11-week Kellogg’s strike to end after multi-year agreement reached | Hacker News Reader

11-week Kellogg’s strike to end after multi-year agreement reached

kiro7.com

82 pointsbatmaniam93 comments

A reference for those who think the strike was just about pay and hours. A large portion of it was about the two-tier system. [1]

[1] https://omahadailyrecord.com/content/kellogg%E2%80%99s-union...

Main bit I don't understand is who is eating cereal anymore? Literally don't think I've seen someone eat a bowl of cereal in twenty years.

Kelloggs is one of those companies where you might know them from cereal, but they actually own a ton of food companies across a wide variety of verticals and just don’t put their logo on the boxes/cans.

Like, if you’re in the US, you’ve likely never heard of Unilever, but you’ve bought a lot of food from them.

They do over a billion dollars in sales every month.

Post does a $2 billion per quarter, General Mills does $5 billion a quarter

So a lot of people are eating cereal it seems.

I used to think the same thing, but realized I just got older.

I don't know your experience, but we grew up low middle class at best and ate tons of cereal.

Now that I'm older and more affluent, I guess I don't personally know anyone who really eats it anymore. But I also don't really know many kids, either.

I assume it's still selling, supermarkets aren't dumb enough to devote an entire aisle to something nobody is buying.

That's the funny thing - in the UK the cereal isle isn't a thing any more, it's gotten smaller and smaller and now it's just a few metres of shelving.

Ah, I didn't even think about other countries. Apologies.

Here in the US, I can't think of a typical supermarket I've been to that doesn't devote an entire side of one aisle to it, even today.

Kellogg’s sells a lot more than just cereal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Kellogg%27s_brands

I eat cereal almost every day. The only thing that's changed since I was a kid is the type of cereal. It used to be Trix and Froot Loops, then it was Honey Nut Cheerios, now it's Bob's Red Mill Homestyle Granola.

In that period have you seen someone eat Cheez-Its, Pop-Tarts, or Pringles? These are also Kellogg’s brands.

Not seem a Pop-Tart in about a decade. Doesn't really fit modern ideas of diets. Pringles I've seen at a few parties.

Do you go to grocery stores? Even if you have never seen someone eating cereal, the fact that it takes up 20-40 feet of an aisle should make it obvious that many someones are buying it.

Even large supermarkets where I live only have 2-3 metres of cereals. Less than for example shelf space devoted to sherry.

Maybe it's regional? Here in Boise both Winco and Albertson's have a full aisle with both sides of the aisle dedicated to cereal.

Were you working from home before the pandemic?

The only place I've seen people eat cereal is coworkers at the office (across 3 companies).

hi :) i do eat cereals, i like them.

Everyone likes them, they are just nutritionally void at best, and straight candy at worst.

The strike has been big news here in Michigan. It's generally seen as a huge victory for the union. With over time the average cereal worker makes $120,000 a year.

The union has encouraged workers to vote yes on the latest offer. But opponents brought in Senator Bernie Sanders for a big rally to encourage a no vote and it looks like they were unsuccessful.

It also doesn't just effect cereal. I'm a fan of Jimmy Dean breakfast bowls that have been extremely hard to find. Turns out they're owned by Kellogg's now and were a part of the strike.

Weren't a huge part of the issues around the insane hours per day and days per week required?

> 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.)

It's easy to say it's 120k a year, but if they're working 80 hours a week to do that, then it's really only half that number. Even 52 hours a week is bonkers to me. I'd want considerably more tha my standard hourly rate to exceed 38 hours a week as well.

> [...] 90 percent of overtime is voluntary

It's likely "voluntary" in the same sense that arbitration clauses are "voluntary" in many contracts. That is, you voluntarily agree to arbitration clauses in a contract because those terms are not mandated by statute to be in said contract. They are not voluntary is the sense that they're optional! You absolutely have to agree to those terms as part of the contract.

Similarly, voluntary overtime likely just means the overtime itself was not initially stipulated hence by definition it's voluntary, rather than referring to whether agreeing to do overtime is voluntary.

Aren't Equivocation Fallacy fun!

If overtime is at time and a half, 80 hours a week at 120K is closer to 48K base.

there's also the time lost - time not spent with family or doing whatever else. that's priceless.

I don't understand something. Why do they have to make employees work so much overtime? The allegedly bad working conditions were a common talking point for the strike. Seems like if Kellogg's just hired more workers they wouldn't be paying such a premium in OT, and there'd be less complaints on the workers side as well? And if the response is there's a shortage of workers, why not open another plant elsewhere and move some of the production lines?

Because one worker earning 120K for 80 hours is likely cheaper than 2 workers earning 48K for 40 hours each due to healthcare and such.

However, 80 hours per week near industrial machinery is NUTS. That's just asking for really bad accidents.

This is an odd, but interesting, argument in favour of socialized healthcare. It is like the opposite extreme of companies that only hire people for just under full time hours in order to dodge healthcare costs.

It is a huge argument in favor of socialized healthcare.

However, if you want to leave it to "the market", the proper solution to both sides of the equation is that companies should be required by law to pay one "person unit of benefits" for every 40 hours worked (healthcare, vacation, pension/401K) no matter whether those hours are done by 4 people or a single person.

You can either pay it to a person or it goes into a government fund to help cover the people being shortchanged (ie. food stamps and healthcare for WalMart employees).

This would immediately stop all the stupidity around "just under full time hours" as well as "too much overtime".

>companies should be required by law to pay one "person unit of benefits" for every 40 hours worked

Yes, the government could levy this "fee" on all employer-employee relationships and put it into some "government fund".. Wait a second! That sounds suspiciously familiar.

The point is that once you make it revenue neutral, most companies would rather pay it out to an employee rather than pay it out to the government.

Yes, there would likely be a few obtuse companies (maybe make paying it to the government 10% more expensive than paying it directly to the company), but most would simply grant their existing benefits directly to the employee once they couldn't make any money off of not doing so.

Getting rid of the employer from non cash/equity compensation (especially tax advantaged) completely would be even easier and more effective for making markets transparent.

It could also just be an argument for letting people purchase health insurance in healthcare.gov with pre tax income, currently a benefit only for employees employed by employers offering it.

I would even go so far as to limit businesses’ ability to compensate people in cash or equity only. That would help foster far more transparency on what wages really are and help sellers of labor easily compare offers from employers. All tax incentives should be decoupled from employers and offered directly to all taxpayers equally.

I do not know how much this is contributes but Nebraska has very low unemployment rates (<2% currently). Can be hard to recruit for difficult / manual labor jobs even if it pays well

If they have to mandate time and a half overtime because they can’t find people, it tells me they aren’t paying enough for their employees or charging enough for Frosted Flakes. (Welcome to inflation)

They have time and a half. That's a federal law not a union stipulation. That's why cereal makers are taking in $120k with overtime.

It is possible for the union to have negotiated more than 1.5x regular payrate for overtime.

I meant if they have to force overtime, which happens to be at least time and a half, then they aren’t paying enough.

Except it doesn’t pay well. $120k/y normally is $60/h. With 80 hr weeks, assuming 1.5x for overtime, that’s $24/h. Frankly, any job that requires overtime better pay investment banker rates.

It is more cost effective for Kellogg's to do mandatory overtime than it is for them to recruit and train new hires and pay for benefits etc.

Assuming that overtime is paid time and a half, that usually works out to the cost of hiring new employees (depending on benefits, employees typically cosy between 133-160% of their salary, iirc).

If employees argue these are bad working conditions, then it should be reflected in staff turnover, which would be additional incentive for the company to hire more to alleviate the problem.

There is definitely something else at play than simple cost effectiveness.

A lot of the current strikes are over the two-tiered systems and companies are using the two tiered systems to slowly push out the unions.

Two-tiered systems allow some workers to be full union members, but new hires not with the promise that one day they may become union members. Non-union members are mostly making way below those of union counter parts doing the same job. Then what happens, someone from the union retires, so a lot comes open for a non-union member, but the company never fills it. They can meet their promise with the union of "we have 5,000 union jobs on paper," but they don't actually have 5,000 union workers because they are not filling them.

We do not have enough information about the pay the come to any conclusions. Is there a defined benefit pension component? Is it already included in the quoted wages? What is the value of the health insurance subsidies? Etc.

I don't see anywhere that Sanders encouraged a no vote. Members have talked about voting no but Sanders speech appears to be commending the strikers only. Not suggesting actions.

> With over time the average cereal worker makes $120,000 a year.

Which average, mean or median?

It doesn't matter. That doesn't include management, and nobody on the cereal line is pulling in $20 million and throwing off the average.

> the average cereal worker makes $120,000 a year

Wow - why aren't workers in lower paid careers like service dropping everything to get these jobs? Why weren't people scabbing to get them during the strike and offering to work for $110k instead?

The payrate information is incomplete, such as pay per hour or number of years of service required to attain the payrate that will result in a gross income of $110k.

Also might include working nights and weekends.

It is annoying to see analysis done simply by using nominal wages, and have it ignore time of day the work is performanced, risk of bodily injury, whether or not you get to be home for dinner with the family, location of the work, whether or not you work weekends and holidays, and what the effective pay per hour ends up being.

Reminds me of a software engineer colleague who complained endlessly about city bus drivers making more money than they did.

"Well, go become a city bus driver then."

"Um, uh..."

Or maybe he was asking why engineers were paid so low compared to blue collar jobs. If our work is valued the same as bus drivers, then ok, he should switch careers. But if it's not valued the same, as HN frequently demonstrates with its discussions boasting about massive dev salaries, your colleague is rightly asking why engineers are paid so low compared to bus drivers.

Which camp are you in? Either way, maybe it's time for a tech union, clearly these workers at Kellogg and other industries are getting their demands met. Why aren't we?

They were scabbing. Predictably, quality appeared to go through the floor as a result

eg) https://twitter.com/RespectableLaw/status/147225737151065293...

Yikes is that people interfering with food again to support the aims of the union? Nasty tactics.

I'm pretty sure it's just inexperienced workers with zero training or experienced supervision making obvious, predictable mistakes in food preparation (over-baking, failing to evenly apply icing to pop-tarts, etc).

Your reading seems like a very big stretch given how pedestrian most of these mistakes are.

> making obvious predictable mistakes in food preparation

Obvious mistake of not putting plastic or insect larva in the food?

You don't have to work to put insect larvae in food, especially grains. It's separating out larvae that's the usual challenge. Seems like exactly the kind of QA challenge you'd have with a completely green workforce.

I'd assume these production lines involve contact with any number of plastic parts that could break or shave off if operated incorrectly. Same with the glue from packaging hitting the food if you don't do it right.

Yes to both, bulk food has got a lot of insects and foreign matter when it comes into a factory.

I think the implication is that it is not intentional, but a result of the poor quality of work that the inexperienced substitute work force has.

Are you assuming malice where sheer incompetence could be at play?

Also assuming a couple images in tweets form a set of representative and trustworthy data.

A very good point, too.

Doesn't seem to be without precedent?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/14/kelloggs-video...

I don't think it's ever even remotely acceptable to do this over a workplace dispute. What about you?

s/effect/affect

I like finding cases where both effect and affect are interchangeable, as in they create logical sentences but with different meanings.

> effect (verb): cause (something) to happen; bring about.

"It [the union] doesn't just effect cereal. It also effects Jimmy Dean breakfast bowls."

I'll give this one a C-.

I think this definition of 'effect' as a verb has some extra nuance in real usage that isn't entirely captured by the dictionary definition.

Generally you'll see it used as "[actor] effects [intangible/ephemeral noun]", rather than "[actor] effects [physical object noun]". "Trees effect oranges." would generally not be considered proper English, despite meeting the dictionary definition.

Sometimes it's important to use the most(-ly) correct word, rather than merely a correct word. In both cases, "produce" would work much better: "Trees produce oranges". "It [the union] doesn't just produce cereal. It also produces Jimmy Dean breakfast bowls."

produce (verb): make or manufacture from components or raw materials.

I agree with the C- though! It's certainly not entirely wrong. And a really fun opportunity to talk about effect as a verb!

More commonly, effect is used as a noun while affect is used as a verb.

That's the challenge.

$120,000 a year

No article I've seen on the matter brings this up. These are fantastic jobs, and anytime the media reports the facts on similar cases, ordinary people (ie, people who bust their asses for 12.50/hour) start falling into the "move the factory to Mexico" camp. I'm sure Sanders wanted the whole thing to go up into smoke for his own reasons.

In any case, people need to stop paying a 2000 percent markup on porridge.

I guess we’ll see in 5 years how this worked out for both sides.

I'm down to my last box of Rice Krispies so this is great news. Didn't fancy eating the disgusting generic Krispy Rice supermarket's own brand again.

Why isnt this factory completely automated

Because it's actually an extremely difficult problem to solve. Also: it will likely require many recipes to change dramatically to be appropriately viscous etc. Changing recipes carries a massive market risk. If I buy a box of Corn Flakes I expect it taste like Corn Flakes; not something adjusted to meet an automated process.

> If I buy a box of Corn Flakes I expect it taste like Corn Flakes

Machines are much better at producing uniform things than humans. Not sure what "magic" you think that humans can bring to a baking process.

Yes but changes in the baking process or recipe will impact flavor. So for automation to replace the humans your automation has to be compatible with the existing recipe. If it's not, and requires a recipe adjustment, you're likely going to see a change in flavor that consumers will probably reject. Products developed with automation from day-one do not have that problem, but Kellogg's value is locked into existing products.

Automation is not "Do the exact same thing the exact same way a person would do it, but with a machine." You adapt your product to facilitate the manufacturing process. That's how stuff gets automated.

You do realize that there are already a ton of machines involved in order for Kellogg to produce so much cereal?

After all the blowback Kellogg got over this strike, that question is certainly being asked. The reality of course is that there are limits to automation, at least currently.

Safe to say they're working on it.

It's interesting that it's known as the "Kellogg's strike", when the union is "The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union", encompassing a lot more than Kellogg. My guess is that having tobacco workers in the name would cause fewer people to support the strike.

I assumed it was because it was mostly(all?) Kellogg's employees who were striking, and not other (or all) BCTWGMIU members.

It wasn't a general strike. When GM workers were on strike a while ago it wasn't a UAW strike either because the UAW was still working everywhere else.

Last I read Kellogg's was replacing all 1400 of them. So the union gave up, in other words.

Edit: Here is the source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/07/kellogg-stri...

What? Where did you read that? The worker's union won, with full concessions from management, and with nearly all of the employees hired back.

The new employees Kellogg tried to hire to replace the striking workers failed miserably. They didn't have enough workers with domain knowledge to run the plants; the new workers caused the company more money than they saved:

> Small fire at Kellogg’s Plant in Lancaster, striking continues in week 11

https://www.abc27.com/news/local/small-fire-at-kelloggs-plan...

> UPDATE: Efforts to replace striking Kellogg's workers has been disastrous, workers tell us. Scabs wreaked havoc on the factory, most cereals are not being produced, and a delivery train went off the track yesterday.

https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1469417376231866375...

Management yields 100% to workers, all demands met:

> Highlights of the new five-year collective bargaining agreement:

• No take aways; No concessions

• No permanent two-tier system

• A clear path to regular full-time employment

• Plant closing moratorium: No plant shut downs through October 2026 • A significant increase in the pension multiplier

• Maintenance of cost of living raises

> https://bctgm.org/2021/12/21/kelloggs-strike-ends-bctgm-memb...

Please post your source that said the Union gave up. There's no way to misinterpret this outcome at all; they clearly won.

I had also read a few weeks back that Kellogg intended to hire permanent replacements for those on strike. Seems that must not have worked out too well for them...

> The Kellogg Company announced Tuesday [Dec 12] that a majority of its U.S. workers have voted against a proposed five-year contract and that the company would hire permanent replacements for the employees who went on strike

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/07/1062240467/kellogg-to-hire-re...

Turns out that 'unskilled labour' isn't so unskilled, nor fungible. The replacement workers made a mess of things, including derailing a supply train!

People flooded the online job application with bullshit.

https://www.npr.org/2021/12/10/1063112624/redditors-spam-kel...

This type of action should be illegal. I see it more and more, including spamming political event registrations and things like that. It just doesn’t seem ethical, and gives me cartel vibes.

Protest needs to be disruptive or inconvenient in some way to draw any kind of attention or have an impact. Otherwise the complaints can be entirely ignored, but that often seems to be the goal of corporate-sanctioned protest; get everyone who is angry to channel their energy into something time consuming but utterly ineffective.

Categorizing a publicly organised protest tactic as a "cartel" seems like a stretch too, especially when on the other side we're looking at a company in a market with maybe three or four major players? If one was casting an eye for cartel-ish behaviour one should probably start with the major cereal companies, before going after a bunch of randos on Reddit.

Corporations and political organizations freely spam our inboxes with emails and real mail garbage to milk us for money. I can't possibly get angry at citizens spamming them once in a while. Seems like just a 21st century form of protest--at worst, it inconveniences them.

It already is against the law and is called ~~'tortious interference'~~ (corrected). If those who are negatively affected by it want to recoup damages, they have an established mechanism for doing so. I'm not convinced we need more.

Tortious interference is the deliberate interference with a contract between the target and a third party, and generally requires the intent to disrupt performance of that contract. Submitting fake job applications doesn't fit the bill: there's no contractual relationship that it interferes with.

I agree, I mistakenly thought the job portals were those of placement agencies and temp worker agencies. If the job portal is run by a subcontractor (job placement agency) then it could be tortious interference.

Perhaps this would fall under fraud.

No. We do not need more regulation.

My understanding is that proposed contract that was being rejected was being rejected because it created a perpetual underclass of juniors who would've had less benefits. The union was supporting the striking workers by rejecting the contract in order to ensure all their members are treated fairly.

It seems corporate PR isn't made any more reliable by passing through NPR...

> Please post your source that said the Union gave up. There's no way to misinterpret this outcome at all; they clearly won.

How about the fact that everything you just listed was in the previously-rejected contract that weeks ago the pro-union side was saying was made in bad faith?

As far as I can tell, the union now accepts very close to the same contract, and rather than arguing it was made in bad faith, they have switched to arguing they have won absolutely everything they wanted.

It's sort of like living in Bizarro World.

You're being downvoted because you're commenting on an article from today, December 21, and claiming that the information in an article from December 8 somehow supercedes it.

"the last you read" is outdated information. The article linked at the top of this page contains up-to-date information.

You were actually correct on the first part -- as part of their attempt to bust the strike, Kellogg's attempted to replace all of the striking workers, and technically they did. Critically, the striking workers weren't fired and are thus able to come back to their jobs without any problems.

But the union absolutely did not give up -- they can't really control if the company brings in scabs.

In the end though, the union won and got everything they were asking for, including giving back the jobs to the strikers.

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