New contract ends strike

About 1,400 striking Kellogg workers have ratified a new contract, their union said Tuesday, ending a strike that began in early October and affected four of the company’s U.S. cereal plants.

“Our striking members at Kellogg’s readyto-eat cereal production facilities courageously stood their ground and sacrificed so much in order to achieve a fair contract,” Anthony Shelton, president of the workers’ union, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, said in a statement.

The strike had become especially contentious after workers rejected an agreement on a five-year contract between their union and the company in early December, and the company announced that it would move ahead with hiring permanent replacement workers.

President Biden waded into the dispute a few days later, saying in a statement that the plan to replace workers was “deeply troubling” and calling it “an existential attack on the union and its members’ jobs and livelihoods.”

The contract dispute revolved partly around the company’s two-tier compensation system, in which workers hired after 2015 typically received lower wages and less generous benefits than veteran workers. The company has said that the longer-tenured workers make more than $35 an hour on average, while the more recent workers average just under $22 per hour.

Veteran workers had complained that the two-tier system put downward pressure on their wages and benefits because they could effectively be outvoted or replaced with newer, cheaper workers.

The strike included plants in Battle Creek, Mich.; Omaha, Neb.; Lancaster, Pa.; and Memphis, Tenn.