“The company’s made a fortune in recent years,” says Kevin Bradshaw, the vice president of the local at Kellogg’s plant in Memphis, “and they’re fighting to take away our necessities and all that the union has won.”
In effect, by prolonging and even proposing to worsen the two-tier system, some companies, with Kellogg at the forefront, are demanding that workers continue to labor under the conditions pressed upon them during the Great Recession, even as corporations have long since put those recession conditions in the rearview mirror and have made record profits and reaped the rewards of rising share prices for years. In a time of unprecedentedly widespread concern and anger over economic inequality, the two-tier system only makes that inequality even more severe.