08 Oct HAROLD MEYERSON: The Little Union Thatโs Reviving the Strike
The roll call of unions that have actually changed the trajectory of American labor is relatively short: the United Auto Workers, the Mine Workers, and other CIO unions in the 1930s and โ40s, as factory workers organized; AFSCME and the American Federation of Teachers in the 1960s and โ70s, as unions took hold in the public sector.
Today, a much smaller union, punching way above its weight, is vying to join that list. After 40 years in a desert of union decline, workersโ ultimate weapon to win whatโs rightly theirsโthe strikeโlooks to be coming back, a long-overdue development that I discuss and analyze in some detail in my article on the Prospect website today. In that piece, I note that 2021 is beginning to look like 1919 and 1946, the years in which America experienced its greatest number of strikes. To be sure, today, with the private-sector rate of unionization reduced to less than 7 percent, most of the striking is individual rather than collective: employees refusing to return to their old poor-paying no-benefit jobs, creating a worker shortage that has compelled such anti-union behemoths as Amazon and Walmart to raise their employeesโ wages. In tandem with this new form of individualized collective bargaining (ours is a time that requires oxymorons), unions themselves are beginning to strike, a phenomenon not seen ever since Ronald Reagan busted the air traffic controllers union when it went on strike in 1981.
And the union leading the charge today is the BCTGM, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union, founded in the same year as the American Federation of Labor: 1886.
Youโre forgiven if you havenโt heard of the BCTGM, but theyโre the folks who put breakfast on your table, bread in your sandwich, and candy in your kidsโ time-to-see-the-dentist mouths. This year, though, theyโre also the folks who are restoring a needed level of strategic militance to American labor. In July, protesting the crazy hours they were compelled to work (in some cases, up to 84 hours a week), their members struck a Frito-Lay plant in Topeka. The following month, members struck five Nabisco factories across the nation, also to protest the plethora of hours and the dearth of benefits. Theyโve done a bang-up job of pressuring those corporations to grant their workersโ demands, by both striking and publicizing the absurd schedules and conditions their members were compelled to endure.
Now, this week, BCTGM members have struck every Kellogg factory in the United States, after negotiations over schedules and benefits had produced no results. Kellogg workers have documented how theyโve been compelled to work straight through the weekend, and how some have had to work 12-to-16-hour days to keep turning out those Frosted Flakes.
Though Iโve been writing about unions for the past 40 or so years, this is the first time Iโve written anything about the BCTGM. I can tell you that since this spring, the union has had a new president, Anthony Shelton, but I can do no more than infer that this may have something to do with the union now having to produce more picket signs.
But I do know that this outburst of militance has a lot to do with the same factors that produced the strike waves of 1919 and 1946. Those were the years following the two world wars, of course, when the words โfront lineโ still meant exposure to deadly fire. Today, as the pandemic (we hope) recedes, it refers to workers who had to show up every workday and risk contracting a potentially fatal virus. In all three cases, those workers were hailed as heroes, and in all three cases, most of the jobs to which they either returned or continued to hold offered pay and working conditions that were anything but heroic.
Soโstrikes then and strikes now. And this time around, with the bakers leading the way.