![]() (Earlier this year, Congress voted to stabilize a large number of troubled multiemployer plans.)īCTGM tried to retaliate with a boycott of Mexican-made Mondelēz products and stirred an organizing drive among Mexican unions at the Mondelēz plant in Mexico, aiming to overturn the company-run, pro-industry union there. Mondelēz handed the union a painful drubbing over the past five years - starting in 2016, when Mondelēz began shifting jobs from Chicago to a new factory in Salinas, Mexico, then halted its pension plan in favor of a 401(k), saying the union’s failing multiemployer pension plan was headed toward collapse. Without a doubt, the moment marks a comeback for BCTGM. “My experience with the company, goes through a labor dispute, is that they don’t want to do it again,” Woods adds. (Mondelēz currently pays 95% of union members’ healthcare coverage.) As only the second strike in Nabisco’s history, Woods is hopeful the company has learned a lesson. Mondelēz also lost its bid to require new hires to pay a share of their healthcare costs, Woods says. If current workers do not volunteer for the weekend shifts, the company will hire new employees, Woods says. More importantly, the schedule allows workers to keep their overtime pay for holidays and weekends - benefits that would have vanished with three-day shifts. Instead of the company’s demand for rotating 12-hour, three-to-four-day shifts for workers on high demand sites, Mondelēz has agreed to create weekend shifts, solving the company’s need to meet production demand, Woods says. He adds that, of the 893 workers who voted nationally, only 201 were against the deal. “The union wanted to maintain what we had - we didn’t lose nothing,” he says. The victory is “huge” according to Donald Woods, president of BCTGM Local 1 in Chicago and one of the union’s negotiators. Indeed, his union - the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) - has proven up to the challenge to keep those benefits.Ī five-week strike by 1, 000 of the union’s members at Mondelēz came to an end with workers approving a new, four-year contract on Saturday, September 18. He was just a teenager when he got the job, which also got him a lifetime of something that has nearly disappeared across the nation - a union job with good pay and good benefits. Nearly four decades ago, Walsh went to work at what was once the world’s largest bakery, Nabisco (now a subsidiary of Mondelēz International). ![]() “We are emptying out their shelves,” he added optimistically. ![]() “I think we got a chance,” Walsh said last week. CHICAGO - His shift on the strike line over, James Walsh lingers on the sidewalk to wave his picket sign amid a deafening racket of passing truckers and drivers hammering their horns in support. ![]()
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