Workers at the Mondelez International bakery in Northeast Portland have been striking August 10 due to a contract dispute with their employer, which wants a contract that includes longer shifts, cuts to overtime pay, and higher health insurance premiums. Nabisco/Mondelez employees in Illinois, Georgia, Colorado, and Virginia soon also walked off the job, and the Portland workers have been joined on the picket line by a variety of other unions, including longshoremen, railroad workers, machinists, and painters.
Today, they added one more union to that list: the NWSL Players’ Association.
A group of Thorns players, including Emily Menges, Marissa Everett, Morgan Weaver, Madison Pogarch, Simone Charley, Bella Bixby, Christen Westphal, Abby Smith, Yazmeen Ryan, and Taylor Porter, picketed in solidarity with the bakery workers along NE Columbia Blvd, holding signs reading “solidarity” and “scabs go home,” and chanting slogans like “no justice, no treats!” and “no contract, no snacks, Portland has the bakers’ backs!”
“I just think it’s important that we show up for other members of the community who are fighting the same fight that we’re currently fighting,” said Menges. “We know right from wrong, and this is wrong.”
The union is in talks with management in Baltimore today, their third meeting since May, but the workers’ grievances go back further than that. “The company for a number of years, has been doing everything they can to try to break the union,” said Mike Burlingham, vice president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM) Local 364, which represents the workers. “They’re not coming in to negotiate. They’re coming in with their list of demands.”
Burlingham said the company has yet to make any official offers, and has instead tried to negotiate directly with workers, which is illegal in a unionized workplace. They also brought in scabs from out of town to keep the bakery running while the union members strike.
“The company’s proposal is, they want to set up a two-tier medical plan for us, to create divide within the union,” said Burlingham. Essentially, the proposed plan would mean newer employees would pay higher premiums. “That’s called eating our young, and we don’t do that. And the other thing is, they want to move our eight-hour shifts to 12-hour shifts and change the language of how we get paid overtime.”
“Greed is the problem here, with Mondelez,” said Victor Weekes, a retired worker who now acts as a union representative. “And respect. Mondelez don’t respect the people that work.”
Professional soccer is a very different job from working a factory floor, but workers’ rights are workers’ rights. “I think that we can’t really look at ourselves as like a group of a group of workers that are going through anything new,” said Bixby. “I think that it’s on us to line ourselves up with other workers that are going through labor struggles as well.”
“The details and everything are different—we’re not fighting for pensions, we’re not fighting for that kind of stuff—but just the fair treatment of humans,” said Menges. The NWSLPA is also currently negotiating a collective bargaining agreement with the league, but “for today,” she continued, “we are less focused on what we’re doing and more focused on what they’re trying to accomplish.”
The players’ presence on the picket line was not a Thorns-specific effort, but a gesture on behalf of the whole NWSLPA. “The PA’s been watching what’s been going on with these Nabisco workers pretty much all over the country,” she said. “It just so happened that one of the factories that went on strike is in Portland, and that was the only location that [players] plausibly could have gone to and supported them.”
“I think it’s important that we and other people in the community come and show support, just because I hope that it is taken seriously by their employer,” said Bixby. “I hope that ongoing support by a lot of different groups and a lot of different people helps them take it seriously.”
Seeing the Thorns stand in solidarity with the bakery workers “means the world to me,” said Burlingham. “Them showing up and showing their support is so meaningful to us. Players of that caliber, and the platform that they have and the attention that they can bring to this, it’s phenomenal.”
A number of the striking workers are Thorns fans, and several people giddily posed for photos with the players; one woman admitted to me she was too shy to ask for a photo. Weekes is a big Timbers fan, and his son has Thorns season tickets. If the Thorns are in the championship in November, he said with a grin, he’d be there.
All the Nabisco workers I spoke to agreed that spirits are high. “All the support we get,” said Chrysta Knutson, a packing shop steward with Local 364, “it gives me so much motivation and encouragement, and it just keeps my morale up.”
“It takes it takes a whole community, and in this case, an entire nation, because this is a nationwide strike,” said Burlingham. “It’s going to take an entire nation to stand up and say, what’s going on isn’t right… And until that time, boycott Nabisco, boycott Mondelez.”
Some reporting was contributed by Margaret Seiler.
