Nabisco workers11/7/2023 (Last year, Mondelez CEO Dirk Van de Put received over $11 million in stocks and stock options, in addition to the nearly $5 million he earned in pay and bonuses.) Worker power is continuing to grow In December of 2020, the board of Mondelēz approved a total of $6 billion in stock buybacks, enriching investors with no strings attached and no real benefit for the company or its workers. Nabisco is owned by Mondelēz International, which describes itself as "one of the largest snack companies in the world with global net revenues of $25.9 billion and net earnings of $3.4 billion in 2018." Nabisco's workers aren't profiting from the increased sales derived from all their extra labor, but a handful of executives and investors certainly are. That increased demand has put pressure on snack manufacturers to produce and distribute more snacks. Thanks in part to all the lockdowns, streaming movie nights, and working and schooling from home, the entire snack food sector saw a sales increase last year, with some brands increasing sales by more than 100 percent over their pre-pandemic numbers. It's probably not a coincidence that two of the highest-profile strikes during the pandemic are in the snack food industry. Additionally, the company shifted its generous pension plans into much stingier 401(k)s, and Nabisco is now calling for employees to pay more for health care benefits. Nabisco recently outsourced hundreds of jobs to Mexico, shuttering factories in Georgia and New Jersey in the middle of the pandemic. "They're trying to take us back to, I feel like, slavery days where we're working all these hours and not getting any more money for it." "Anything after eight hours, we feel, should be overtime," Willie Williams, a worker in the Chicago Nabisco plant, explained to More Perfect. The workers say Nabisco is forcing them to work up to 16-hour days without overtime pay and to take on weekend shifts in sweltering conditions. Over a thousand workers in all four Nabisco bakeries and distribution centers in America - from Portland, Oregon all the way to Richmond, Virginia - are now on strike. ![]() It only took a few weeks for Probst's predictions to come true. "Employees have probably more strength than they've had in a number of years," Probst explained, and more employees were likely to flex their muscles in the months to come. They're tired of giving up their lives for substandard wages and sacrificing their quality of life so that somebody else can make outsized profits."Ĭiting increased "consumer consciousness" in support of the Frito-Lay workers and a favorable job market that is finally driving up wages for workers, Probst predicted that the Topeka strike would not be the last worker action to grab headlines. On a recent episode of the " Pitchfork Economics" podcast, Kansas State Representative Jason Probst said the strike showed workers "have had their fill. In July, a successful worker strike at a Topeka Frito-Lay factory captured the nation's attention. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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