That conditions have gotten so bad raises questions about BCTGM’s strategy in years prior.
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While such an approach means high wage costs (though this is precisely what Mondelez is seeking to get rid of in the new contract), understaffing saves on the benefits to which new hires would be entitled, as well as hiring and training costs. Such schedules are increasingly common across the food-production industry as employers turn to mandatory overtime instead of finding new hires. Some three hundred fifty workers remain.Īt the Chicago shop, scheduling is brutal: workers are regularly “forced over,” assigned a second eight-hour shift following the first one, with eighty-hour weeks a frequent occurrence. The workers refused around five hundred people lost their jobs. The plant on the city’s southwest side was the site of mass layoffs in 2016, when the company presented workers with an ultimatum: concede to a 60 percent cut in wages and benefits or face a huge reduction in the workforce. On August 19, Nabisco’s Chicago shop joined the strike. If the company gets its way, they’d lose such premium pay, a change workers say could cost some of them $10,000 a year. At present, Mondelez pays 1.5 the standard rate for hours worked beyond an eight-hour shift, 1.5 on Saturdays, and double pay on Sundays. Workers say the company is pushing for concessions that include a two-tier health care plan - with newer workers slotted into a worse deal with higher costs - and a reduction in premium pay. Employees at Nabisco in Aurora, Colorado, and Richmond, Virginia walked off the job within days as contract negotiations dragged on between Mondelez International, the company behind Nabisco products, and the workers’ union, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM). While Mondelez’s attorneys initially said the company would be pursuing a temporary restraining order against the union, they told Olney five days later they were no longer seeking one.Īnd on Tuesday, a teamster named Jesse Dreyer filed a federal lawsuit against Huffmaster, alleging one of its security guards assaulted him the day before.When workers at a Nabisco bakery in Portland, Oregon went on strike on August 10, they weren’t on their own for long. 31, and the next day the union’s attorney Margaret Olney replied that most of the actions outlined in the cease and desist were not performed by union members themselves, but outside supporters. Mondelez’s attorneys sent a cease and desist letter to the union on Aug. The strike has elevated to legal threats, too.
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They routinely blocked vans from entering and leaving that parking lot, often clashing with security guards hired by the strike staffing company Huffmaster Crisis Response. Protestors found out where Mondelez was loading strikebreakers onto buses and vans to transport them to the bakery. Outside supporters of the strike soon intensified strike tactics by blocking vans carrying strikebreaking workers from entering and leaving the facility. Eventually Portland police kicked strikers off of the land after the company determined it was, in fact, Mondelez land.
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Two weeks into the strike, baker’s union members set up a station down by the railroad tracks nearby the facility to stop incoming supply trains operated by railroad union members from reaching the bakery. 10, and started benignly with about two dozen baker’s union members holding signs along Northeast Columbia Blvd. So did other unions at the bakery including teamsters, engineers and electricians. Nearly 200 members of the local baker’s union-every baker’s union member in the building-went on strike. Many of the striking bakers have been without income for over a month, spending long hours on the picket line.
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The contract would maintain the health coverage in the union’s last contract, a provision union members support. “It’s still the intentional divide the company is creating, just structured in a different way.” This new ‘bid’ will create a divide between lower and senior employees within the bakery as junior people will be forced into this bid should nobody volunteer,” Burlingham says. “This is a way for the company to remove premium pay for weekend work as well. Portland union members say that’s no better than Mondelez’s last offer, which would have shifted the schedule to an “alternative” work week that would reduced overtime.