Worker Strikes Terrifying The Ruling Elite Across U.S.
Tucker: Because of Joe Biden, it's that simple
Striking Kellogg workers describe the issues in their fight
In the third week on strike, 1,400 Kellogg’s cereal workers in the US are continuing their fight against the hated two-tier wage system and the inhuman 16-hour mandated work schedule. Kellogg workers have worked through the pandemic. Classified as “essential workers,” they have risked their health for private profit.
Now in their third week on strike, Kellogg workers at four facilities in the US are demanding wage increases that keep up with inflation, an end to brutal work schedules that keep them on the job for weeks at a time, and an end to the hated two-tier wage structure.
Striking workers at the Kellogg facilities in Battle Creek, Michigan spoke to the World Socialist Web Site describing the conditions they face.
A legacy worker spoke on the impact of the pandemic. “A quarter of the workers here had COVID. We got pieces of paper being told to carry it in case the police pull you over. It said, ‘essential worker.’ Now we’re nothing again! You swallow your $11.6 million and we’re garbage again. We only had two $500 bonus checks before taxes.”
Steven Cahillane, CEO of Kellogg’s made $11.6 million in total compensation in 2020, while workers are forced to work seven days a week. The worker continued, “the new CEO makes 11.6 million, doubling his money, while we slaved through the pandemic. They need to be humbled. These CEOs are never in here.”
“[The current contract] allows for mandatory seven days a week, but they could force you 365 days if they wanted. We’re not a 40-hour week [company] we work seven days mandatory.” Workers referenced a coworker who calculated the total hours in the plant equaling eight hours a day for 365 days a year. “It’s not all peaches and cream like they show on TV.”
“We cover for each other if someone needs to take off. Only way to get a day off is to cover two shifts.” Workers described how the company mandates workers to come in even when they have a scheduled day off. They are also held captive by the company at the end of the shift. “At the end of the shift, supervisors with 10 minutes left, would try to force overtime. Sometimes they would shut the badge off at the gate to stop us from leaving.
“They tried to tell us that after 16 hours they will send a cab for us. Well unfortunately Battle Creek doesn’t have cabs. There are people in here that live 20-30 minutes away, I’m amazed there haven’t been accidents.” Despite the rule against more than one mandate, workers are forced to work more than one 16-hour shift a week. “You have a choice to not go on mandatory overtime. If you keep trying to take off, you keep racking up points against yourself.”
Workers described the dysfunction inside the plant. “Equipment is older than I am. We have to steal parts from other areas. Management will tell us they have to save in the budget so they can get their bonuses. So, we have to find our own tools and parts when packing sizes change. For the same reason they don’t update the [computer] systems. Sometimes a load will be lost with no record of where it is. Safety is also a big thing; fingers can get pinched on the packing line on machinery. After overtime hours you feel like a zombie. They just want a body.”
A fellow picket spoke on the issues raised in the contract. “Nothing was talked about in the contract. I’m ready to get it over with, [but] not going to settle for chump change. We’re out here fighting for a reason.” Workers opposed the tier wage scales, left open by the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union (BCTGM). “Legacy isn’t losing anything; we’re fighting for younger workers. Not easy when you have kids at home. In the interview they told us we work 56 hours a week. Then they tell the world we volunteer.”
The Battle Creek plant had over 4,000 workers. After decades of deindustrialization, the plants have fewer than 320 workers. As at other manufacturing plants, contracted workers have been used to eliminate long-term benefits and health care for full-time workers.
There have been cycles of CEOs over the decades, who “suck profits and leave.” A second-generation worker spoke about the changes of the conditions of life for workers. “My dad never said anything about money, always about benefits and health care. You can always live within your means but now with no benefits or pension, a medical bill can wipe people out.”
Workers spoke on the five-year contract. “One thing that irks me is the contract is five years. I’m tier one, tier two is not getting paid like us. It takes them seven years to get where we are. That’s unfair: seven years for top pay when the contract is only five. They work next to us.”
The BCTGM not only allowed tier wages from previous contracts to continue but allowed Kellogg’s to bring in scab labor. Working to sabotage the struggle at Kellogg’s, the BCTGM local president in Omaha reported that 100 ironworkers, construction workers and electricians who are members of the Building and Construction Trades Council (BCTC) would begin working inside the Kellogg plant. This is not isolated to Omaha; workers at Battle Creek reported they saw buses full of workers sent to local hotels.
“Kellogg’s bought out the hotel. I’ve seen more buses at the Red Roof Inn. Someone tried to get hotel rooms but they said there’s no vacancies. They pulled people from everywhere and brought them to Battle Creek.”
This action follows the complicity of the union and the company in attacking workers’ living standards. For years there have been job cuts. This past September, Kellogg announced the cutting of 212 jobs, the majority of which were factory workers. Workers expressed opposition to this and previous actions by the union. “On Labor Day for the last four years they said they were cutting over 200 jobs,” a legacy worker stated. “If they have money to bus in workers from outside and put them in a hotel, then they can give it to us workers.
“In the last contract the International BCTGM said this is the ‘best thing you’re going to get.’ We rushed him out of the room. We all knew he was getting a deal with Kellogg, and we rejected it.” Last month the BCTGM rammed through a sellout contract against 1,000 striking Nabisco workers. While hailed by the Democratic Party appendages, the details of the contract were not released. Details later emerged showing a miserable wage increase of $0.60 an hour per year, far below the inflation rate. The deal included a $5,000 sign-on bonus to entice workers into swallowing this poison pill.
Production workers were encouraged by the international upsurge of strikes taking place. One spoke about the strike by 150,000 metalworkers in South Africa. “I read that in here! Finally, people are fed up. You have leverage now; companies are bringing up people because they can’t find workers. It makes you mad, it feels like you own that stuff even though it’s Kellogg’s property; we’re in there all the time.”
A legacy worker supported the upsurge of workers’ struggles: “About time American workers are heard. We make the products, but we lose out on our family time. I couldn’t tell you how many holidays I missed in my first six years here. I couldn’t spend it with my kids.” Speaking about the CEO she said, “without us you’re not going to get your bonus.”
Workers at Kellogg are in a powerful position. In a turning point in the class struggle, workers are overwhelmingly rejecting union-backed contracts by 90 percent or more. There is immense determination by workers to win back higher wages and standards of living not seen in decades.
Maid on Netflix: A single mother struggles to extricate herself from poverty and abuse
Maid is a 10-episode drama series created by Molly Smith Metzler (best known for her writing on Shameless and Orange Is the New Black). It premiered on Netflix October 1 and has been one of the streaming platform’s top-rated shows for the past several weeks.
The miniseries follows a financially hard-pressed single mother as she strives to extricate herself from an abusive relationship and in the process establish her personal independence.
Based on Stephanie Land’s 2019 memoir Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, the series features Margaret Qualley as Alex, playing opposite her real-life parent Andie MacDowell as Paula, her character’s mother.
Maid opens with 25-year-old Alex grabbing her young daughter Maddy (Rylea Nevaeh Whittet) and escaping from her alcoholic partner Sean (Nick Robinson) and their trailer-home north of Seattle. With only a few dollars in her pocket, she and Maddy sleep in their broken down car.
The next morning, Alex seeks help from social services (She imagines that the reaction might be: “So you’re looking for a big fat government handout because you are a jobless, white trash piece of shit, am I right?”). A social worker informs her that she needs a job to qualify for subsidized housing. The agency then sets her up with Value Maids, a low-budget operation run by the cut-throat Yolanda (Tracy Vilar).
Desperate for employment, Alex must rely on her “undiagnosed” bipolar mother Paula, a self-centered “free spirit,” for childcare help. The house-cleaning job pays $12.50 an hour, out of which Alex must pay for supplies and a uniform. With each deduction from her check, she is that much closer to homelessness.
Alex suffers numerous humiliations and setbacks. When she hands a supermarket cashier food stamps as payment, the latter insensitively calls out “Cleanup on aisle poor!” Alex first cleans for the snobbish Regina (Anika Noni Rose), who owns a palatial home in a wealthy island community. The gig ends disastrously with Alex fainting from hunger and Regina refusing to pay for her services. To make matters worse, Sean is suing for custody of their daughter.
Now living in a shelter for battered women run by the empathetic Denise (BJ Harrison), Alex meets another young mother, Danielle (the feisty Aimee Carrero), who helps her begin tackling her difficult situation. Unfortunately, Danielle eventually goes back to her abuser, which—according to Denise—is more the rule than the exception.
Trying to find an apartment, Alex runs up against landlords who refuse to accept TBRA (Tenant-Based Rental Assistance). When one proprietor agrees to take her voucher, the accommodation turns out to be blighted by mold, jeopardizing Maddy’s health.
Meanwhile, Alex suddenly and vividly recalls her mother Paula fleeing a batterer, Alex’s father Hank (Billy Burke), now a recovering alcoholic. As a result of this painful memory, she refuses her father’s succor even at her most precarious, down-and-out moments. Maid implies that the past abuse is responsible at least in part for Paula’s mental instability and her succession of bad relationships, including a current husband who gambles away her assets.
The emotionally wounded Alex sabotages several opportunities to alter her circumstances, including the one provided by a gay couple who offer her a stunning apartment with an address that would allow Maddy to attend a decent childcare center. Alex proves incapable of preventing a drunken Sean from destroying that arrangement. (Sean too suffers from a traumatic childhood—a mother’s opioid addiction.)
Even when the immensely promising Nate (Raymond Ablack), a single dad willing to help, enters the picture, Alex proves that she remains trapped in the cycle of abuse. Her free-fall into the abyss can be reversed, from the series’ standpoint, only by coming to terms with and overcoming her personal demons and history.
Shot in British Columbia, Maid is set in Washington state, which has one of the highest levels of income and social inequality in the US. The miniseries has clearly struck a chord with audiences because the characters and their problems are familiar and recognizable. Poverty, domestic violence, substance abuse, low-wage and insecure employment, government indifference, lack of a social safety net—not to mention the attendant mortifications and psychic difficulties—afflict wide layers of the population.
Of course, the official figures on poverty are derisory; a clearer picture, for example, emerges from a 2018 United Way survey (and there are many such) that found 43 percent of US households unable to afford basic necessities such as housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone—and that was before the medical and economic cataclysm of the pandemic.
At the same time, the media and much of the entertainment industry remain obsessed night and day with billionaire oligarchs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. The general atmosphere is venomously hostile to the problems of the working class and the poor.
In that context, both the appearance of Maid and the response to the miniseries have a certain significance. Its success is one of the indirect means, in a country where everything is done to bury the truth about social misery, by which to gauge the actual state of affairs in the US, along with the actual state of public opinion.
Nonetheless, how social reality is approached, how profoundly, where the focus lies, what is implied by the totality of the imagery and drama, all this remains an issue. There is no need and no reason to exaggerate Maid ’s accomplishments in this regard.
The gravitational pull of gender politics can still be felt here, as well as a healthy dose of middle-class wishful thinking.
One critic—certainly no Marxist—pointed out: “The limited series’ depiction of the hardscrabble poor may prove more controversial. Though it takes place over the course of a year, Maid isn’t really about chronic or inescapably systemic poverty; there’s hope for a way out by the end that might resonate more with middle- and upper-class viewers than with Alex’s real-life cohort.”
Audiences, no doubt bored and even sickened by the endless succession of comic book/superhero “blockbusters,” are looking for something different, closer to life, more compelling. However, the themes and concerns the creators of Maid have in mind only intersect to a limited degree with those that would produce a deeply realistic portrayal of American life.
According to the logic of the miniseries, even Alex, economically downtrodden and emotionally imprisoned, can break free and make her life a success story with the aid of wealthy benefactors and through her own tireless efforts. In fact, hers is a highly unusual outcome. What about the vast majority left to suffer intolerable circumstances?
Maid is not animated by outrage at the existing social order that produces the ills it unevenly depicts. The filmmakers tend to argue for a purely individual solution through self-help and self-discovery. Moreover, their obsessive attention to the particular issue of intimate partner violence (the series is bookended by public service announcements for victims of such abuse) comes at the expense of the broader social and historical context. Such an approach has an almost inevitable consequence, inadvertently or not, of shifting part of the blame for the social ills onto the victims—as well, of course, as the immediate perpetrators, who, as in the case of Sean, are themselves victims.
In short, with too much of the lead characters’ dysfunction blamed on spousal abuse, the more generally disastrous conditions tend to be pushed into the background or taken for granted, particularly as Alex evolves. In the end, the protagonist turns the drudgery of being a “maid” into a benevolent (she helps out hoarders) and lucrative enterprise.
Furthermore, there is the issue of the source of domestic violence. Maid itself, at its most objective, presents life for many under capitalism as a brutal affair, in which a layoff, for instance, can affect someone’s ability to survive. Life as a whole for millions is increasingly difficult, tense, stress-filled. The exploited and vulnerable can pass along the essential brutality of their situation to the even more vulnerable. Generally speaking, domestic abuse is a channeling, a re-direction of the greater social and economic violence.
Audiences are responding to what they take to be the sincerity of the miniseries, but are still marking too generously on the curve and not demanding enough of film and television work. This is not yet “An American (Working Class) Tragedy,” as it were, the truly significant social realism that we need.
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