Striketober: American workers take to the picket lines

THE PANDEMIC has been very good for sellers of cornflakes, and very busy for those who make them. With so many people spending so much time at home, cereal consumption has boomed. Kerry Williams, an instrument technician, says this has translated into almost constant overtime shifts at his Kellogg’s plant in Pennsylvania, sometimes as long as 16 hours a day. That would be hard enough. But what makes it that much harder, he says, is seeing Kellogg’s, one of the world’s biggest producers of ready-to-eat cereals, pull in giant profits even as his pay has barely increased. “We feel it’s time that this money trickles down to us, because without the workers on the floor there would be no Kellogg,” he says. Mr Williams and about 1,400 colleagues at Kellogg’s factories round the country, from Tennessee to Michigan, have been on strike for two weeks.