Fights for Dignity: A Look at Three Recent American Labor Strikes
As the U.S. economy adapts to decreasing pandemic restrictions, the fight for worker’s rights on the local level has continued throughout the country. Union and non-union workforces have been using labor strikes to demand changes in company policy, and three recent strikes offer insight into how American laborers can fight for better workplace environments.
The ongoing strike of Topeka, Kansas Frito-Lay employees is one of the latest and most prominent examples of a struggle between employees and management. Nearly 600 workers participated in the work stoppage after rejecting the last negotiated contract offered by Pepsi-Co, the company that owns Frito-Lay. The chief demands of the workers are an end to forced overtime and a commitment to improved pay.
At the Frito-Lay plant in Topeka, Kansas, production has only increased during the pandemic. Via Justice for Frito Lay
“The biggest goals with the labor strike is to allow workers to have time with their families,” said Brent Hall, President of Local 218 of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union, which organized the strike. He added that the union membership wants “for Frito-Lay to reach staffing needs and reward the current workforce with pay that puts them on the top of the list in the area.”
The Topeka walkout is far from the only recent strike to gain traction, and it’s not even the only one involving PepsiCo employees. In Munster, Indiana, unionized truck drivers and delivery workers at a Pepsi bottling facility went on strike in order to protest a proposed increase in the company’s health insurance premiums. For every year until 2025, the plan would result in a $20 increase in the weekly premium. This would take the amount that workers at the plant pay each week for their insurance from the current $14 to $81 in 2025. The striking workers, represented by Teamsters Local 142, are hoping to cap the premiums at $14 a week.
While the two PepsiCo strike actions are still ongoing, a recent week-long strike at the Chicago restaurant chain Portillo’s reached its conclusion on July 6. The Portillo’s workers were attempting to secure better pay and an end to forced overtime. With the help of Arise Chicago, a workers advocacy group, the non-union strikers were able to air their grievances and return to work without being locked-out, but their fight still continues.
“If you unite and take action, you can win concrete improvements on the job,” said Shelly Ruzicka, the Communications & Development Director at Arise Chicago. “Because most bosses are always going to push back, you need to make collective decisions, maintain communication on your goals and stay united. The Portillo's workers are extremely united.”
In a high stakes strike, a unionized workforce can be incredibly helpful, but it isn’t always necessary. “If anything, workers who organize themselves who are not part of a union may actually strike more easily,” said Ruzicka. “Without a union they don't have considerations around their contract on if they can legally strike.”
For activists like Hall, union involvement has been a huge part of his labor advocacy for the past decade. When reflecting on his history of community work, he said “I have been working hard ever since Labor Notes in Chicago in 2018. We used several of the methods learned from Seminars and the teachers’ strikes in that time” (According to its website, Labor Notes is a “media and organizing project” that focuses on working with and educating union members). Ruzicka also noted the power of labor unions, stating that “Unionized workers of course have many more resources to plan, carry out, and publicize a strike. In either case, union or not, the most important thing is for the workers to be unified, and to have a shared understanding of the strike's goals.”
Ron Sadler, a 32-year employee at Frito-Lay’s facility in Topeka, Kansas, joins a union strike. Via AP
These strikes have obviously received significant attention from local news outlets, and the Topeka story was even covered by The Washington Post, but how do the advocates involved feel about the media coverage of labor struggles? Sometimes, the media latches onto a strike story, and Hall said that such was the case with the Topeka strike. “Coverage has been kind of easy to get for this, and I talk to reporters like talking to a friend.”
Often, though, strikes aren’t given the attention that people invested in labor struggles feel they deserve. “In general, worker issues and class issues are not covered enough in the mainstream press,” Ruzicka said, adding that “Newspapers that used to have dedicated labor beat reporters mostly don't anymore.” This hasn’t stopped Arise Chicago from attempting to increase the visibility of strikes and other workplace issues, however. According to Ruzicka, the group “earned 171 local, national, and international media pieces in 2020,” and she went on to comment that “Part of our role as a worker center is to highlight these issues in the media, and broaden the narrative for news consumers and elected officials.”
With the economy opening up, strikes and labor actions will surely continue as more and more people return to work. If anything, COVID brought corporate exploitation and the need for unified workforces to the forefront. “The workplace was the epicenter of the pandemic, and was a major contributor to low-wage workers--especially immigrants and workers of color--contracting and dying from COVID at much higher rates than White and middle or upper-income workers,” said Ruzicka. “In 2020, Arise supported and organized workers at several locations to go on health strikes because of COVID-19,” she added. “It was a literal matter of life and death… Rather than scare workers from taking action to protect needed jobs, COVID-19 emboldened workers to take action.”
Despite the Biden administration’s proposed infrastructure plan and recent executive order to raise the minimum hourly wage of federal contractors, this has been a uniquely difficult time for the country, and a recent National Low Income Housing Coalition found that a worker earning minimum wage isn’t able to afford a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the U.S. This means that the need for unions and labor advocacy groups won’t go away anytime soon, and strikes like the ones seen recently will continue for as long as laborers are exploited. In a way, Hall may have summed up the sentiment of workers across the country when describing the union’s stance on the Topeka strike: “The membership has had enough.”
