Kellogg Co. is continuing to try to keep up cereal production during a strike against all four of its U.S. RTE cereal plants.
The company is importing cereal from its plants overseas, and running the four struck plants with a combination of replacement workers and management, CEO Steve Cahillane told Bloomberg.
“We have plants in Mexico, Canada, the UK — Manchester is a very big cereal plant — and even as far away as Australia. So we’ll leverage the totality of our global network,” Cahillane said.
The strike was declared Oct. 5 by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union after its contract ran out. The two sides are so far apart that the union didn’t even bother to send the latest Kellogg proposal to members for a vote. One of the major sticking points is Kellogg’s desire to impose a two-tiered wage and benefit structure that is less generous to new employees; Kellogg says it no longer wants such an arrangement to be “permanent.”
