As Nabisco Ships 600 Jobs Out of Chicago to Mexico, Maybe It’s Time To Give Up Oreos [View all]

[RiverLover]

As Nabisco Ships 600 Jobs Out of Chicago to Mexico, Maybe It’s Time To Give Up Oreos
BY Marilyn Katz
In These Times
7/31/15



Is giving up Oreos a foolish and futile gesture? Of course, I know that other Chicago-born companies have made similar moves. I, like many Chicagoans felt a loss when Frango Mints were no longer hand made on the top floor of Marshall Field’s—and felt worse when Marshall Field’s ceased to exist at all. I was saddened when Klaus Suchard chose to take Brach candy production from Chicago, and in so doing ended Chicago’s title as candy capital of the world. I even regretted the loss of the city’s steel mills and stockyards, despite the cleaner air that their exodus brought.

But this seems different. Perhaps it was reading the May stories of Rosenfeld’s report to shareholders in which she touted the upward trajectory of the company’s profits through cutting back on procurement and customer service and her plans to make it even more profitable by a restructuring that would realize a gain of $1.5 billion for stockholders.

It might have been reading the very next day that Rosenfeld was now being feted as the first woman to join the “20 Club,” those Illinois CEOS who are paid more than $20 million a year. Rosenfeld was paid $21 million in 2014 alone.

Or perhaps, in a city beset by financial woes, it was contemplating the impact of 600 more unemployed people, who had, only weeks ago, represented a well-paid diverse workforce of Latinos, African Americans and whites whose skills and union had earned them a sustainable salary of as much as $26 an hour.

Or perhaps, after another weekend of shootings and deaths, it was thinking about the young people who we tell that in staying in school, staying out of trouble and following the rules there is a clear path to opportunity in our city—at the moment that 600 such opportunities in the city evaporated....

...There’s nothing new or even unusual about Irene Rosenfeld and the story of Nabisco and its Oreo cookies. But perhaps its very pervasiveness in our lives is just the thing to wake up the nation to the downward spiral we find ourselves in—a veritable race to the bottom, with a thin layer of the very rich, a hollowing out of the middle, and a growing underclass—relegated to selling merchandize produced for pennies on the dollar in other countries.

A friend to whom I spoke about Mondelez counseled that to mention Rosenfeld’s salary is a distraction. But it seems somehow wrong that we praise and reward a CEO for eliminating American jobs or for being paid an amount in one year that would take any worker in her plant 500 years to earn.

Come to think of it, if Rosenfeld could learn to live on $2 million a year, that $19 million could be used to save 600 jobs, and the company’s bottom line would still be the same....

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18259/oreos-union-busting