Solidarity

  

Nabisco is the US leading snack maker and its workers have been forced to work 12 to 16 hour shifts, six to seven days a week, during the pandemic, while the company seeks to eliminate overtime pay by altering employee schedules so that weekend shifts become part of the 40-hour workweek. 

Workers are also rejecting a Mondelez proposal to create different employee health plans under which new hires would pay more, including deductibles—which do not exist under the current system.

Nabisco workers stress that they are not asking for more pay or benefits.

"This fight is about maintaining what we already have," Mike Burlingham, vice president of  Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers' (BCTGM) Local 364 in Portland, told Today. "During the pandemic, we all were putting in a lot of hours, demand was higher, people were at home, and the snack food industry did phenomenally well. Mondelez made record profits and they want to thank us by closing two of the U.S. bakeries and telling the rest of us we have to take concessions, what kind of thanks is that?" Burlingham added, "We make them a lot of money. It's very disheartening. How is that supposed to make us feel?"

Nabisco workers are now on strike across the USA demanding better working conditions, an end to foreign outsourcing, and the withdrawal of a company plan that would scrap the company's current guaranteed overtime pay system. 

Nabisco's parent company, multinational confectionery corporation Mondelez International, 2020 revenue increased to $26.6 billionwith profits of $3.6 billion and a 6% an nual increase in share price. Dirk Van de Put, Mondelez's new CEO, could earn more than $17 million in compensation, plus a $38 million one-time windfall, this year.

"They couldn't care less about us," striker Donna Marks, who has worked 17 years at the Portland plant.  "Now, they want us to work more and pay us less, and everything that we have, we have because we negotiated. They want to take away what we fought for with no negotiation. They act as if they gave us something."

Rusty Lewis, a striking worker at Nabisco's Aurora distribution center, said, "It's gotten worse. It's gotten horrible. Horrible hours. They don't care about frontline workers. They only care about the almighty dollar. We're tired of getting stepped on and treated like trash. We've had enough."

'No Contracts, No Snacks': Nabisco Workers on Strike Across US | Common Dreams News