Cold weather and high winds aren’t stopping members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 175 from expressing their dissatisfaction with the latest contract offer by employer Dr. Oetker. The German-based food processing company has had a frozen pizza plant off of Bradley Avenue for around nine years, and the union workers at the location began a strike Wednesday morning after negotiations fell through on a new contract.
According to UFCW Local 175 spokesperson Fred Teeple, the contract put forward simply didn’t meet the needs of workers: “there’s some health and safety concerns and stuff like that, but ultimately, the membership and the union believes that the wage increases weren’t sufficient to ratify the document.”
The financial aspect is one that many of the union workers striking echoed, discussing hourly wages seen in other countries and cities. “You see McDonalds in the United States advertising a starting wage of 21 dollars, and that’s in US money,” one of the striking workers explains while walking along the road leading up to the plant.
The length of the strike remains unknown, though Teeple expresses hope that the union action will bring both parties back to the negotiating table: “You can never tell in these situations. Hopefully, it’s shorter in length and we get these members back to work for the company with a significant wage increase.”
The pizza plant unionized in 2018, with their first contract signed in 2019 and expired at the end of 2021. While talks for a new deal have been in the works for months, no further negotiations have been scheduled.
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