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Comment by Flankk | Hacker News Reader

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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