Cereal Killers: How 80-Hour Weeks and a Caste System Pushed Kellogg's Workers to Strike

[captain queeg]

2. It's a different world in a lot of ways

I think a lot of people have never had the kind of job where you punch a time clock and work on a production line, day after day. Not that long ago it was probably the most common for the majority of American workers. You really were treated like some kind of machine. Nowadays between automation and many production factories moving overseas I don’t see much of those jobs left. There was a period in America where many of those jobs could provide a living wage and benefits (largely due to unionization). While I rarely had a union job, other plants doing similar work would at least have to stay in the same ballpark for pay. I knew many people who didn’t really care what kind of work they did, as long as the pay was sufficient. But when work sucks and the pay sucks no one wants to be there.