![]() Striking Nabisco/Mondelez workers spoke of losing 600 co-workers to a massive layoff in 2016. This is an industry that has taken hit after hit due to successive corporate restructurings and offshoring, and over the years BCTGM has done little to fight back. The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) International Union Local 1 represents more than 30 bakeries and candy factories in the Chicago area. However, given the strength of their strike, under conditions of a labor shortage and while retailers’ shelves were empty of Nabisco products, many workers believe an opportunity was missed here, and believe that the union could have won an end to these brutally long shifts, which are sometimes seven days a week, and rehiring of the hundreds of workers who were laid off under corporate restructuring during the past two contracts. Nabisco bakers went on strike for the first time since 1969, and put a stop to the worst of these changes after weeks of striking. After a year and a half of forced 12 and 16-hour shifts as essential workers under the pandemic, and faced with management proposals to make these conditions worse by introducing contract language around “flexibility” that would have taken out existing rules on overtime pay, workers at both Frito Lay and Nabisco decided that enough was enough. The Nabisco strikers showed the same serious and growing consciousness among workers that we saw on the Frito Lay picket line. “We’re getting sandblasted on the sidewalk as truckers blow by.Chicago Socialist Alternative members joined BCTGM strikers on the picket line at Nabisco/Mondelez South side bakery throughout their grueling month-long strike. “It’s definitely an intimidation thing,” says Burlingham. 13, the company fenced off the entire property with orange vinyl fencing, pushing the strikers closer to Columbia Boulevard, a thoroughfare for big trucks and speeding cars. So what happens on this Northeast Portland sidewalk has significant implications for who will make Ritz crackers in the coming decades. That leaves just three Nabisco bakeries operating in the U.S.: in Portland, Chicago and Richmond. The labor dispute follows years of Mondelez cutting employee pensions and halving its unionized workforce by closing bakeries in New Jersey and Atlanta. ![]() (Other unions in the Portland facility-including the machinists, electricians and operating engineers-are honoring the picket line.) Since then, workers at a bakery in Richmond, Va., and a sales center in Aurora, Colo., have gone on strike, too. Portland was the first of Nabisco’s facilities across the country to strike. “They want to take away what we fought for with no negotiation. Now, they want us to work more and pay us less, and everything that we have, we have because we negotiated,” Marks says. “I used to enjoy this job, it used to be like a family to me. She says after the Nabisco brand was absorbed by Mondelez in 2012 after Kraft Foods split into two entities, one being Mondelez, “the environment changed.” One of the issues is a proposal by Mondelez to eliminate overtime pay for working on the weekends by altering the schedule to incorporate weekends into the 40-hour work week.ĭonna Marks has worked at this facility for 17 years in environmental health services. The workers plan to strike until the company agrees to negotiate a new contract, says Burlingham. The company did not share the details of that contingency plan. “We have activated that plan and are committed to continuing to supply our delicious snacks to retailers and consumers,” a company representative said. But Mondelez begs to differ, telling WW it has a contingency plan to produce Oreos during a strike.
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