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Workers employed by cereal manufacturing giant Kellogg’s have been on strike for the past two months in a fight for reliable employment, wage increases, and benefits. Earlier this month, Kellogg’s and its workers were about to come to an agreement that would provide veteran employees with 5-year contracts and 3% raises. Plans fell through when Kellogg’s refused to budge on its two-tier employment system that would keep transitional employees from eventually becoming permanent workers.
The disruption has caused production issues in Kellogg’s cereal plants as the company struggles to meet demand without its 1,400 workers who are all on strike.
“We are disappointed that the tentative agreement was not ratified by employees,” Kris Bahner, a Kellogg’s spokesperson told CNN. “We have made every effort to reach a fair agreement…The union created unrealistic expectations for our employees.”
Workers, however, claim they only want to be given better working conditions, pay, and benefits.
“For any time that someone would feel sick or whatever, they want you to use your vacation days as opposed to having sick days. Again, working in excess of 120 days in a row,” Todd Manusos, who has been working at Kellogg’s for 24 years, told More Perfect Union.
“Very often, we don’t even know we have to work 16 hours [shifts] until 10 minutes before its time to go home.” Heather Greene, an employee of 15 years, explained.
The strike followed after Kellogg’s reported record sales in Q1 and Q2 2021, increased the salary of its CEO by 20%, and insisted that benefits, wages, and insurance for its workers were “unsustainable” for the company.
When Kellogg’s announced that it would be hiring workers to replace the ones they have on strike, it seemed that the fight was over for workers at the picket line. That is until Kellogg’s workers found an ally online or, to be more precise, 1.3 million of them.
Four days ago, Reddit user u/JaffaRambo posted a chart of brands manufactured by Kellogg’s to Reddit’s r/Antiwork sub. The subreddit, which is often ridiculed as a group of “lazy, entitled kids who want to live on welfare,” is a hub of discontent with existing labor practices and workplace conditions.
The community advertises itself as a “subreddit for those who want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas, and want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.”
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The post garnered over 18,200 upvotes and over a thousand comments offering solidarity, knock-off recipes of Kellogg’s snacks, and jokes about the nutritional quality of Kellogg’s products.
Two days later, u/BloominFunions caught wind of Kellogg’s plan to recruit scabs online. According to the user, “Kellogg’s just announced that they will hire 1400 permanent replacement scabs to break the strike. And they are accepting applications online!”
The user sarcastically told r/Antiwork members that they could apply to their dream factory job in Omaha, Battle Creek, Lancaster, and Memphis and left a list of zipcodes for each area.
What followed were replies from thousands of users saying they’ll apply with some going as far as to say they’ll show up to the first day of work and join the workers on strike. Others took it further with a proposal to write a script that would fill out applications and flood Kellogg’s with enough applications to overwhelm their website.
IT professionals banded together with members of r/Antiwork and organized a DDOS attack on Kellogg’s website. One user, u/ridik_ulass, claimed to work in cybersecurity and told users to “Don’t just flood them, drown them. Don’t make it a humanly difficult task to overcome, make it a mechanically impossible one.”
Other users pitched in to figure out how to launch the attack to do more damage to Kellogg’s while leaving them with time to relax.
Since the time of posting, three different supporters of the r/Antiwork movement against Kellogs have publicly released their code and guide on how to clog Kellogg’s recruitment process.
One user by the name of u/HeyHoLetsGo615 created a “Kellogg Time Waster 3000” that filled in thousands of bogus applications with random data while another user called u/GGCrono gave members a quick guide on how to write a cover letter that can get through filter bots if they want to manually pitch in.
But perhaps the most popular of r/Antiwork’s supporters is TikTokker Sean Black who goes by the username @black_madness21. Black posted a video yesterday where he showed TikTok users what his script could do. The script automatically answered applications in seconds and provided only relevant information to ensure it couldn’t be filtered out.
“In case you’re wondering, yes, all the data is relevant data.” Black said, “Zip codes match, cities match, it all matches up perfectly. I’m still working on the rest of the fields but it’s not bad for a day’s work, I’d say.”
Within that same day, u/eesara posted a screenshot showing that Kellogg’s application pages are down.
Users have also been petitioning school boards to remove Kellogg’s products from school cafeterias.
But the r/Antiwork community isn’t done yet. Since the start of the plan to take down Kellogg’s website, they’ve acknowledged the possibility that Kellogg’s would use hiring agencies to find scabs for them.
Yesterday, u/7r38ej posted a list of local staffing agencies linked to Kellogg’s. These staffing agencies are next on r/Antiwork’s list of businesses to launch a cyberattack on. R/Antiwork’s current goal appears to be to stop the staffing agencies in areas where Kellogg’s is hiring from meeting labor demand from their clients, forcing them to choose between their contract with Kellogg’s and their other clients.
Users living near Kellogg’s factories reported seeing dumpsters filled to the brim with products that did not pass quality control, a sign that points to current production line workers being unable to create up to par products.
However, given the number of people who expressed wanting to go undercover as a scab and sabotage Kellogg’s from the inside, some users speculate that some of the wasted products were made by r/Antiwork members.
President Joe Biden recently released a statement condemning Kellogg’s plans to replace workers on strike that said it was an “existential attack on the union and its members’ jobs and livelihoods.”
Meanwhile, Kellogg’s application website has been restored, but r/Antiwork members have committed to a virtual arms race to keep the website down. User u/DaniTheCyberpunkGirl posted a video showing her update of the original application bot by Sean Black. The new r/Antiwork application bot can read captcha, enabling it to bypass Kellogg’s anti-bot security measures.
