Disclaimer: this is not an “essay” with “facts” this is a jumble of anecdotal evidence that I tied together with a shoestring of 20th century IWW labor theory. And for me it’s an exercise. It’s an experiment in strategic Gonzo praxis.
Cool, so I’m here to do a little prose on the Kellogg strike. The strike lasted 11 weeks, and more than 1,400 strikers walked off the job at 4 plant locations. I visited the Omaha plant with some comrades in early December.
First, for an overview of the Kellogg strike, go here, https://www.tempestmag.org/2021/12/not-so-grrrrrrreat/
Ok. So you’ve read it. You know that the strike is over, the unions conceded, and workers’ demands for an end to the two-tier system were not met. So the Tempest authors argue that the perhaps-winning solution here would have been to crack down on the use of scab labor. But based on what I saw on the ground in Omaha, the scabs are not the enemy, nor are they the solution. Maybe harassing scabs was a good tactic back when Kelloggs couldn’t effectively displace and exploit undocumented people – maybe it’s always been problematic – I don’t know. What we (labor organizers) should be doing is examining the strategic lessons from the strike wave as a whole, as well as the tactics of the Kellogg workers. My questions after the picket line: Where were the union organizers and what is an effective strike?
Here I am going to make the stupidly bold claim that a weeklong regional strike organized across multiple vertically dependent industries would be WAY more effective than a fiscally and emotionally draining marathon 11-week strike in 4 different plant locations, all of which occupy the same horizontal space in the production line as cereal plants. Yes, I will come out in favor of the wildcat strike in vertically dependent industries, more on that later. Let it be known that the Kelloggs plant workers were on strike and the factory was still operating 24/7! The cereal trucks never stopped! If Kelloggs lost any money on the strike, it wasn’t enough money!
Tactically, there are a couple of key groups of workers that aren’t necessarily in the same union as the majority of Kellogg workers, and I believe those workers are the solution to a more effective (shorter, bigger) strike. For example, there were at least two maintenance workers that never went on strike. Without a maintenance worker on hand, the plant can’t operate. Then there’s workers that aren’t employed by Kelloggs (actually, given that Kelloggs is a huge conglomerate it’s possible Kelloggs employs them too. ie, I brought a can of Pringles to the strike line. Pringles are a Kelloggs product. Ignorance is salty.) but are a part of the supply chain: truck drivers, security workers, data analysts, programmers…grocery store sales representatives….forklift operators.. and I don’t have to tell you that those workers have a lot of power by lieu of their position. Anybody who lives and works in the U.S. right now knows there’s a huge labor shortage!
Ok, but let’s get locally situated. Omaha, NE. City of asphalt, some government presumably, and terrible vibes. I heard there’s a zoo, but that probably makes me like the city less. (Sorry! I was in Omaha for like 31 hours.) Situated! So let’s talk about conditions and solutions. The Kellogg workers call it a wet clean-up when someone vomits dust from their lungs at the end of a shift. There is a wet clean-up every night. That is not why they strike.
A typical shift starts at 3am or 7am. The Kellogg workers pull 12 hour shifts, 84 hours a week, some do 16 hours on Sundays. So their kids can eat at an empty table. That is not why they strike.
The Kellogg workers have 98% union membership on the shop floor. In a right-to-work state, this is a big deal! Could this be why they strike?
The Kellogg workers worked 7 days a week throughout the early days of the pandemic and continue to do so now. I noticed not one of the workers on the picket line discussed their personal life. You give up multiplicities to be a worker at Kelloggs. And all discussion revolved around the new, two-tiered system put in place by management.
The new tiered system imposes a hierarchy in which new hires will make less per hour for the same work. A lot less. Try 10 dollars an hour less. For the same work! New workers will never get healthcare and they will never be promoted. It is very clearly a strategic move on management’s part to choke out an Omaha union stronghold. As higher-tier, ‘legacy’ workers die or retire, less and less of the total population of plant workers will have the pay and benefits that Kellogg workers depended on in the past. One is reminded of Amazon’s insidiously good strategy of replacing the entire workforce every eight months. (I’ll cite @ the end)
So this is why the Kellogg workers struck for 11 weeks. For the new generation.
Nine weeks into the strike, the week after I was there, workers were voting as to whether they should continue the strike. An end to the tiered system was all they wanted. Yet some had burned through their savings to the tune of $20,0o0! On the first day of the strike, Kelloggs terminated their health insurance. And it was Christmastime.
Ok, I need to segway here and talk about whales. My friend, I’ll call her 🌛, told me about whales while we were walking around the Omaha plant. (It is the largest cereal plant in the world and a lap takes about forty-five minutes.) She said it is said that whales have a greater emotional capacity than humans. It is said that sometimes whales get brain tumors. The brain worms will drive the whale to beach itself-suicide. But if enough whales are infected with worms, whole pod will beach itself, even if most remain uninfected.
Ok, keep that in mind but back to the strike. It was December cold! And at times hard to be positive. The Kellogg workers fought for pennies in a concrete winter, and while holding a union sign for ten minutes by a roadway I got flipped off twice. On the picket line is banjos and cookies and singing, and a worker with eyes that know tells us we have no power in this world. Even if they put a brave face on it, not one of the workers was optimistic that the strike would end well, despite their sacrifice. That hurt. That was suffering I didn’t want to think about. In fact I wanted to make like a whale and beach. But I didn’t. I know my place.
And then a bus of scabs rolls in, right on schedule. Or, more accurately 7 nearly-empty buses roll in, flanked by company security, because Kelloggs wants to be sneaky about the exact number of scabs going in and out of the plant and will use 7 buses when it needs 1. And then there are whispers to us that most of the scabs are undocumented workers ‘recruited’ from out-of-state and not to boo them. They’re not the enemy.
Obviously I think that was the right call and it seemed to be the workers’ normal approach to the parade of buses, which visited four times a day as production continued inside the plant. You might remember that Tempest authors and some DSA members have been calling for a crackdown on scab labor in support of the current small-but-mighty U.S. strike wave. So here now I’m asking a fundamental question of codified union strike tactics. Let’s first agree that booing a bus of undocumented workers would not be a helpful strategy in this or any other scenario, and it’s a likely scenario. As long as the status of ‘undocumented’ exists as a means of corporal control, then capitalists are going to exploit what is essentially a legally captive workforce. Scab-scaring may have been helpful in the past, but we’re a dog with different fleas now.
I think when a big union company goes on strike, the typical strategy is to dig in their trenches and prepare for the indefinitely long haul. In theory, the longer the strike, the greater the corporate losses, the more likely workers are to get what they demand. Not to mention a strike is fun! The strike shifts were about 4 hours long. Shifts in the plant? (Pop quiz) 12 hours! But I don’t think a long ‘siege’ strike is strategic anymore. For a lot of workers, the Kellogg strike failed. A long single-company strike is like building a ‘utopian commune’ in the woods: spatially vulnerable, and sustainable for how long? Symbolically, a long corporate strike is like the tree that stands alone in the storm.
Ok, so a long time ago I asked where were the union organizers? Who were the worker leaders and who were the organizers of the strike? I didn’t meet them on the picket line. On that last Sunday before the vote, all anyone would talk about was whether or not they should continue the strike. Workers were asking each other and so many were still undecided, day of the vote! Maybe the union organizers were not active on the picket line because of state repression, ie the Omaha PD was harassing them. But people would have appreciated some chance to meet as union! Debate, speeches, faces, leaders, questions, food and something to drink, a chance to plan actions and take risks together! I’m just saying, whales, don’t underestimate the power of group think. From a dual-power perspective, the Omaha strike is indicative of our regional lack of socially reproductive support networks. I’m talking fiscal support for workers on strike, free medical clinics, festivals held in their honor to acknowledge that going on strike is one of the most heroic things a working person can do. (Am I joking? No_pe.) Joy is always revolutionary.
Absence of leadership or not, I’m not here to point fingers, I’m here to talk about solutions, and I am especially not here to call out the Omaha union organizers, because I’m not in that circle and don’t really know what’s going on. I speak from an outside perspective.
And from the outside, it felt like the strike had already lost its footing and its morale. What if the strike never had a chance to lose its footing? What’s up with a lightning strike?
Lightning strike: [this is a term I just made up] Ok, so a lightning strike is when the labor strike is less than two weeks long and organized across an entire supply chain. A lightning strike is not defined by a single workplace fight, but rather by many small fights. If the crackdown in any one workplace is too harsh, strikers retreat (and by retreat I mean go back to work.) It is a guerilla rather than a traditional tactic. A lightning strike might be reminiscent of prison strikes or rent strikes, which historically have much greater leeway for participation than labor strikes. That is, you can win a rent strike with less than half of total participation. A lightning strike takes the pressure off organizers to get perfect participation and allows us to focus on coordinating with the many, many already radicalized but spatially sporadic workers. Symbolically, a lightning strike resembles a wave of grass that’s quick to seed, and in the end, workers’ demands are met and the leftist movement is [harder better faster] stronger.
So who or what organizational entity could bring all those workers together? What could persuade those who are comfortably employed in the tech sectors to join in with the logistical workers? Especially given that workers participating in such a strike would probably have less union protection. Remember whales? Maybe more of those comfortably employed could be persuaded to take a risk if others in their pod did, too, which means popular education. Ultimately, I think a project on a regional scale would require a regional strategy and a significant flow of money. The small, insular, revolutionary organs of power which already exist in most states have to coordinate; what supply chains criss-cross the area? And of course, the biggest question is Where is the money going to come from?
*crickets compose and then perform a new DSA theme song*
I think a ‘lightning strike’ is probably very similar to the Wobblies’ revolutionary vision of simultaneous nationwide wildcat strikes. Wildcat strike: when workers go on strike without their union’s blessing, authorization, permission. Also a wildcat strike: when workers go on strike without a union at all. This was very in vogue at the turn of the twentieth century, but to make a very long story very short, the Wobblies had no consistent base and no money and the state clobbered them. Basically, if your strategy is hit-and-run, then you have to give people a safe place to run to, or they’ll desert. Which the people did. Desert.
Ok, so you’re probably thinking that this is a pretty superficial analysis if I can’t explain why we don’t see more vertically strategic, multiple-industry strikes. Well, I would agree, and also I am unable to satisfactorily explain (yet.) But ‘industry’ is a moving target, and the curve is moving fast. Just needed to label that elephant.
Ok, I’m wrapping up here. Let’s review. Have I mentioned coordination? A lightning strike would really take some coordination. Basically, because coordination is so important, DSA seems like it’s in the most obvious position to succeed with this strategy, with its national network of chapters. Or maybe it’s the most immediately obvious to me because I’m in DSA. In addition, it seems like data analytics skills to compress regional space down to a coherent topographical strategy. Basically we need more radical hackers.
Cool I’m out of steam so that’s all for today. I sideways-approached the question of why the Kelloggs strike didn’t succeed, I pitched DSA pretty hard, and I got really hyped up about a “new” (rebranded) strike strategy that I’m sure is not perfect. I’ll ground us with the final notes I scribbled as I was leaving the Kellogg strike, so let’s remember why we’re here, that is, the cruelty with which Kelloggs treats its workers is akin to duct-taping a go-cart together and heading for the freeway. Risky for everybody no matter where you are on the road! The Kellogg strike was really powerful for me to witness. Let’s think critically about our strategy and approach our work with love. Solidarity.
tl; dr In this post I made up a term for a new kind of strike which was probably unnecessary.
here is that amazon article I promised: https://bit.ly/3ENVz2U
cdzhouse 