Kellogg’s workers in Landisville continue strike amidst stalled negotiations
by Lauren Manelius
Workers walk the picket line in Landisville, PA. Credit: Lauren Manelius.
Union workers at the Kellogg’s factory in Landisville, Pa. are in the fourth week of their strike that began on October 5, calling for a new contract that eliminates the current two-tier wage and benefit system that they say has resulted in up to 96-hour work weeks and meager benefits.
Now, with signs of a protracted dispute, Kellogg’s workers are committing to continuing their strike.
Workers have drawn high profile attention. U.S. Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh visited the picket line on Oct. 27, local newspaper LNP reported, where about 75 workers were marching at the time, along with members of other local unions who attended in solidarity. Walsh told workers that the Biden administration supports their fight for better wages and working conditions, as well as the advocacy unions provide in general.
After nearly a month of Kellogg’s refusing to negotiate, BCTGM Local 374G leaders traveled to meet with company representatives at its corporate headquarters in Arlington, Va. from Nov. 2-3. BCTGM came away without an agreement, indicating that the company’s latest offer failed to make meaningful progress.
“It seems as though this was just a media grab,” read an update on the union’s website after the first day of negotiations.
“We cannot recommend this offer and will not bring it back for the membership to vote on,” says the latest update, made Nov. 3. “We agreed that we will not have concessions and that is all their last offer was.”
Union president Kerry Williams explained to Strikewave that when the current contract was negotiated in 2015, Kellogg’s instituted the two-tier system to define between a “Legacy” employee—anyone hired before 2015—and “Transitional” employee, anyone hired after 2015.
Both are full-time positions, but Legacy employees have higher wages, full benefits, and a pension. Transitional employees don’t have the potential to earn the same wages as Legacy employees, and they do not receive a pension. They also have fewer vacation days and holidays. Workers want this imbalance eliminated.
“At the end of the day, we want to make everybody equal. We all do the same work in there, side by side,” Williams told Strikewave from the picket line, adding that the union believes Kellogg’s is simply waiting for Legacy employees to quit or retire, so that all employees are receiving the sparser compensation of a Transitional employee.
Employees say Kellogg’s has also failed to live up to the promises it made in that contract.
“There were certain parameters that we thought these people were going to transition into. That's why they're called Transitionals,” union member Tasha Cameron-Wesley told Strikewave. Those parameters included benefits similar to that of Legacy employees.
“It wasn't working the way we were under the assumption that it was going to work. I personally feel as though the company is finding loopholes…We're mainly out here trying to get everyone on an equal plane,” Cameron-Wesley said.
“They keep taking and taking and taking, but yet they're still profitable. They're still paying their CEOs multi-million dollar bonuses, and they're even threatening to move jobs to Mexico, to try to make them more profitable…They just don’t respect us, period,” Williams told Strikewave.
Among those signs of disrespect, Williams told Strikewave, is that as part of the new contract, Kellogg’s wants to remove the union’s logo—often called a “union bug”—from its products.
Workers are also fighting for improvements to the time-off policy, which stipulates that all days off (PTO) are unpaid, and come with many restrictions—for example, PTO may not be used on a Friday. Legacy workers can only earn up to four twelve-hour blocks of PTO a year, and Transitional employees can earn even less.
“They call them PTOs, which normally means ‘paid’ time off. But Kellogg’s means unpaid time. They call it ‘personal’ time off,” Williams told Strikewave.
Union member Mark Harshbarger, who has been employed at Kellogg’s Landisville facility for about a decade, told Strikewave that this policy makes it nearly impossible to tell his family members when he’ll be home, let alone plan an outing.
“It's not near enough [PTO] for the amount of forcing they do to us,” Harshbarger said. “They just take and take and take...Every day you come into this plant, you start to get that gut feeling. Am I going to get to go home and see my family today? Or am I going to get forced into 16 hours? And the closer the time comes to one o’clock, 1:30, when they start forcing, you start hearing the names [of who has to stay]...It's almost like an abuse, every day.”
A typical shift schedule for Harshbarger is 7 a.m. until 7 or 11 p.m.—seven days a week, sometimes 28 days straight. Two weeks before the strike, he worked 96 hours over seven days.
“I do what I do, and I sacrifice for my family,” he told Strikewave.
Union members are also pushing back against the company’s narrative that workers are “going back on their word,” Williams told Strikewave. That doesn’t make sense, he said, because that 2015 contract was only supposed to last four years, after which the union and Kellogg’s would meet to renegotiate.
“Your system is not working. You are burning up our personal lives because you cannot hire anybody. Nobody wants to work for you under the conditions you're offering,” Harshbarger said. “I think the decline in pensions and being able to earn a livable wage and have a pension for retirement is something that the greedy American corporation has tried to take away from us. And I think we're some of the last standing fighters left.”
Seeing all of the public support along the picket line has been “very invigorating,” Williams told Strikewave. “It's not just public support, but union support, from all over the place.”
Lauren Manelius is a freelance journalist based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, covering mostly local politics. You can find more of her work in the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, on her website, and on her twitter feed.