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- Paul Constant is a writer at Civic Ventures and cohost of the “Pitchfork Economics” podcast.
- In his latest piece, he discusses the striking workers at the Frito-Lay factory in Topeka, Kansas.
- The workers will receive a gradual 4% pay raise, but income inequality within the company remains.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
For three thrilling weeks in July, the nation’s attention fixed on striking workers at a Frito-Lay factory in Topeka, Kansas.
Back when major newspapers had full-time labor reporters, strikes and worker actions used to dominate more of the news cycle. But now that only six of the 25 biggest American newspapers (and zero American television networks or cable news outlets) employ labor reporters, it’s rare to see coverage of union actions in the national media.
Jason Probst, a Democratic member of the Kansas House of Representatives, explained on this week’s episode of “Pitchfork Economics” why he thinks the Frito-Lay strike so successfully captured the nation’s attention.
“We started to learn just how awful the working conditions were” at the plant, Probst said. “We heard about 84-hour workweeks, that people were working seven days a week and doing these ‘suicide shifts’ where they worked 12 hours, got a few hours off, and had to come back for another 12 hours.”
And all that work was being compensated with distressingly low wages. “There are some employees that have been there over 10 years without a substantive raise,” Probst said.
Probst thinks the general public recoiled at the “unconscionable work conditions” that Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo, demanded of their workers. “They understood that this was another example of workers just being kind of crushed into the ground,” he said.
The strike was also a newsworthy aberration in Kansas, one of the most antiunion states with notoriously bad so-called “right-to-work laws” that give employers almost total control over their workers. Probst admitted that in Kansas, “We don’t typically see a full-on strike like this.”
Wealthier, white-collar Americans might not understand it’s not as easy as just getting up and leaving when working conditions become intolerable.
“I used to work production and manufacturing years ago, and my takeaway was they pay you just enough to not get another job,” Probst said. “The nature of the work keeps you there physically for long periods of time, so you can’t even take time off to go look for another job,” he added.
Not only did the striking workers have to risk going without pay for an indeterminate amount of time or even losing their jobs entirely, “The first thing that the company did” when workers walked off the job, Probst said, was “cut off health-insurance benefits for all the striking workers.”
“The fact that they were able to weaponize health-insurance coverage for their employees who decided to advocate for themselves demonstrates, to me, far too much power in the hands of our employers,” Probst said, calling this strike a clear indicator of why “health insurance needs to be separated from your employer.”
After three weeks of bargaining, the union voted to end the strike on July 23. Probst doesn’t have all the inside details of the bargain, but “It looks like the employees will get a 4% pay increase over the next two years, they’ll get at least one guaranteed day off each week, and they will not have to work these ‘suicide shifts’ anymore,” he said.
The workers may have won, but it’s not a Cinderella ending. Probst notes that Frito-Lay can still basically demand unlimited overtime of its workers with a few cursory restrictions tacked on.
And that 4% pay raise isn’t going to do much to upend income inequality within the company – Ramon Laguarta, CEO of PepsiCo, still made roughly $21.5 million last year, which is more than 460 times the median PepsiCo worker salary.
But Probst does see some cause for optimism. During the strike, he saw increased “consumer consciousness,” with the general public calling for boycotts of Frito-Lay and Pepsi products for the duration of the strike, and impassioned calls to support the strikers’ general fund on social media.
And Probst is also seeing that in the current economic recovery, “Employees have probably more strength than they’ve had in a number of years.”
Probst believes that Topeka is on the cutting edge of growing worker dissatisfaction in America. “I think people have had their fill. They’re tired of giving up their lives for substandard wages and sacrificing their quality of life so that somebody else can make outsize profits,” he said.
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