Cereal Killers: How 80-Hour Weeks and a Caste System Pushed Kellogg's Workers to Strike

[Omaha Steve]

After decades on the losing end, company workers are demanding a better deal. The cereal giant has other plans

By STEPHEN RODRICK NOVEMBER 30, 2021

OMAHA — The shelves at the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union Local 50 are lined with boxes of Kellogg’s products that the union members and their mothers, brothers, and grandfathers have packed over the past century. A Froot Loops box commemorating the 2012 Olympics sits next to Special K Plus, a cereal that for some reason comes in a milk carton. A toy truck delivers Corn Flakes. Still, what catches your eye is a box featuring an impossibly cute boy slurping up his Rice Krispies. No one knows when exactly the box is from — probably the early 20th century — but it conjures a homier time for the company. That’s when company founder W.K. Kellogg was asked about profits and said, “I’ll invest my money in people.”

That was a long time ago. Now, the investment only goes to certain people, like Kellogg CEO Steve Cahillane. He brings in nearly $12 million a year in compensation, nearly 280 times the company average.

The workers? They’ve time-traveled to William Blake’s dark-satanic-mills era of factory work, where a purposely understaffed labor force­ endures, according to union workers, 72- to 84-hour work weeks — not a typo — that includes mandated overtime and a point system that dings you if you dare beg off to go watch your son’s Little League game. (Kellogg’s claims its employees only work 52 to 56 hours a week and 90 percent of overtime is voluntary, a claim BCTGM workers hotly dispute.)

“The worst is when you work a 7-to-7 and they tell you to come back at 3 a.m. on a short turnaround,” says Omaha BCTGM president Daniel Osborn, a mechanic at the plant. “You work 20, 30 days in a row and you don’t know where work and your life ends and begins.”

FULL story: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/kelloggs-strike-labor-wages-overtime-1261994/

[multigraincracker]

1. The Free Market sees human beings a capital,

just like any other machine. Work it until it breaks and then get another one. That is how Capitalist view human beings. Every CEO needs to spend one week every month on that line. IF they can't do it, fire them.

[Mr. Steve]

4. Definitely yes.

You sure have that right.

[captain queeg]

2. It's a different world in a lot of ways

I think a lot of people have never had the kind of job where you punch a time clock and work on a production line, day after day. Not that long ago it was probably the most common for the majority of American workers. You really were treated like some kind of machine. Nowadays between automation and many production factories moving overseas I don’t see much of those jobs left. There was a period in America where many of those jobs could provide a living wage and benefits (largely due to unionization). While I rarely had a union job, other plants doing similar work would at least have to stay in the same ballpark for pay. I knew many people who didn’t really care what kind of work they did, as long as the pay was sufficient. But when work sucks and the pay sucks no one wants to be there.

[jimfields33]

3. True. I have no idea what working in a factory would be like

I’m stunned that the company thinks 52 hours is no big deal. That’s 12 hours of overtime per person. That’s huge when they could hire more people and save that overtime money. I think the numbers people need fired.

[captain queeg]

6. It's often about benefits, though Kellogg doesn't seem

Like the kind of place with a generous benefit package. Say they have good insurance for example, the company pays per employee not per hour. I’ve seen it done often where they’ll use a lot of overtime to avoid adding staff.

[DENVERPOPS]

5. Interesting

they won't give you an increase pay, but they will give you more overtime to help you out..........

The logic of that is as topsy-turvy as what is found in Alice In Wonderland........