<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=192888919167017&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Thursday, March 28, 2024
March 28, 2024

Linkedin Pinterest

John Deere and Kellogg’s workers are on strike. Could that lead to more strikes?

By Eric D. Lawrence, Detroit Free Press
Published: November 1, 2021, 6:00am
2 Photos
Kellogg's Cereal plant workers demonstrate in front of the plant in Battle Creek, Michigan, on Oct. 7, 2021. Workers at Kellogg's cereal plants are striking over the loss of premium health care, holiday and vacation pay, and reduced retirement benefits.
Kellogg's Cereal plant workers demonstrate in front of the plant in Battle Creek, Michigan, on Oct. 7, 2021. Workers at Kellogg's cereal plants are striking over the loss of premium health care, holiday and vacation pay, and reduced retirement benefits. (Rey Del Rio/Getty Images/TNS) Photo Gallery

Times were tough in the heartland in the mid-1980s.

Family farms fell into foreclosure in what was known as the Farm Crisis, and John Deere, the equipment manufacturer, cut thousands of workers. In 1986, UAW-represented John Deere workers launched a strike, while the company reported its first annual loss in 53 years, according to the New York Times.

That strike, which ran for 163 days before an agreement was forged, came in a decade when unions in America were facing a tough landscape, and the man in the White House, Ronald Reagan, had made his own mark on labor relations five years earlier when he fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers.

The Detroit Free Press would later report that it was Reagan’s handling of the air traffic controllers’ strike “along with his celebrated embrace of unfettered capitalism, that hammered home to unionists that they were no longer honored guests in the nation’s corridors of power.”

Thirty-five years later, 10,000 UAW-represented John Deere workers are back out on strike in several states, but the landscape might be shifting for unions and one of their most powerful weapons, the strike. John Deere isn’t the only employer where picket lines or potential picket lines have been a factor this year. Strikes or threats of a strike have been in play in labor disputes at Michigan-based Kellogg Co., Nabisco and even among 60,000 TV and film workers, who got a tentative deal after threatening to strike.

October has been dubbed “Striketober” by unions and those sympathetic to their cause. “The Daily Show” even highlighted the Kellogg strike with its own version of cereal mascot Tony the Tiger, submitting that “Frosted Flakes is the only cereal flavored by the tears of the people who made it. They’re exploited!”

But to get a sense of how the mood in the country has shifted, it’s the two John Deere strikes that offer the clearest contrast, according to Marick Masters, a Wayne State University business professor who specializes in labor issues.

“(In the 1980s) you had very much of an aggressive anti-union environment in which employers were very aggressively willing to try to outsource jobs, and that gave them a lot of leverage and they used it to their great advantage and that resulted in the strike. And now you have a situation in which the balance of power seems a little bit more equalized and employees are in a stronger position,” Masters said.

Now, for instance, companies are complaining of a labor shortage, so it makes it a bit harder to find or bring in temporary workers during labor disputes, which would otherwise put pressure on striking workers. But workers are also feeling pressed to act by a combination of increased inflation, which hurts the buying power of just about everyone, and years of lagging wage gains, Masters said.

mobile phone icon
Take the news everywhere you go.
Download The Columbian app:
Download The Columbian app for Android on Google PlayDownload The Columbian app for iOS on the Apple App Store

“All these things sort of combine to … create a situation where in some instances where the scales are going to probably be tipped more in favor of the employee than they have been in recent history,” Masters said.

The specific pace of actions, however, has been dictated more by the expiration of labor contracts, he said, noting that these aren’t wildcat strikes or more general actions across industries. There have been more major strikes, those involving 1,000 workers or more, this year than last — 15 compared with 8 — but it trails 2018, with about 20 major strikes, Masters said.

“(2018) was considered to be in recent times a relatively active year in terms of strikes,” Masters said.

That was followed the next year by a nationwide strike against General Motors involving 48,000 UAW-represented workers.

For Jane McAlevey, a senior policy fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, organizer and author, the pandemic simply paused momentum that had been building in 2018. That was the year teachers striking in West Virginia over pay and health care costs led teachers in other states to launch similar actions.

The impact of the pandemic, however, has now also helped reenergize workers toward strikes as a tool against inequity, McAlevey said.

“I think the pandemic has really ripped the sort of blinders off about that fact that all of these employers don’t care at all about their workers,” McAlevey said, noting that many workers risked their lives during the pandemic while lacking adequate personal protective equipment.

Momentum is a key driver of strike activity, she said.

“Workers will take the risk and go on strike to win when they see other workers taking that risk and winning. The momentum in 2018 is because so many workers saw so many workers striking and winning,” McAlevey said.

McAlevey pointed to wealth disparities that have been on display, such as the image of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chair, heading to space while Amazon workers have complained about an unforgiving work culture and reports of delivery drivers having to urinate in bottles.

“Workers are watching their bosses like sail away, rocket off into space, make a killing and then leave them high and dry, so yeah, there’s a kind of worker anger,” she said.

John Deere might not be launching its CEO into space, but John May’s $15.6 million in compensation last year at a company projected to make as much as $5.9 billion this year when compared with a contract offer that would boost worker pay by 5% or 6%, according to the Des Moines Register, highlights a disparity that’s tailor-made for mobilizing workers to strike.

Mix that with headlines about how the world is minting a new billionaire every 17 or 18 hours at a time of pandemic upheaval and there’s incentive for change through collective action, according to McAlevey, who sees worker action as a necessary counterbalance to an out-of-kilter system.

Not everyone is convinced of the longevity of the moment. Wayne State’s Masters said he believes the willingness to strike is more a reflection of the current climate and structural problems in the economy and won’t result in much of a shift in labor power over the long term.

Jarrett Skorup, a spokesman for the conservative Mackinac Center for Public Policy, disputed the notion that unions are gaining an advantage, pointing to Michigan in particular.

Despite its historical reputation as a center of unionism, Michigan is no longer even one of the top 10 states for the percentage of workers in a union, noted Skorup, pointing to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Skorup said strikes are counterproductive.

“I think strikes from private sector unions are often shortsighted and one of many reasons that businesses resist unionization since they are another, often unnecessary, added cost of doing business. These costs are a key reason manufacturing has moved, over the years, from states with a strong union presence to states with a weaker union presence,” he said. “If there is a unionized workplace, it’s smart for a no-strike clause to be negotiated into contracts.”

He also pointed to scandals involving the UAW, which is currently dealing with the aftermath of a corruption probe that led to convictions against former top union officials and auto executives at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, now Stellantis. That scandal, which included the misuse of millions of dollars meant for worker training on things like booze, dinners and travel, has been cited as one of the reasons workers at John Deere and earlier this year at a Volvo truck plant in Virginia rejected contracts negotiated between their union and the company. The union, some argued, needed to fight for a better deal.

Masters, however, said that although the scandal has been widely reported, it’s likely much less a factor than the specific circumstances at each individual workplace.

Loading...