Frito-Lay Forced Overtime Frustrations Not Limited to Striking Topeka Plant
Frito-Lay workers in Topeka, Kansas, have been on strike since July 5, demanding wage increases and an end to the company’s reliance on forced overtime, which has seen some of them forced to work 12-hour days, seven days a week for weeks on end.
But frustrations over forced OT aren’t limited to Topeka. Below, we publish a letter from the wife of a Frito-Lay warehouse worker at another of the company’s 30 U.S. manufacturing facilities, who said she feels like a “single, married mom” because of the way the snackmaker’s abuse of mandatory overtime has upended her family life. (We are publishing the letter anonymously at her request.)
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Dear Labor Notes,
I want to thank you for your recent article ‘We Want to See Our Families: Frito Lay Workers Strike Over 84-Hour Weeks, Meager Raises.’ As a spouse of a Frito-Lay warehouse employee [at a different facility], everything in your article hit home to me. I really hope that your article can help draw national attention to how Frito-Lay treats their employees. I do believe that a lot of families of Frito Lay employees are caught in the same situation as we are.
When my husband started working there, nearly 10 years ago, the wages were competitive. As you mentioned, the raises since then have been, least to say, minimal, despite the growing costs of housing and living expenses. When PepsiCo is banking billions of dollars, their employees are stuck earning the same wages and working non-stop.
As a family, we can never plan anything. Our daughters and I constantly go places without him, because there is never any stability in knowing his schedule. Oftentimes, only hours before we expect him home, he will text me to let me know he has been forced over. I have joked that I'm a single, married mom.
I could go on and on! It's a frustrating situation that has felt like it will never change. I only hope that with the strike happening, and more attention being brought to the situation to the media, such as your article, that things will change for the better for all Frito-Lay employees.
Kindly,
The spouse of a Frito-Lay warehouse worker
And this issue isn’t just a product of the pandemic. When Labor Notes asked the letter-writer how long forced overtime had been an issue for her husband and her family, she responded, “That's been happening since he's worked there!”
TOPEKA STRIKE UPDATES
Bakery Workers (BCTGM) Local 218 heads back to the bargaining table with Frito-Lay on Monday.
Striking workers have been maintaining a picket line outside the facility and posting photos of all the community and union support they are receiving on the Topeka Frito-Lay Union Members Appreciation Page on Facebook.
Frito-Lay has been touting the offer that workers overwhelmingly voted down before the strike, highlighting that it included a 60-hour a week cap on the amount workers can be required to work, eliminated mandatory “suicide shifts” (“squeeze shifts,” in company lingo, in which workers only have eight hours off—these will now supposedly be voluntary), and included 2 percent annual wage increases for each year of the two-year contract. But as workers have pointed out, a 60-hour week still means they routinely could be forced to work:
- five 12-hour days
- six days a week, including three 12-hour shifts, or even
- seven days a week, with one 12-hour shift.
And the 2 percent increases are a pittance given that wages have been stagnant for most classifications for over a decade, with small lump sum bonuses instead of increased wage rates most years.
Workers say that if the plant doesn’t significantly raise wages—and improve working conditions, including by reducing forced overtime—it won’t be able to attract more workers, meaning that 60-hour weeks will be the norm, even for the highest-seniority workers. Workers who have been at the plant for 20 or 30-plus years worry they could be forced in on their weekends if lower-seniority workers hit their 60-hour cap earlier in the week.
PEPSI PROFITS WHILE WORKERS SUFFER
Meanwhile, PepsiCo, which owns Frito-Lay, raised its profit forecast earlier in the week, projecting earnings per share of 11 percent this year. The company also announced it will raise its prices. Pepsi shares are now trading at record highs—as workers toil away 84 hours a week in the company's plants.
Max Alvarez did an hour-long interview with Topeka Frito-Lay striker Cheri Renfro on the Working People podcast. Given the 84-hour weeks Frito-Lay has subjected workers to, I particularly appreciated Renfro’s description of anti-union right-to-work laws as “right to work you to death.” Kansas is a right-to-work state; about 600 of the 850 workers at the Topeka Frito-Lay facility are union members. Find it on your podcast app or at In These Times.
Lauren Kaori Gurley of Vice published an interview with Mark McCarter, a shop steward who has been working in the Topeka plant for 37 years. It’s titled, “I'm a Frito-Lay Factory Worker. I Work 12-Hour Days, 7 Days a Week.” As McCarter says, “This job wears you down, it tires you, and makes you mentally exhausted. It plays with your mind. Some of these guys who work 12 hours a day everyday are destroying their marriages. They're destroying their families. My wife passed away and I don't have a wife to go home to to say, 'Hey babe I'm only working eight hours tomorrow,’ but a lot of these guys come in with the understanding that they'll be here for eight hours but then they got to call their wives and kids and say, ‘Guess what? It's not eight hours. It's 12 hours and then I have to go back to work at 3 a.m.’”
A local magazine, 785, has set up a fund to help Topeka strikers pay their water bills. Strikers are also urging supporters to boycott Frito-Lay and Pepsi products. Supporters can also call the PepsiCo Board of Directors mailbox (1-866-626-0633) and leave a message demanding that they settle a fair contract.
Elsewhere, truck drivers at a Pepsi facility in Muncie, Indiana, have been on strike since Monday over the company's effort to jack up health insurance premiums from $14 a week to $81 a week. (PepsiCo owns Frito-Lay.) "We shouldn't be paying for it in the first place. This is a multibillion-dollar company," driver Tom Albano, a member of Teamsters Local 142, told The Times of Northwest Indiana. "And the raises the company is offering is not going to cover, or barely cover, what your increase is going to be in your health insurance."
Finally, 250 New Jersey workers who bottle drinks including Tropicana juices and Gatorade (both Pepsi-owned brands) voted to join the United Electrical Workers (UE), in the largest union election victory among blue-collar workers so far this year. The workers, largely Latin American immigrants, fought off an intense anti-union campaign by their employer, Refresco, the world's largest bottling company. According to the UE, "Workers began their union organizing campaign in 2020 after years of abusive treatment by supervisors, low wages, paltry benefits, sexual harassment, an unforgiving attendance system that penalizes workers for getting sick, and constant schedule changes. The organizing campaign was temporarily suspended as dozens of workers fell ill with COVID-19... The company's careless handling of the pandemic last year turned out to be one of the main reasons workers succeeded in winning over a majority for the union this year." Now they're on to the fight for a first contract.
Is forced overtime an issue in your workplace? Write to Labor Notes Assistant Editor Dan DiMaggio at dan@labornotes.org.
'We Want to See Our Families': Frito-Lay Workers Strike Over 84-Hour Weeks, Meager Raises
Frito-Lay workers in Topeka, Kansas, have been on strike since Monday over low pay and forced overtime.
Some workers have been forced to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, for weeks on end due to short staffing. They want to see that change.
“Nobody I know loves Frito-Lay enough that they want to live there,” said Monk Drapeaux-Stewart, a box drop technician, responsible for keeping the plant’s machines supplied with cardboard. “We want to go home and see our families. We want to have our weekends off. We want to work the time that we agreed to work—and hopefully not much more than that.”
‘BOTTOM OF THE LADDER’
The last several contracts have featured lump sum bonuses most years, leaving wage rates stagnant for most classifications. Drapeaux-Stewart said he’s only gotten a 77-cent increase over the last 12 years.
Meanwhile, the Topeka area has attracted several new manufacturing facilities and large warehouses over the past 20 years, taking advantage of its location smack in the center of the country, with access to a number of highway arteries. The Frito-Lay facility, which has been around for 50 years, now competes for workers with a Mars chocolate facility, a Bimbo bread bakery, and Home Depot and Target distribution centers, as well as a Goodyear tire plant that opened in 1945 (workers there are members of the Steelworkers). A Walmart distribution center is slated to open in September.
“Between all those industries, Frito-Lay sits at the bottom of the ladder as far as wage scales,” said Mark Benaka, business manager for Bakery Workers (BCTGM) Local 218, which represents workers at Frito-Lay and Bimbo. Other local facilities have offered significant wage increases in recent weeks, Benaka said, but Frito-Lay continues to offer pennies.
“Fifteen, 20 years ago Frito-Lay had a really good reputation—all you need is a high school diploma and you’ve got this job with good pay and benefits,” said Drapeaux-Stewart, who started working at the facility 16 years ago. “But slowly all of that has been whittled away.”
That’s made it difficult to maintain workers—and led to the mountains of forced overtime.
“Conditions are really just deteriorating as each contract rolls by,” said Cheri Renfro, an operator in the Geographic Enterprise Solutions department, where workers fulfill orders for smaller mom-and-pop shops and gas stations.
Renfro estimated that the company brought in more than 350 employees in the last year—and lost the same amount. “You have to wonder as a company why wouldn’t you question that—say, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’”
CONTRACT VOTED DOWN
Last week, workers voted down the latest contract offer from the company, which included a 2 percent wage increase this year and a 60-hour-a-week cap on the amount of hours a worker can be forced to work. The wages weren’t enough and the overtime cap would have meant more senior workers being forced in on weekends, workers say.
Other issues fueling workers’ anger include safety, a punitive attendance policy, and pressure from inexperienced supervisors competing for promotions. “This storm has been brewing for years,” Renfro wrote in a letter to the Topeka Capital-Journal, in which she outlined examples of the plant’s “toxic work environment,” including management keeping the line going after a worker collapsed and died and refusing bereavement leave for a worker whose father passed away during the Covid lockdown, since there was no funeral.
In late June, Local 218 members voted 353 to 30 to approve a strike.
“In the past people were afraid to go on strike—you keep hoping every contract is gonna be better,” said Renfro. “But as time has gone on the company has proven they are not gonna get better and they are not gonna work with us.”
SNACK SURGE
Frito-Lay is a division of PepsiCo and has been a major contributor to the company’s bottom line, earning $1.2 billion in profits on $4.2 billion in revenue in the first quarter. Last year, the division was responsible for over half of PepsiCo’s operating profits, with profits of $5.3 billion on $18.2 billion in revenue. PepsiCo also owns brands including Mountain Dew, Quaker Oats, Gatorade, Tropicana, and Aquafina.
Topeka is one of the largest of Frito-Lay’s 30 U.S. manufacturing facilities; most are nonunion. The 850 workers there make, package, and ship nearly every type of Frito-Lay snack: Lays potato chips, Tostitos, Cheetos, Sun Chips, Fritos, every flavor of Dorito, and more. Six hundred are members of Local 218 (Kansas is a right-to-work state).
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The plant never slowed down during the pandemic, workers said. Instead, production increased, as people ate at home more and bought more comfort foods like chips. “I’ve learned that when something’s hitting Americans beneath the belt, the two main items that never suffer are snack foods and alcohol,” said Benaka, who retired from the plant in 2017 after 37 years.
Workers were at one point given an extra $20 a day to work during the pandemic, up to $100 a week—but that only lasted a few weeks. “I don’t know if they were afraid we were gonna get used to the higher wage,” said Renfro.
Production at the plant fluctuates seasonally—it’s busier in the summer and around big holidays and the Super Bowl. Workers are used to overtime during those periods. But recently the overtime has become constant. “Now we’ve having overtime when we shouldn’t be,” said Renfro—and a lot more of it.
‘I’M DONE WITH GIVING EVERYTHING TO FRITO-LAY’
Renfro said she worked 73 hours during the week leading up the Fourth of July, and then worked from 3 a.m. until 3 p.m. on the holiday. “I went to sleep—I didn’t even hear the fireworks, I was so tired.”
“I’ve had to miss going to so many holidays because I’m getting forced,” said Renfro. “I’ve had to call my mom and tell her I couldn’t make it. I don’t want to miss those moments anymore. I’m done with giving everything to Frito-Lay—my time, my holidays.”
One of the most hated forms of forced overtime at the plant is being forced to work a “suicide.” That’s when the company makes a worker stay four hours on top of their eight-hour shift, and then forces them in four hours early before their next shift—leaving them only eight hours off.
Drapeaux-Stewart said these shifts have become increasingly common, especially in departments with the worst understaffing, like the warehouse. “It’s crazy that this has become the blue-collar everyday [worker’s] new normal.”
EMPTY SCAB BUSES
The company has set up a parking lot a mile from the plant. It’s running coach buses from the lot every 15 minutes to shuttle in temporary workers and out-of-state scabs.
But strikers suspect that the buses are a ruse. “Most of these buses are completely empty, or have one to three people, not counting the driver,” said Drapeaux-Stewart. “It’s psychological warfare—they’re trying to demoralize and dispirit the men and women of the union in the hopes we’ll come groveling back for whatever crumbs they offer us.”
Benaka said the company also appears to be pulling empty trailers in and out of the facility to intimidate workers. “You’re talking about folks who’ve worked at this facility 30 or 40 years—they know what an empty trailer looks like.”
Strikers are also monitoring the facility’s smokestacks to get a sense of the strike’s impact. “There’s been no smoke, no steam, no nothing, no sign of production at all,” said Drapeaux-Stewart.
“Usually there’s always an odor coming out of Frito-Lay, but it’s been smelling really good outside,” said Renfro.
Local supporters have been donating food and water to the picket line. Some local restaurants have said they will stop serving Pepsi products. A local magazine, 785, has set up a fund to help strikers pay their water bills.
“I’m really amazed at the community support,” said Renfro. “It makes you proud to be a part of this community.”
“It’s scary but it’s exciting,” said Drapeaux-Stewart. “I have so much hope for this strike that we will finally get what we’ve needed—the guarantee of getting to see our families, and earning a living wage to support those families.”
For more on the strike, see the video from the picket line by More Perfect Union.
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