members of the Local 218 union ratified a contract with a 3 per cent raise in year one and 1 percent in year two, guarantees at least one day off per week, and eliminates so-called “suicide shifts” forcing workers to stay more than four hours beyond an eight-hour shift only to return to work four hours earlier for the next one – leaving fewer than eight hours between them.

Workers at the Topeka plant reported stagnant wages that have not kept pace with the cost of living and no meaningful raises in more than a decade despite the company reaping billions of dollars in profits during the pandemic.

Their claims of hazardous working conditions have allegedly been met with indifference; the facility has been the subject of several recent cases involving an employee’s amputation, according to reports filed with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The agency also is investigating an incident from May involving a forklift.

The strikes are among several high-profile organising efforts and labour movements across the US amid a pandemic that has underscored the nation’s wealth gap while enduring the lingering economic fallout from the public health crisis, despite the growing fortunes of America’s largest employers.

More than 1,000 Alabama coal miners have been striking since April, and rallied in New York City this month to draw attention to their fight.

After a high-profile union vote among workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, labour organisers have accused the retail giant of busting a campaign to create the first-ever union in the company’s history. The National Labor Relations Board determined that the retail giant illegally discouraged the effort.

A potential union at the nation’s second-largest retailer, founded by one of the world’s wealthiest men, marked a turning point for US labour; The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one the largest labour unions in the US, passed a resolution committing to “supply all resources necessary” to help unionise workers at Amazon as a “top priority” for the union.

The movements also arrive as members of Congress revive debate over the White House-backed Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or Pro Act, which would constitute one of the largest labour provisions since the New Deal era, taking aim at so-called “right to work” across the US.