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). 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. 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. 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. On August 19, Nabisco’s Chicago shop joined the strike. 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. The workers refused around five hundred people lost their jobs. 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. Such schedules are increasingly common across the food-production industry as employers turn to mandatory overtime instead of finding new hires. 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. That conditions have gotten so bad raises questions about BCTGM’s strategy in years prior.
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