As a senator, Biden vigorously voted for several similar bills. In short, based on his voting record, Joe Biden is not (and never was) a champion of disadvantaged Americans, unless you consider multi-billion-dollar credit card corporations and millionaires “disadvantaged.” Chris Talgo
What workers are striking against: A global profile of The Kellogg Company
“The pandemic presented us with a sampling event like none other and we saw increases in household penetration that outpaced most of our categories...” This is how Kellogg’s CEO Steve Cahillane summed up the company’s performance during 2020, when widespread lockdowns drove demand for packaged foods as millions sheltered in their own homes. Net income for the breakfast cereal giant increased 30 percent to $1.25 billion, and revenue jumped slightly to $13.77 billion.
This rosy description of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed 800,000 in the US alone, is an example of the cold logic driving forward the company’s attempts to smash the two-month strike by 1,400 cereal workers in the United States. It responded to their overwhelming rejection of a concessions contract brokered by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union (BCTGM)—that would have eliminated restrictions on the hiring of lower-paid, second tier workers—by declaring it would accelerate plans to fire and replace the strikers en masse. This autocratic move sparked outrage among workers around the country and the world.
But this ruthless campaign is not the product of a company struggling for survival. Indeed, Kellogg’s remains as highly profitable as it has been in its more than 110-year history, and it has expanded its operations significantly in recent years, driven by ruthless cost-cutting. Indeed, breakfast cereal is among the most profitable segments in the food processing industry, which Yahoo! in turn recently rated the 14th most profitable industry in the world.
In 1995, when the International Committee initiated a campaign against Kellogg’s global job-cutting campaign at the time, we noted that Kellogg’s had already vastly increased its international scope. Of its global workforce of 15,000 at the time, 7,000 lived outside of the United States, and the company was expanding aggressively into emerging markets such as southeast Asia and the former Soviet Union. The company had made $705 million in net profits the year before, on worldwide sales of $6.6 billion.
At the same time, the company controlled 42 percent of the global cereal market and was locked in a bitter struggle over market share with rival General Mills.
Since then, both the company’s revenue and profits have roughly doubled. Kellogg’s earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) were $1.6 billion, with an 11.6 percent profit margin. By comparison, Ford Motor Company reported of $1.63 billion on $115.8 billion in revenue, making the world’s fourth-largest auto manufacturer slightly more than one-tenth as profitable as Kellogg’s.
Dividends, meanwhile, have increased for decades, and now stand at $2.31 cents a share. At a share value of $63.37, this means Kellogg’s dividend yield is 3.5 percent, more than twice the average of the S&P 500. Even though many other large companies suspended dividend payments last year to conserve cash during the pandemic, Kellogg’s continued to dole out tens of millions of dollars to its shareholders.
A globalized food company
In spite of this, Kellogg’s market share in breakfast cereals has continuously eroded since the 1990s. Its US market share declined from 36 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2017. This is one factor in the company’s growing diversification into different segments of the prepared foods market. It has done this through a series of high-profile mergers and acquisitions that will continue to play a critical role in the company’s current “Deploy for Growth” strategy, which targets accelerated growth rates of between 1 and 3 percent.
These mergers have expanded Kellogg’s from a cereal maker primarily centered around on the US market to a multinational producing a wide variety of packaged foods for different markets across the world. The most high profile of these acquisitions was arguably its $2.7 billion purchase of potato chip brand Pringles in 2012 from Proctor & Gamble. Most of its recent acquisitions, however, have focused on international brands and joint ventures.
These include:
- A joint venture announced in 2012 with Singapore-based Wilmar International focused on the growing Chinese snack market;
- Another joint ventured in 2015 with Tolaram Africa focused on West Africa. Kellogg’s later invested another $420 million into the venture;
- The purchase of majority stakes in Egyptian food companies Bisco Misr and Mass Food Group, also in 2015;
- A 2016 acquisition of a controlling stake in Brazilian food company Parati for $429 million
As a result of these moves, breakfast cereals occupy a substantially smaller portion of the company’s sales than it did less than 20 years ago. According to a 2018 slide show for investors, the proportion of cereal as a total of net sales declined from roughly two-thirds in 2005 to less than half in 2017, while snacks, a category that includes products such as Cheezits, Pringles, Town House crackers and Nutri-grain bars, doubled to 52 percent. The volume of products sold in the United States as a share of worldwide also declined in this period.
The company’s workforce has also doubled since 1995 to approximately 30,000 today. Currently, it operates 52 plants worldwide, half of which are located outside of North America. These include three plants in Russia, three in South America, three in Africa and two in India. Slightly less than half, or 25 of these plants, actually produce cereal, with others producing frozen foods and pre-packaged snacks. Only five of the company’s 26 factories in the US and Canada, four of which are involved in the current strike, produce cereal (the fifth, a new plant located in Belleville, Canada, is not a party to the same labor contract as the US plants).
The 1,400 workers on strike in the four US cereal plants comprise less than five percent of Kellogg’s the global workforce. This is, in part, the product of relentless job-cutting campaigns, such as the one in 1995 that eliminated 1,075 jobs worldwide. The cuts have reduced the workforce of these plants to a fraction of what they were a generation ago. The company’s flagship plant in Battle Creek, Michigan currently employs only 410 workers, less than a quarter of the 1,700 people who worked there in 1995.
Kellogg’s global workforce has been subjected to repeated job cuts. The most recent of these, “Project K” which was completed just before the pandemic in 2019, eliminated 7 percent of the global workforce, resulting in an estimated cost savings of $700 million per year, according to the company.
At the same time, Kellogg’s has demanded repeated concessions from workers’ wages and benefits, supposedly in the name of “saving” jobs. Before and during the 2015 contract talks, it locked out workers at the Memphis plant and threatened to close an unnamed US plant if workers did not accept the establishment of a new second tier of lower-paid “transitional” workers. The BCTGM obliged, pushing the contract through, but its repeated acceptance of concessions has not saved a single job.
In part to deflect attention from this record, the BCTGM is promoting a ferocious anti-Mexican campaign, calling on Kellogg’s and other companies to cease production in Mexico and blaming foreign workers for the loss of jobs and wages in the United States. This racist agitation has been taken up by the far-right news outlet Breitbart, which is a key media promoter of Trump’s ongoing attempts to build a fascist, extra-constitutional movement. In fact, Trump’s nationalist “America First” tirades, directed against Mexico in particular, had been the stock in trade of the American unions for decades before Trump emerged as a major political figure in the Republican Party.
In reality, Kellogg’s presence in Mexico goes back decades, and it was the first non-English speaking market that the company expanded into. The Kellogg’s plant in Queretaro, Mexico was built in 1951, making it decades older than the US plant in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
While the company has, almost from the start, conducted business on a multinational scale, the international expansion of Kellogg’s and the global integration of capitalist production over the past four decades has rendered the national-based strategy of the BCTGM, and indeed the trade unions as a whole, hopelessly obsolete. It serves only to isolate the striking workers in the United States from their most powerful allies in Kellogg’s global workforce and the international working class as a whole, all of whom would be outraged to learn of the company’s strikebreaking efforts. Indeed, Kellogg’s is attempting to weather the strike by utilizing its international supply chains to compensate for lost production in the United States.
But the international dimensions of Kellogg’s operations are a source of strength for workers, not weakness. Kellogg’s, like any other major international company, is extremely vulnerable to disruptions in its global supply chains and a global campaign among Kellogg’s workers to unite with workers in the US would have a powerful impact.
Workers in Mexico have repeatedly demonstrated their determination to oppose their exploitation. In January 2019, auto parts and electronics workers in Matamoros, just across the border from Brownsville, Texas revolted against the poverty wages and sweatshop conditions at the US and other foreign-owned maquiladoras. The staged a series of wildcat strikes in defiance of the company controlled unions and marched to the border where they appealed to their class brothers and sisters in the US to join them.
In the summer and fall of 2019, workers at the General Motors factory in Silao, Mexico refused to work overtime during the strike by 45,000 GM workers in the US. For their courageous act of class solidarity, GM fired and blacklisted the leaders of the struggle. In response, rank-and-file workers in the US called for their reinstatement and donated money to support the victimized Mexican workers.
The American media, the BCTGM, the United Auto Workers and other US unions blacked out any information about these struggles in order to keep perpetuating the poisonous lie that Mexican and American workers are enemies.
Among striking Kellogg’s workers in the US there is enormous sympathy for their coworkers in Mexico and the developing world, whom they regard as a super-exploited “third tier” of workers.
Kellogg’s has an international strategy to pit workers against each other in a race to the bottom. To defeat this, workers need their own international strategy. That means rejecting the divide-and-conquer nationalism promoted by the BCTGM and reaching out to their class brothers and sisters around the world to defend the jobs, living standards and working conditions of all workers.
This requires taking the conduct of the strike out of the hands of the pro-company union by establishing a rank-and-file strike committee, independent of the BCTGM, to establish lines of communication and joint action by workers across Kellogg’s global empire.
Deafening Silence: Top Democrats Hush as Left-Wing Kellogg’s Company Set to Replace American Union Workers
House and Senate Democrats who have claimed to be champions for labor unions are silent as the Kellogg Company, whose largest shareholder is the left-wing W.K. Kellogg Foundation, is set to replace about 1,400 American union workers who have been on strike since October.
American union workers employed at Kellogg’s have been striking as of October 5, protesting what they say are grueling working conditions at plants in Battle Creek, Michigan; Omaha, Nebraska; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; and Memphis, Tennessee.
The workers and their union, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers, and Grain Millers’ International Union (BCTGM), allege that Kellogg’s executives have threatened to move manufacturing to Mexico in an effort to bust up their striking.
In October, a BCTGM union representative said Kellogg’s “continues to threaten to send additional jobs to Mexico if workers do not accept outrageous proposals that take away protections that workers have had for decades.”
Kellogg’s Cereal plant workers demonstrate in front of the plant on October 7, 2021 in Battle Creek, Michigan. (Rey Del Rio/Getty Images)
Only 41 Percent of Voters Trust Republicans on Immigration Policy
Only 41 percent of registered voters believe Republicans are best able to handle the nation’s worsening migration problem, according to a poll by the Wall Street Journal.
The low rating shows the failure of the GOP’s leadership — and especially Rep. John Katko (R-NY) — to offer a coherent agenda that offers clear pocketbook benefits to GOP and swing voters. Katko is the chairman of the American Security Task Force which was created to craft a winning immigration message for the 2022 election.
“The issues that Americans are concerned about are pocketbook issues — whether they can pay their bills, whether they can pay their mortgage, whether they can find housing, whether their kids are in good schools and in safe schools,” said Rosemary Jenks, the government relations director at NumbersUSA.
“All of that relates to our immigration policy, and Republicans aren’t talking about those issues,” she said.
That political failure comes amid a deliberate decision by Democrats to allow at least one million illegal and partly-legal southern migrants to rush into U.S. jobs, neighborhoods, and schools, in full view of the evening news shows.
The November 16-22 poll of 1,500 registered voters showed that public concern over immigration outranks the economy or the rising inflation rate, despite the GOP’s broad effort to showcase the rising prices in President Joe Biden’s economy.
Thirteen percent of voters rated migration as the top issue, ahead of the economy at 11 percent, and inflation at 10 percent.
The poll asked, “Between the Democrats in Congress and the Republicans in Congress, who in your opinion is BEST ABLE to handle each of the following issues? If you think they are both equally able to handle an issue, or neither is, just say so.”
When they were asked who can “fix the immigration system,” 27 percent of the voters picked Democrats and 41 percent picked Republicans.
But nine percent picked “both equally” and 20 percent responded “don’t know.”
The 41 percent response showed that only a minority of voters trust the GOP in Congress.
The poll also showed 29 percent of voters — including many critical swing voters — do not see a believable difference on immigration between the pro-amnesty Democrats in Congress and the donor-dependent GOP.
The GOP did better on the narrow issue of who best can “secure the border.” Only 16 percent of voters picked Democrats, and 52 percent — a bare majority — picked Republicans.
But that score still left 28 percent of voters not ready to favor the GOP. The 28 percent included 9 percent who picked “both equally” and 19 percent who said “neither.”
Katko is an establishment Republican who has supported amnesty for law-wage farmworkers and who needs the support of business donors and Democrats to keep his threatened upstate New York seat.
His message for the 2022 election spotlights opposition to Biden’s border chaos, migrant arrivals, and push for amnesty, and ignores pocketbook issues related to wages, jobs, rents and schools. For example, Breitbart reported on Katko’s proposed 2022 promise — the passage of the Border Security for America Act of 2021:
“From finishing the border wall system to modernizing technology and bolstering border staffing, this legislation tackles key shortcomings and weaknesses,” Katko said in a statement.
“That’s all there is to it?” responded Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, who noted the bill does not include any language to close up legal loopholes in the border, such as catch-and-release rules:
“It is pretty weak. I’m not against it, but it will not address the border crisis. The border crisis is primarily driven by loopholes in the law that everybody is aware of, not by a lack of equipment or personnel. I don’t dispute there almost certainly are personnel and equipment needs, but that’s not the main problem here.”
Katko’s recent tweets highlight his appearances on Fox News. The network frequently publicizes the border chaos while ignoring the costs donor-backed migration imposes on voters’ pocketbooks:
“It is clear that there is a lack of leadership in the Republican Party on the immigration issue, because if the leadership were talking about these [pocketbook] issues and encouraging members to talk about these issues, they would be,” said Jenks.
Katko’s office did not respond to questions from Breitbart News.
Katko’s silence about wages and jobs plays into the Democrats’ plans for the 2022 election.
For example, a billionaire-funded progressive coalition is citing a November push poll to reassure Democrats worried about voter opposition to the Democrats’ parole amnesty, which would provide roughly 6.5 million illegals with work permits.
The polling memo predicts that establishment Republicans will criticize the amnesty merely as a welfare giveaway, not as a painful pocketbook loss of jobs and wages that would otherwise go to young Americans:
By saying it will address labor shortages — as unfilled jobs and inflation remain top concerns for many voters nationwide — we [Democrats] may effectively beat back Republican economic attacks on the [amnesty] proposal. When voters are presented with a statement on both sides of the issue, a statement from supporters of the proposal referencing labor shortages beats a statement from opponents of the proposal referencing taxpayer-funded benefits by a 58% to 38% margin.
A December 6, Democratic poll argues that voters are more concerned about jobs and wages than the GOP’s focus on inflation. The poll carefully ignores the hot-button issue of immigration as it claims, “When voters are asked which is more important to them, 54 percent of voters say job and wage growth is more important to them, while only 39 percent of voters say slowing rising prices is more important.”
Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. This opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
Eric Levitz, a pro-migration editor at New York Magazine, wrote November 24:
Trump’s party is obviously concerned about immigration. But it hasn’t mustered any signature plan for remaking the immigration system. This is in part because the GOP remains internally divided on legal immigration. With a labor shortage plaguing many industries — agriculture has been especially hard hit — many GOP-aligned business interests are more hostile to cutting legal inflows than they were when Senate Republicans voted down Trump’s plan for doing so. Thus the GOP’s actual substantive ambitions on Trump’s signature issue appear to be quite modest: The party wants to hire more Border agents, build more walls, and make life a little harder for asylum seekers while leaving the bulk of the status quo immigration system in place.
Katko’s refusal to emphasize pocketbook immigration reforms is fueling a push to replace him as chairman of the critical homeland security committee. The Hill reported November 16:
In a closed-door meeting in the Capitol, Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) launched an effort to oust Katko as the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, sources in the room said. Bishop, a member of the Trump-aligned House Freedom Caucus, serves under Katko on the Homeland panel.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (D-Calif), who has urged rank-and-file members to stay unified and keep their focus on taking back the majority next year, referred Bishop’s motion to the influential Republican Steering Committee. That committee can either vote and recommend that the full GOP conference remove Katko or simply not act on it.
But Katko has been backed by other establishment Republicans including Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).
Amid silence from Katko, other GOP legislators have drafted reforms that deliver pocketbook gains to ordinary Americans. For example, Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) and 10 other GOP members introduced legislation on December 9 that will drastically shrink the Fortune 500’s use of foreign visa workers for white-collar jobs sought by well-trained U.S. graduates.
The bill is backed by Reps. Mary E. Miller (R-IL), Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Eric Crawford (R-AR), Steven M. Palazzo (R-MS), Kevin Hern (R-OK), Austin Scott (R-GA), Michael Burgess (R-TX), Joe Wilson (R-SC), Dan Meuser (R-PA), Beth Van Duyne (R-TX), Doug LaMalfa (R-CA).
Banks’ pocketbook proposal is tailored for suburban college grads, but other pocketbook promises will also help bring in more Latino voters. Veteran Democrat strategist Ruy Teixeira wrote December 9:
In the [2020] post-election wave of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group (VSG) panel survey, well over 70 percent of Hispanic voters rated jobs, the economy, health care and the coronavirus as issues that were “very important” to them. No other issues even came close to this level. Crime as an issue rated higher with these voters than immigration or racial equality, two issues that Democrats assumed would clear the path to big gains among Hispanic voters.
“They are instead a patriotic, upwardly mobile, working class group with quite practical and down to earth concerns,” Teixeira wrote.
The U.S. government’s post-1986, bipartisan economic policy of extraction migration is deeply unpopular among a broad swath of voters because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their housing costs.
The invited migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, radicalizes their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture, and allows the elites to ignore despairing Americans at the bottom of society.
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