To: Detroit/Seattle
Workers' Voice mailing list
October 25, 2021
Re: Essential workers: last year’s heroes, this year treated as zeroes!
by Tim Hall, Detroit Workers’ Voice
The strike of 1400 Kellogg workers, now in its third week, is the third in a series of food production worker strikes, following Frito-Lay and Nabisco, over the past few months. One thing they all have in common is intense worker anger against the extreme overwork loaded onto them during the pandemic, as people bought unusual quantities of cereals and treats. Demand for their products soared while many workers fell ill. The Kellogg factories were already under-staffed and this condition became unbearable. The food production capitalists, already highly profitable as big modern monopolies, raked in enormous, increased profits. Kellogg made $1.25 bn in 2020.
Did the Kellogg plutocrats thank the workers for this rain of gold? Hardly. Workers at all three companies spoke of 14-16-hour days for weeks on end. One Kellogg worker says he worked 100 days straight. In 2020 the capitalists sang love songs to what they called “the front-line workers” who slaved on the job in spite of the danger of the Covid pandemic and staff shortages due to the virus. But now a Kellogg worker labeled their treatment eloquently: “Last Year Heroes, This Year Zeroes!”
Kellogg began using the two-tier wage system in 2015 to squeeze the workers savagely and turn them against each other, younger against older and older against younger. It is a system of harshly lower wage for new workers ($13 cut per hour) for doing the same work as older workers. The young also receive inferior health care and no pensions. The older workers are to be bought by higher pay. The number of lower-tier, lower-pay workers was capped at 30% of the workforce. Now Kellogg wants to eliminate the cap, thereby removing any hope for the lower-pay workers of ever getting full pay, insurance and a pension. And this would open the door for the entire workforce to get the lower pay and paltry benefits, as the older, “legacy” workers retire.
Nabisco tried something similar: a pool of weekend overtime workers at straight pay composed mainly of new workers, but the workers' struggle succeeded in limiting this system there. On the West Coast today, 20,000 nurses and other health care workers at Kaiser Permanente are threatening to strike against the introduction of a two-tier wage and benefit system. There, the savage hospital administration wants to cut the pay of new employees by 26%.
The two-tier wage system is a longtime nemesis of U.S. workers. Begun in the 1970's, it spread widely as a method of cutting wages and escalating profits. In 2007, in the auto crisis, the Obama administration and the corrupt UAW bureaucrats imposed the two-tier system on auto workers, causing disunity among the workers and higher profits for the capitalist bosses. The auto companies are engaged in “phasing out” two-tier until 2023 with “pathways” to full pay but no pensions. (At the same time, the auto companies have created large pools of low-paid temporary workers, in effect a new second tier.
At the postal service a two-tier system was expanded to three, two among career workers and a third, much lower-paid, of workers who had no certainty of career employment. This was introduced by the treacherous Guffey leadership in 2011. The year before, the national convention of the American Postal Workers Union voted unanimously against it, but the Guffey leadership got it passed with scare tactics. The postal workers have since made some improvements to the system, but it remains in force at the USPS today.
At Kellogg, workers say that the elimination of the 30% cap on low pay jobs is the motive force behind their strike. They aren't even asking for higher pay for the older workers; they are demanding equal pay for all! One worker states: “we want to bring those thirty percent up to the higher tier level of workers.” They refuse to sell out the younger generation. Many auto and later postal workers also fought this betrayal, but lost. If the Kellogg workers win, it will give the whole working class an example of successfully fighting against the bane of the two-tier wage system.
Meanwhile, Kellogg has brought in full-time scabs (given the innocent-sounding name of “replacement workers”) to steal the workers' jobs. And the buses carrying the scabs to the plants to steal those jobs have begun ramming the workers on the picket lines. This is a struggle of working class against the capitalist class over how much of the product of the workers' labor that the workers can force the capitalists to pay them, versus how much of this labor-product the capitalists can steal for their yachts.
A strike against two-tier wages! Against the sellout of the new workers! Against this longtime trick of the labor bureaucrats and bosses working together!
Hallelujah! <>
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