ABOOT TYME
Women executed 300 years ago as witches in Scotland set to receive pardons

Three centuries after repeal of Witchcraft Act thousands tried as witches could get official apologies

Maggie Wall memorial, Dunning, Scotland. A collection of stones, topped with a cross in honour of Wall, who was burned in 1657 as a witch. Photograph: Geoffrey Davies/Alamy

Caroline Davies
Sun 19 Dec 2021

From allegations of cursing the king’s ships, to shape-shifting into animals and birds, or dancing with the devil, a satanic panic in early modern Scotland meant that thousands of women were accused of witchcraft in the 16th-18th centuries with many executed.

Now, three centuries after the Witchcraft Act was repealed, campaigners are on course to win pardons and official apologies for the estimated 3,837 people – 84% of whom were women – tried as witches, of which two-thirds were executed and burned.

After a two-year campaign by the Witches of Scotland group, a member’s bill in the Scottish parliament has secured the support of Nicola Sturgeon’s administration to clear the names of those accused, the Sunday Times reported. The move follows a precedent by the Massachusetts House of Representatives in the US that proclaimed victims of the Salem witch trials innocent in 2001.

Scotland’s indefatigable pursuit of witches between 1563, when the Witchcraft Act was brought in, and 1736, when it was finally repealed, resulted in five “great Scottish witch-hunts” and a series of nationwide trials.


Why the witch-hunt victims of early modern Britain have come back to haunt us

The earliest witch-hunts were sanctioned by James VI of Scotland, later James I of England and Ireland, who believed witches plotted against his Danish bride by summoning up storms to sink his ships. Among those accused in 1590 was Geillis Duncan – whose character featured in the Outlander TV series – and who admitted under torture to meeting the devil to thwart the king’s ships.

Another, Agnes Sampson, had confessed that 200 women witnessed the devil preach at North Berwick on Halloween where the king’s destruction was plotted.

Other well-known cases include Lilias Adie, from Torryburn, Fife, who was accused of casting a spell to cause a neighbour’s hangover; while Issobell Young, executed at Edinburgh Castle in 1629, was said by a stable boy to have shape-shifted into an owl and accused of having a coven.

With witchcraft a capital crime, the convicted were usually strangled to death then burned at the stake so as to leave no body to bury. Many confessed under torture, which included sleep deprivation, the crushing and pulling out of fingernails, and pricking of the skin with needles and bodkins to see if the accused bled.

The Witches of Scotland website notes that signs associated with witchcraft – broomsticks, cauldrons, black cats and black pointed hats – were also associated with “alewives”, the name for women who brewed weak beer to combat poor water quality. The broomstick sign was to let people know beer was on sale, the cauldron to brew it, the cat to keep mice down, and the hat to distinguish them at market. Women were ousted from brewing and replaced by men once it became a profitable industry.

Claire Mitchell QC, who leads the Witches of Scotland campaign, said it was seeking pardons, apologies and a national monument to the mainly female victims of the witch-hunts. “Per capita, during the period between the 16th and 18th century, we [Scotland] executed five times as many people as elsewhere in Europe, the vast majority of them women,” she told the Sunday Times.

“To put that into perspective, in Salem 300 people were accused and 19 people were executed. We absolutely excelled at finding women to burn in Scotland. Those executed weren’t guilty, so they should be acquitted.”

 BC

Lheidli T’enneh chief welcomes regional district decision on natural gas project

Sustainable projects coming to Prince George region next year, Chief Dolleen Logan says

Arthur Williams
a day ago

Lheidli T'enneh Chief Dolleen Logan welcomed a decision on Thursday by the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George board to reject a proposal by West Coast Olefins.Hanna Petersen

The regional district’s decision to reject West Coast Olefin’s proposed natural gas liquids recovery plant in Pineview couldn’t come soon enough for Lheidli T’enneh Chief Dolleen Logan.
On Thursday, the Regional District of Fraser-Fort George board of directors voted against advancing the project to the B.C. Agricultural Land Commission for consideration of the non-farm use of agricultural land. The controversial project was proposed on a 12.9 hectare area, located between McRinny Road and Lund Road in the Pineview/Buckhorn area. The board postponed the decision to Thursday, after a pair of deadlocked votes during the board’s meeting in November.
“It should have been turned down the first time,” Logan said. “Hopefully it won’t pop up somewhere else in Prince George. I have no idea why it would take so long. If it was in our community, it wouldn’t have even gone to the board.”
The proposed project drew opposition from the Lheidli T’enneh and Pineview residents, who submitted numerous letters and a petition with more than 2,000 signatures in opposition to board directors.
Those concerned about the lost jobs and economic benefits the project would have brought shouldn’t worry, Logan said.
“Don’t worry, there are jobs coming. We’ll be making some announcements this summer,” Logan said.
Several companies are looking at projects in the Prince George area which will bring jobs and economic benefits to the entire community, while building a sustainable future, she said. Logan said the Lheidli T’enneh are “open for business” and want to work with companies that will bring benefits to their members and the entire community.
“Come to Lheidli T’enneh, our door is always open,” Logan said. “(But) I haven’t heard from (West Coast Olefins CEO) Ken James since he walked out that door and said, ‘I don’t need you people.’”
Logan said, going forward, she would like to see submissions for non-farm use in the Agricultural Land Reserve to come to the Lheidli T’enneh for approval first, before going on to the regional district board.
“It’s like we don’t have a voice. It goes the ALR, the Oil and Gas (Commission)…  You have to meet a lot of people, just to get you word across, and then you don’t have any say,” she said. “It’s been very stressful. This has been going on since 2019.”
In the meantime, the Lheidli T’enneh will continue to work with the regional district and City of Prince George on project, she said. This proposal strained the relationship between the Lheidli T’enneh and the city, she said, but in any relationship you won’t always agree all the time.
According to information released by West Coast Olefins, the proposed project would have recovered natural gas liquids - including propane, butane and natural gas condensates - from Enbridge’s Westcoast Energy Pipeline and returned cleaner-burning “lean natural gas” to the pipeline. A new pipeline would transport the natural gas liquids to a proposed separation plant in the Danson Industrial Park in Prince George to be separated and sold.
West Coast Olefins CEO Ken James had not replied to a request for comment as of Friday morning.
 

Nunavut's former deputy chief public health officer spills details on Iqaluit's water crisis

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‘I don't blame the public for not having full confidence in the tap water,’ says Dr. Anne Huang

CBC News · Posted: Dec 18, 2021 

Iqaluit residents collect water from the Sylvia Grinnell River in Nunavut on Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2021, after the city issued a do not consume order for its tap water. A former Nunavut health official says residents deserve to know how those in charge handled the recent water crisis. (Emma Tranter/The Canadian Press)

Nunavut's former deputy chief public health officer says she flagged concerns to the City of Iqaluit about whether tests at the city's water facilities were done properly in early October when strange, fuel-like smells were coming from the taps.

In an interview with CBC News, Dr. Anne Huang, who is no longer in the role, said that "It definitely was challenging to receive information that first week." Initially, she said the city "had no idea who I was."

In the days that followed, her fears were realized when she found that initial water samples sent to an Ottawa lab had not been collected correctly. 

"I was worried because I didn't know how much that could impact the findings," Huang said from Regina.

• Iqaluit residents can drink tap water again, Nunavut's health department says

• City of Iqaluit says historical fuel spill likely source of drinking water contamination

She began her role as deputy chief public health officer in April. Working with the territory's chief public health officer on COVID-19, she was also responsible for environmental health. Her six-month contract with the territory wrapped up in late October.

Huang said she also asked if the city tested specifically for hydrocarbon contamination as she said she and her colleagues could detect a fuel smell from their taps, even as social media posts began to pop up saying the same thing. She said she wanted to rule out that the smell wasn't caused by petroleum hydrocarbons entering the drinking water system. 

By Oct. 12, the city of 8,000 people was under a do not consume order that lasted nearly two months. The city would eventually point to an underground fuel spill as the potential cause of the contamination.

Residents still wary of tap water

The do not consume order has since been lifted, but some residents are still wary of drinking the water.

Dr. Anne Huang, Nunavut’s former deputy chief public health officer, says she doesn't blame residents who still don't trust the city's water, even after the order was lifted. (Submitted by Dr. Anne Huang)

"I am not surprised and I don't blame the public for not having full confidence in the tap water despite the do not consume water having been lifted, because of some of the gaps in communications, I think, during the water crisis," Huang said. 

In an email statement to CBC News, City of Iqaluit spokesperson Aleksey Cameron wrote that testing for petroleum hydrocarbons is not part of the federal or territorial testing requirements, and therefore was not part of the city's water testing regime.

As a result, she said, the city did not have the correct bottles to test for hydrocarbon contamination.

"The lab was called and they advised staff to use the bottles on hand to rush the samples and they would send the correct bottles," Cameron wrote.

"The time it takes to send samples to a southern lab and receive results is usually five days," she wrote.

"This was one of the challenges that was faced during the early stages of the investigation."

Huang urged caution in communicating initial results

Huang said she told both the city and Nunavut's health department to emphasize the initial test results were preliminary, rather than more conclusive.

On Oct. 10 the City of Iqaluit issued a release asking residents to report any odours from their taps and said that no water quality advisory was being issued at that time. "Drinking water testing to date [is] satisfactory."

Two days later, Nunavut's health department issued the do not consume order.

"Previous test results found that the risk of contamination at the time was low and that the water was safe to drink," the order read. 

• Fuel smell drove health official out of Iqaluit water treatment plant 4 days before public was notified

• Fuel smell in Iqaluit water treatment plant on Oct. 8 was from repair work, officials say

Despite the initial communication challenges, Huang said there was a good information flow from the city in the days that followed. 

But she said the public deserves to know how those in charge handled the situation.

She also said it's important to keep in mind that the city used to be home to an old American air force base and, as a result, is at a higher risk of future fuel contamination.

"I do think a full transparency will be critical to regain the confidence of the public in this critical infrastructure," she said.

Hundreds of residents line up to collect bottled water on Oct. 15, just a few days into the crisis that would last nearly two months. (Casey Lessard/Reuters)

Huang also suggested the city should make data from its new water monitors publicly available in real-time to help alleviate concerns about drinking water quality — something the city has promised to do on a weekly basis.

"I think more clear and frequent communication would have been helpful and will be helpful going forward. That's how trust is built," Huang said.

• Hazardous material from 1960s finally getting cleaned up near Sylvia Grinnell park in Iqaluit

The installation of a second monitoring station to monitor raw water from Lake Geraldine, the lake the city draws its drinking water from, is also expected to be completed by the end of the week, according to the city's spokesperson.

In a Tuesday release, the city also said that since Oct. 23, all sampling undertaken for petroleum hydrocarbons have shown the water is safe to drink. Residents who still experience any unusual odours or smells can contact the city's water hotline at 867-979-5603.

"Residents may still notice occasional odours in their tap water as a result of trapped vapours in the system. These will dissipate over time," the release said.

Written by John Van Dusen with files from Cindy Alorut, Meagan Deuling

 

Earth’s Most Important Biochemical Reaction: Photosynthesis Breakthrough for Increasing CO2 Uptake in Plants

By UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN DECEMBER 18, 2021

Plant cells Plant cells inside a leaf seen through a microscope.

A group of proteins in plant cells plays a vastly more important role in regulation of photosynthesis than once thought, according to new research at the University of Copenhagen. The research is an important step towards fully understanding photosynthesis regulation and increasing CO2 uptake in plants to benefit the climate.

Photosynthesis Facts

• Photosynthesis is one of the most important biological processes on Earth, as it produces most of the oxygen in our atmosphere, upon which nearly all life depends.
• Photosynthesis takes place in green plants, algae and some bacteria, when solar energy converts carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and organic matter in the form of glucose.
• Glucose is then converted into nutrients and used by the plants themselves and animals
  Source: Den Store Danske

Imagine being able to grow plants that could absorb even more CO2 from Earth’s atmosphere and thereby help solve the world’s climate problems. Humans have selected, bred and optimized plants to increase food production and ensure our survival for thousands of years.

But the most important and fundamental function of life on Earth – photosynthesis – has not been relevant with regards to plant selection or breeding until now, an age when greenhouse gas emissions from human activities threaten our planet. With new technologies at hand, scientists around the world are now working to understand the internal processes of plants that drive photosynthesis.

In a new study published in the scientific journal PNAS, researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences have just discovered that a group of proteins in plant leaf cells, called CURT1, plays a much more important role in photosynthesis than once thought. 

“We have discovered that CURT1 proteins control a plant’s development of green leaves already from the seed stage. Thus, the proteins have a major influence on how effectively photosynthesis is established,” explains Associate Professor Mathias Pribil, the study’s lead author.

Proteins that kickstart photosynthesis

CURT1 Protein Facts

• URT1 is a protein group which coordinates structural processes of the internal chloroplast membrane that makes photosynthesis function more efficiently.
• It was once thought that this protein group was only present in plants with mature leaves, and that the protein played a less important role. Scientists now know that the protein group is central to managing photosynthesis.
• The protein group also helps plant leaves increase or decrease their light-harvesting ability depending upon sunlight strength.
• Plants with a misbalanced CURT1 protein content – whether too many or too few – had a higher mortality rate and generally poorer growth.

CURT1 proteins were previously believed to play a more modest role and only be present in fully-developed leaves. But using state-of-the-art Imaging techniques (photography and computer equipment), the researchers zoomed 30,000x in on the growth of a series of experimental thale cress (Arabidopsis) plants. This allowed them to study the plants at a molecular level. The researchers could see that CURT1 proteins were present from the earliest stages of their plants’ lives.

“Emerging from the soil is a critical moment for the plant, as it is struck by sunlight and rapidly needs to get photosynthesis going to survive. Here we can see that CURT1 proteins coordinate processes that set photosynthesis in motion and allow the plant to survive, something we didn’t know before,” explains Mathias Pribil.

Photosynthesis takes place in chloroplasts, 0.005 mm long elliptical bodies in plant cells that are a kind of organ within the cells of a plant leaf. Within each chloroplast, a membrane harbours proteins and the other functions that make photosynthesis possible.

“CURT1 proteins control the shape of this membrane, making it easier for other proteins in a plant cell to move around and perform important tasks surrounding photosynthesis, depending on how the environment around the plant changes. This could be to repair light harvesting protein complexes when the sunlight is intense or to turn up a chloroplast’s ability to harvest light energy when sunlight is weak,” explains Pribil.

Plants with a misbalanced CURT1 protein content – whether too many or too few – had a higher mortality rate and generally poorer growth.

Improved CO2 uptake in the future

The new finding provides deeper insight into Earth’s most important biochemical reaction. Indeed, without plants, neither animals nor humans would exist on our planet. Thus far, the result only applies to the thale cress plant, but Pribil would be “very surprised” if the importance of CURT1 proteins for photosynthesis didn’t extend to other plants as well.

“This is an important step on the way to understanding all of the components that control photosynthesis. The question is whether we can use this new knowledge to improve the CURT1 protein complex in plants in general, so as to optimize photosynthesis,” says Mathias Pribil, who adds:

“Much of our research revolves around making photosynthesis more efficient so that plants can absorb more CO2. Just as we have selected and bred the best crops throughout the history of agriculture, it is now about helping nature become the best possible CO2 absorber,” says Mathias Pribil.

Reference: “Curvature thylakoid 1 proteins modulate prolamellar body morphology and promote organized thylakoid biogenesis in Arabidopsis thaliana” by Omar Sandoval-Ibáñez, Anurag Sharma, Michal Bykowski, Guillem Borràs-Gas, James B. Y. H. Behrendorff, Silas Mellor, Klaus Qvortrup, Julian C. Verdonk, Ralph Bock, Lucja Kowalewska and Mathias Pribil, 19 October 2021, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2113934118

New Research Shows Plants Are Photosynthesizing More in Response to More CO2 in the Atmosphere

By LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY DECEMBER 17, 2021

A new study finds that plants are photosynthesizing more in response to more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but nowhere near enough to remove all emissions.

Plants Buy Us Time to Slow Climate Change – But Not Enough to Stop It

New research from Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley shows that plants are photosynthesizing more in response to more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Because plants take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into food, forests and other similar ecosystems are considered to be some of the planet’s most important carbon sinks. In fact, the United States and many other countries that participated in last month’s UN Climate Change Conference have made nature-based solutions a critical feature of their carbon dioxide mitigation framework under the Paris Agreement.

As human activities cause more carbon dioxide to be emitted into the atmosphere, scientists have debated whether plants are responding by photosynthesizing more and sucking up even more carbon dioxide than they already do – and if so, is it a little or a lot more. Now an international team of researchers led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and UC Berkeley have used a novel methodology combining remote sensing, machine learning, and terrestrial biosphere models to find that plants are indeed photosynthesizing more, to the tune of 12% higher global photosynthesis from 1982 to 2020. In that same time period, global carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere grew about 17%, from 360 parts per million (ppm) to 420 ppm.

The 12% increase in photosynthesis translates to 14 petagrams of additional carbon taken out of the atmosphere by plants each year, roughly the equivalent of the carbon emitted worldwide from burning fossil fuels in 2020 alone. Not all of the carbon taken out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis is stored in ecosystems, as much is later released back to the atmosphere through respiration, but the study reports a direct link between the increased photosynthesis and increased global carbon storage. The study was published in Nature.

“This is a very large increase in photosynthesis, but it’s nowhere close to removing the amount of carbon dioxide we’re putting into the atmosphere,” said Berkeley Lab scientist Trevor Keenan, lead author of the study. “It’s not stopping climate change by any means, but it is helping us slow it down.”

Measuring photosynthesis

Because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere decades longer than other greenhouse gases driving global warming, efforts to reduce it are critical to mitigating climate change. Plants, through photosynthesis, and soils sequester roughly a third of carbon dioxide emissions released into the atmosphere each decade from the burning of fossil fuels.

During photosynthesis, plants open tiny pores on their leaf surfaces to suck carbon dioxide from the air and produce their own food. To measure this photosynthetic activity, scientists can put a leaf in a closed chamber and quantify the dropping carbon dioxide levels in the air inside. But it’s far more difficult to measure how much carbon dioxide an entire forest takes up.

Through initiatives such as AmeriFlux, a network of measurement sites coordinated by the Department of Energy’s AmeriFlux Management Project at Berkeley Lab, scientists from across the world have built over 500 micrometeorological towers in forests and other ecosystems to measure the exchange of greenhouse gases between the atmosphere and the vegetation and soil. While these flux towers can help estimate photosynthesis rates, they’re expensive and thus limited in their geographic coverage, and few have been deployed long-term.

This explains why scientists rely on satellite images to map how much of the Earth is green and thus covered by plants, which allows them to infer global photosynthetic activity. But with rising carbon dioxide emissions, those estimates based solely on greenness become problematic.

Bringing history in the picture

Satellite images can capture the extra green to account for additional leaves plants put out due to accelerated growth. But they often don’t account for each leaf’s increased efficiency to photosynthesize. Also, this efficiency doesn’t increase at the same rate at which carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere.

Previous efforts to estimate how photosynthesis rates respond to increased carbon dioxide concentrations found widely varying results, from little to no effects on the low end, to very large effects on the high end.

“That magnitude is really important to understand,” said Keenan, who is also an assistant professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. “If the increase [in photosynthesis] is small, then we may not have the carbon sink we expect.”

So Keenan and his team of researchers took a new approach: they looked back at nearly three decades of carbon sink estimates made by the Global Carbon Project. They compared these with predictions from satellite images of the Earth taken between 1982 and 2012 and models using carbon exchange between the atmosphere and land to make carbon sink estimates.

“Our estimate of a 12% increase comes right in the middle of the other estimates,” he said. “And in the process of generating our estimate, it allowed us to re-examine the other estimates and understand why they were overly large or small. That gave us confidence in our results.”

While this study highlights the importance of protecting ecosystems that are currently helping slow down the rate of climate change, Keenan notes that it’s unclear how long forests will continue to perform this service.

“We don’t know what the future will hold as far as how plants will continue to respond to increasing carbon dioxide,” he said. “We expect it will saturate at some point, but we don’t know when or to what degree. At that point land sinks will have a much lower capacity to offset our emissions. And land sinks are currently the only nature-based solution that we have in our toolkit to combat climate change.”

Reference: “A constraint on historic growth in global photosynthesis due to increasing CO₂” by T. F. Keenan, X. Luo, M. G. De Kauwe, B. E. Medlyn, I. C. Prentice, B. D. Stocker, N. G. Smith, C. Terrer, H. Wang, Y. Zhang and S. Zhou, 8 December 2021, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-04096-9

The study was supported in part by NASA and the DOE Office of Science. Among the co-authors were Berkeley Lab postdoctoral fellows Nicholas Smith, Yao Zhang, Xiangzhong Luo, and Sha Zhou, all now at other institutions.

Trees Are Biggest Methane “Vents” in Wetland Areas – Significant Emissions Even When They’re Dry

By UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM DECEMBER 18, 2021

Most of the methane gas emitted from Amazon wetlands regions is vented into the atmosphere via tree root systems – with significant emissions occurring even when the ground is not flooded, say researchers at the University of Birmingham.

In a study published in the Royal Society journal, Philosophical Transactions A, the researchers have found evidence that far more methane is emitted by trees growing on floodplains in the Amazon basin than by soil or surface water and this occurs in both wet and dry conditions.

Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas and much of our atmospheric methane comes from wetlands. A great deal of research is being carried on into exactly how much methane is emitted via this route, but models typically assume that the gas is only produced when the ground is completely flooded and underwater.

In wetland areas where there are no trees, methane would typically be consumed by the soil on its way to the surface, but in forested wetland areas, the researchers say the tree roots could be acting as a transport system for the gas, up to the surface where it vents into the atmosphere from the tree trunks.

Methane is able to escape via this route even when it is produced in soil and water that is several meters below ground level.

This would mean that existing models could be significantly underestimating the likely extent of methane emissions in wetland areas such as the Amazon basin.

To test the theory, the team carried out measurements across three plots on the floodplains of three major rivers in the central Amazon basin. The same trees were monitored at each plot at four time points over the year to capture their response changing water levels associated with the annual flood. Methane emissions were measured using a portable greenhouse gas analyzer and then calculations were done to scale the findings up across the Amazon basin.

Overall, the team estimate that nearly half of global tropical wetland methane emissions are funneled out by trees, with the unexpected result that trees are also important for emissions at times when the floodplain water table sits below the surface of the soil.

Lead author, Professor Vincent Gauci, in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham (and the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research), says: “Our results show that current global emissions estimates are missing a crucial piece of the picture. We now need to develop models and methods that take into account the significant role played by trees in wetland methane emission.”

Reference: “Non-flooded riparian Amazon trees are a regionally significant methane source” by Vincent Gauci, Viviane Figueiredo, Nicola Gedney, Sunitha Rao Pangala, Tainá Stauffer, Graham P. Weedon and Alex Enrich-Prast, 6 December 2021, Philosophical Transactions A.
DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2020.0446

The team was led by the University of Birmingham and included researchers from the University Federal of Rio de Janeiro, the Met Office Hadley Centre, Lancaster University, and Linköping University. It was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (part of UK Research and Innovation), along with the Newton Fund, the Royal Society and Brazilian funding agencies CNPq, CAPES and FAPERJ.

Snap, crackle, stop: Kellogg’s should come to the table and deal, not terminate striking workers

By DAILY NEWS EDITORIAL BOARD
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |
DEC 18, 2021 

For workers around the country, there’s a certain pride that often comes from laboring on the same factory floor as one’s parents and even grandparents, making the same goods in the same way, belonging to the same union. That’s been the case for employees of the multinational food company Kellogg’s, which has been headquartered in Battle Creek, Mich., since its founding more than a hundred years ago.

Yet like workers at many iconic American firms, Kellogg’s employees say they have seen their quality of life and working conditions markedly decline compared to their forebears doing the same work in years past, part of a general trend of flat wages and the erosion of work-life balance. Some were reportedly working averages of around 80 hours a week, almost year-round, under pressure of being fired. The company recently pushed through a tiered system for workers, with newer hires receiving significantly reduced pay and benefits.


Kirk Peters waves to passing cars as they honk in support of Kellogg's workers on strike along I Street in Omaha, Neb. on Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2021.

 (LILY SMITH/THE WORLD-HERALD/AP)

About 1,400 workers affiliated with the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union walked off the job at four plants in Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania and Tennessee in early October. Earlier this month, they rejected a new contract, extending the strike. While it would have included a 3% raise, it contained poison pills like strictly limiting the percentage of workers who could move from the lower tier to the higher tier in a given year.

In the wake of that loss, Kellogg’s put in place the extreme strategy of attempting to permanently replace its striking workforce. It’s bad enough to bring in workers to temporarily circumvent a labor action, but here the company is effectively trying to terminate workers en masse who have toiled throughout the pandemic to keep producing the packaged foods that people around the country relied on, while the pandemic remains ongoing. And just in time for Christmas. Even conservative Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts has urged the company to come back to the negotiating table. Kellogg’s should reverse course immediately. These workers deserve respect, not pink slips.

Leaked email exposes union-management conspiracy to defeat Kellogg’s strike as Sanders attempts to deflect anger towards Mexico

James Martin, Tom Hall
WSWS.ORG

A leaked management email has revealed the existence of a conspiracy between the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union and Kellogg’s management to force an end to the two-and-a-half-month strike by 1,400 US cereal workers. On Thursday, Kellogg’s and the union announced a new tentative agreement which is almost identical to the one which workers rejected two weeks ago, and which allows for the unlimited expansion of the company’s use of lower-paid second tier “transitional” workers. A snap vote has been called for this Sunday.

Leaked Kellogg’s management email

The email, first reported by the pseudo-left More Perfect Union, was apparently sent to several members of plant management. It declares, “In short, overall bucket of money (cost) stays the same. Just shifts money from one bucket to another.” It adds with malicious satisfaction, “No gain overall for them [Kellogg’s workers] with 3 more weeks of strike and no income. No ratification bonus.

“We are confident this will pass,” the emails add because “most of the union’s negotiating committee is for this and plans to recommend it. (emphasis added). I know everyone is tired and tense in the plant, please try to focus on what we need to do. Please try to keep negotiations talk to a minimum in the plant around the workers.”

While More Perfect Union’s reporting ignored the key reference to the union, the email exposes BCTGM as complicit in management’s attempt to break the strike, and that management is relying upon the union to “pass” a contract which workers already rejected. Moreover, the instructions to fellow managers to keep radio silence around workers on the contract is a clear signal that they are relying principally on the union to browbeat opposition on their own behalf.

Workers should respond by rejecting the entire fraudulent framework of this so-called “collective bargaining,” which is exposed as, in reality, a union-management conspiracy to break their courageous struggle. The entire bargaining committee should be kicked out, and a new bargaining committee elected consisting of the most trusted rank-and-file workers from the shop floor.

Last week, the World Socialist Web Site warned that the silence from the BCTGM in response to management’s threat to fire workers en masse following the last contract vote amounted to tacit consent, and that the union was working with management to overcome workers’ resistance through a combination of threats and intimidation. This has now been proven beyond a doubt, first by the “new” tentative agreement itself, and now by the leaked email.

In the days leading up to the election, the BCTGM is engaged in a massive campaign of censorship. Only hours after the TA was announced, it archived several local Facebook groups with thousands of members in order to prevent workers from speaking to each other and building up opposition to the contract. In this, they are taking a page out of the playbook of the United Auto Workers, which used similar methods this fall to force through a re-vote of a contract which workers had also rejected in order to end a month-long strike at John Deere.

Despite these moves, workers remain defiant. “I’m still a NO vote,” said one veteran worker. “Kellogg’s is getting desperate. The big shots came through Battle Creek this morning. I don’t think they liked what they saw. They’re manipulating stock prices, acting like we’ve given up. I hope the members are smarter than the leadership on this BS agreement.

“This contract would make me lots of money,” he added, “and get me the four years I need to retire, but I don’t care about that right now. I’m sick of seeing the young people getting screwed. This is still not good for them. I’m voting NO. If it goes down, [Kellogg’s] will bring another before this quarterly report comes out.”

Another striking Kellogg’s worker said, “This contract is the same as the last one, just a few words changed around. If we vote it in now, this whole strike will have been for nothing. I hope we vote NO!”

The worker denounced the BCTGM’s losing strategy. “It’s like the Detroit Lions. How many years have they played ‘not-to-lose’ and they end up losing every time. You can only win if you play to win.”

“We’ve seen this type of stuff before,” he said. “In the 2015 contract, when they started the transitional lower tier, a lot of people were talking about the shady deals that BCTGM had taken.”

But in spite of determination of the workers, the strike is in danger as long as conduct is left in the hands of the union bureaucracy. Now more than ever, workers must move to take struggle into their own hands by forming a rank-and-file strike committee to oppose betrayals of union, appeal for broadest possible support and develop a strategy for victory.

Bernie Sanders stumps for the union, promotes “America First” nationalism at Battle Creek rally

Earlier in the day, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders traveled to Battle Creek, Michigan in an effort to drum up support for the union and divert workers’ anger. The event, which lasted less than thirty minutes and was largely comprised of the same demagogic phrases which Sanders has employed for years, had an unreal character to it, presenting the BCTGM officialdom as the vanguard of the fight against Kellogg’s even as they are deep in a campaign to force through a sellout contract. The very existence of the tentative agreement went almost entirely unmentioned except for a brief reference to it by Local 3G President Trevor Bidelman, who made certain muted criticisms of the deal, suggesting he expects the contract will be voted down.

Sanders attempted to present the central issue of the strike as a disloyal US-based company threatening to ship American jobs to Mexico. At the climax of his speech, he declared,“If you love America, you love the workers. And if you love American workers, you don’t ship their jobs to desperate people in Mexico and pay them 90 cents an hour.”

This reactionary “America First” nationalism is no different in principle from that of Donald Trump and extreme right. In fact, Breitbart, whose former editor Steve Bannon is a key Trump ally, is attempting to capitalize upon the BCTGM's own anti-Mexican campaign to bolster the credibility of its own fascistic politics.

This anti-Mexican demagogy serves only to isolate the strike from its most powerful reservoir of support, the international working class. For all of his demagogy against the “billionaire class,” Sanders’ presentation of “disloyal” Kellogg’s management leaves open the possibility of “loyal” American exploiters whose interests are united with the workers. Indeed, at the end of his speech, Sanders called on the crowd to appeal to the corporate oligarchy itself to “create an economy that works for all of us, and not just the few.” This has particularly dangerous implications as US capitalism is preparing for military conflict against nuclear-armed Russia and China in a desperate attempt to maintain its world supremacy.

In fact, “America First” nationalism has been a longstanding and central element in Sanders’ politics. In 2015, he denounced open borders as a “Koch Brothers” proposal which would “make everyone in America poorer.” When he returned to this theme in 2019, he earned praise from neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer, who organized the fascist riot in Charlottesville, Virginia. Sanders is not a Nazi, buts his promotion of anti-Mexican nationalism serves only to disarm the working class and lend political legitimacy to the far right.

No matter how it is presented, the promotion of the possibility of the identity of interests between the corporations and the workers, within the framework of the national state, can only serve to bind workers hand and foot to their “own” native exploiters. This is why, in the midst of a demagogic speech attacking Kellogg’s, Sanders also praised the “sacrifice” made by Kellogg’s workers in laboring for weeks at a time without a single day off as having helped “save America during the pandemic.” This is a lie which has been promoted by the food production industry itself to justify its enforcement of brutal overtime and its refusal to shut down production during the pandemic.

In fact, independent studies have shown that the American food supply was never under any danger even in the early stages of the pandemic. However, by keeping workers on the job as long as possible, Kellogg’s and other major food companies have seen their profits soar, even as tens of thousands of food workers have been infected and hundreds have died.

In contrast to the economic nationalism of Sanders, many Kellogg’s workers see workers in other countries as their natural allies. As one worker noted, “The support we have been receiving from all over the country, all over the world—it is really moving. We are being followed by a lot of people, and I don’t know what will happen if we win or if we lose, but it is very powerful to see Palestinian workers in Israel holding up a banner in support of our strike.”

Kellogg’s workers have enormous support in the US and internationally. But to win their struggle, they must take it out of the hands of the BCTGM and fight to build independent rank-and-file committees that can develop a strategy to win the strike. Their strike is part of a growing rebellion of workers all across the world against pandemic conditions and decades of capitalist exploitation.

“Something big has got to happen,” the Kellogg’s worker concluded. “And it’s coming: a revolution.”