Bakery workers in Northeast Portland want consumers to make sure the Nabisco products they’re buying were manufactured in the U.S.
Lamar Kennedy has worked at the Northeast Portland bakery that makes Oreo cookies and other Nabisco-brand snack products for more than 25 years.
The bakery, located on Northeast Columbia Boulevard just northeast of the Kenton neighborhood, employs 210 people full time, according to the bakers’ union that represents workers there.
During the first two decades he worked there, producing America’s top-selling cookies was a job Kennedy enjoyed. Morale was high, working conditions at the bakery were good, and fair wages with plenty of overtime allowed workers to support their families.
But in recent years, workers say, the environment at the bakery has been engulfed in fear – punctuated by top-down intimidation under the ever-looming threat that the plant may close so production can be moved to Mexico.
Adding to the uncertainty, their union’s contract with the company has not been renewed since it expired in March 2016.
“The feeling there is horrible,” said Cameron Taylor, a representative of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union (BCTGM) Local 364. “The people are going to work every day, but it’s not what it was. The company’s attitude has caused the morale to be as bad as I’ve ever seen it. The people there used to care about their job and care about working for that company. They don’t care anymore.”
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During a news conference and roundtable discussion at St. Charles Borromeo Church in September, Kennedy and other bakery employees discussed how their working environment began to deteriorate in 2012, when the Kraft-owned bakery, along with all its Nabisco products, became part of newly created Mondelēz International Inc., a spinoff of Kraft’s global snack food operations.
Members of a labor rights group called Interfaith Worker Justice were also at the table for the discussion. Portland was one stop on their cross-country tour of cities where Mondelēz workers are struggling with the company’s strategy of moving the majority of its big-brand production to Mexico.
Mondelēz-Nabisco production facilities remain open in five U.S. states, employing roughly 2,000 full-time workers, according to a spokesperson for the BCTGM International, Nate Zeff.
Interfaith Worker Justice and bakers’ union representatives also attempted to visit one of Mondelēz’s facilities in Mexico, but they were barred from entry. Workers arrived on buses that unloaded beyond the fences surrounding the factory, so the representatives were unable to speak with them about conditions inside.
“We want to support workers on both sides of the border,” said Laura Barrett, executive director at Interfaith Worker Justice.
A contract between Mexican workers and Mondelēz shows that workers are paid the U.S. equivalent of $7.80 to $10.41 per day.
“We have had several sources tell us that 12-hour days are common in Mondelēz’s Salinas Victoria plant,” Zeff said.
The minimum wage in Mexico, as of December when it saw an increase, is 88.36 pesos, or $4.71 U.S., per day.
Interfaith Worker Justice’s investigation into Mondelēz-Nabisco bakeries culminated in a report released Dec. 12.
According to “Breaking Faith: Outsourcing and Damage Done to Our Communities,” Mondelēz’s actions illustrate the systemic erosion of American manufacturing in exchange for cheap labor in countries with fewer regulations and worker protections.
The report’s authors argue that by moving production overseas and across borders, Mondelēz is betraying the communities that helped its brands become popular and profitable, such as Oreo, which was born in New York in 1912. They say that Mondelēz was making “good profits” under its U.S. production when it announced plans to lay off hundreds of American workers.
While Mondelēz workers in Mexico make less than $1 per hour, its executives are raking in millions.
The report found that “in the last nine years, Mondelēz-Nabisco former CEO (now board chair) Irene Rosenfeld was paid more than $185 million. Upon exiting the company, she will take with her nearly $35 million in personal pension, a $50 million severance and more than $70 million in additional stock options. And as recently reported in the news, the incoming CEO, Dirk Van de Put, stands to make $55 million in his first year.”
Meanwhile, lower-level workers in the U.S. are uncertain about the future of their hard-earned pensions.
“Four months ago, I would have been eligible to retire,” Kennedy said in September. “But now, with what’s going on, I don’t know what’s going to happen with our pension. But week to week, we keep paying into it.”
Mondelēz Global spokesperson Laurie Guzzinati said the company has no plans to close its Portland bakery. She said that the company has continued to negotiate its union contracts across the U.S. and that its U.S. facilities are, and continue to be, an important part of its North American manufacturing network.
Between 2012 and 2017, Guzzinati said, Mondelēz has invested more than $500 million in the United States, including investments in “state of the art, modern manufacturing.”
Nabisco began production in Mexico in 2003 but ramped up its foreign investment and opened a new facility there in 2014. According to the report, the company has spent $500 million on new facilities in Mexico. Soon after Mondelēz’s second bakery near Monterrey, Mexico, opened, the company closed a plant in Philadelphia. Then, in January 2016, Mondelēz announced that 600 workers would be laid off from the Nabisco bakery in Chicago.
The following month, Brian Gladden, executive vice president and chief financial officer at Mondelēz, announced that by 2018, 70 percent of the production of the company’s leading brands would be produced in new facilities being built in countries such as Mexico, India and the Czech Republic, according to a report at World-Grain.com.
In response to the company’s outsourcing strategy, the BCTGM union has waged a campaign against buying Mondelēz snack products made in Mexico. The campaign is aimed at educating consumers and encouraging them to check the label on Nabisco products and buy the snacks only if they were made in the U.S.
It’s their hope that consumers will read the labels on Oreos, Newtons, Chips Ahoy!, Ritz Crackers, Teddy Grahams, Wheat Thins, Animal Crackers and other Nabisco products to ensure they were made in the U.S.
Some products show “Made in Mexico” on the label, and others are stamped with a processing code that includes the initials of the factory where the snack was made. The Portland bakery’s code, for example, is “AH,” while products made in Mexico carry “MM” or “MS.”
The campaign is also encouraging consumers to tell store managers to stock only U.S.-made Nabisco products. However, that strategy has proven less than fruitful locally.
“We go into stores and tell them that these products are made in Mexico,” said Taylor at the BCTGM Local 364. “They don’t care.”
Guzzinati said stores pay the same price for Mondelēz products regardless of where they were manufactured.
At the roundtable discussion in the Northeast Portland church, some bakery employees, including a laid-off worker who had traveled from Chicago, said closures and layoffs were hitting African-American and Latino communities particularly hard.
Kennedy is one of several employees still working at the Portland bakery who was hired in 1992, when Nabisco received a tax incentive to hire residents in the predominantly African-American neighborhood that bordered the facility.
Another Mondelēz employee who was hired at that time, Charlotte England, said there are many single mothers who rely on their job at the Portland bakery to support their children.
Since 2008, Oregon has given the plant’s operator more than a half-million dollars in tax credits and rebates, according to Good Jobs First’s online subsidy tracker. In all, Mondelēz has received more than $91 million in public subsidies from state and local governments in the U.S. since 1993.
On Nov. 16, the union’s campaign, which has the backing of the AFL-CIO, held a national day of action with protesters in Portland gathered outside a Walmart to spread awareness of the boycott of Mexico-made Nabisco snacks.
This past summer, the Portland bakery experienced a weeklong shutdown when Mondelēz told workers no more inventory was needed. Production in Mexico, however, continued during that time, workers said. They also reported temporary reductions in production that meant fewer hours to go around.
As of the beginning of 2018, Taylor said, Mondelēz employees in Portland are “in a holding pattern,” while they live in constant fear that each day of work might be their last.
Adding insult to injury, bakery workers were shocked when they arrived at work during a snack sale for employees in September.
It was “a product sale for the things that we make, and some of the other bakeries make,” Kennedy said. “They had the nerve to bring in products from Mexico to sell to us, the employees!”
A handful of U.S. lawmakers have taken action in response to workers’ concerns.
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote to Mondelēz’s outgoing CEO Rosenfeld in June to express dissatisfaction with the company’s shift of production to Mexico. He also asked the company to share its long-term plans for investment in America’s workforce. According to Wyden’s office, a Mondelēz representative responded to his request verbally, conveying that the company remained committed to the Portland bakery.
In December, U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) was among a group of five congressmen who signed off on a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, urging him, in part, to push for better labor standards in Mexico and reduce incentives for offshoring while re-negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement. The congressmen pointed to Mondelēz’s actions as an example of why these changes are important if the U.S. wants to save manufacturing jobs.
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites
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