Grace Schneider

The Courier-Journal

Employees at a Louisville factory that churns out millions of Girl Scout cookies each year say they're forced to work six and seven days a week and face firing if they refuse mandatory weekend shifts and overtime.

Some of them, who've worked for decades at what was once known as Mother's Cookies in Shively, say they've reached the breaking point but fear losing hard-won wages and pension benefits if they quit or press for better treatment.

The complaints have surfaced not merely because the workers had to step up production of Thin Mints, Samoas and Trefoils now en route to customers in Louisville and across the country. But the plant has boosted its output of other cookies in the past year.

"It feels like we're indentured servants," said a person who's been on the payroll for decades and earns $16 an hour. "It's really gotten worse in the last year. They (managers) keep saying it will get better, but it never does."

The bakery at 2287 Ralph Ave. was acquired from Keebler in March 2001 by Michigan-based cereal giant Kellogg Co., which says through a spokeswoman that employees must work overtime to avoid "a production shutdown."

Federal labor law also permits managers to require overtime as long as they pay time and a half for extra hours, according to Daniel Lowry, communications director with Kentucky Labor Cabinet.

But Mary Lou Sacra, a former packer and union shop steward, said she retired two years ago in part because "the overtime was wearing me out" and that employees are plagued by overwork.

Worn out, fed up

In interviews, a dozen current employees said they hit the wall when the company decided to run shifts on Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Eve and New Year's Day, holidays they'd previously had off. They said that they couldn't decline to work unless they held high seniority and that complaining to union representatives didn't help.

They also say that, if they inform a manager they can't stay beyond their eight-hour shift, they receive what is known as an "occurrence" for declining to work — 10 of which accumulated in a nine-month period results in termination.

The workforce, once more than 700 people, has dwindled to 328 hourly workers plus executive and administrative staff. Kellogg declined to disclose its total employment or to respond to questions about how mechanization whittled the workforce.

The bakery has transformed over the past decade, from focusing on producing Girl Scout cookies in a nine-month push where workers were accustomed to some overtime, to a busier operation with three shifts running 365 days a year, said Teamsters Local 783 representative George Nelson.

Kellogg also shifted other cookie products to Shively from Charlotte, N.C., and another plant. In short, Nelson said, "they took on more product than they had people."

Despite hiring 60 additional workers in the past year, more than half didn't last beyond a six-month probationary period because of excessive absences. To alleviate the strain on existing crews, the union agreed in the new contract last summer to allow "temps" to clean equipment and fill some shifts, Nelson said.

Of the holidays shifts, Nelson said, it was voluntary, not mandatory. The workers said few were allowed to turn down the shifts because managers made it clear that it was "work or else."

Contract allows open-ended OT

The current contract between Kellogg and the union, which Nelson said was ratified resoundingly, doesn't define or prevent overtime. One provision states that "the company shall have the right to require employees to work reasonable amounts of overtime in their department" but doesn't address what "reasonable" means.

Carol Mooney, a retired Indiana State Teacher Association union representative, reviewed the contract and described such language as too vague to safeguard fair working conditions for employees. Labor lawyers would say "you could drive a truck through that (language)," Mooney said.

A Kellogg worker last month filed a complaint with the Kentucky Labor Cabinet, citing forced overtime and concerns about safety for exhausted workers. The agency confirmed the complaint but is still trying to interview the individual and determine whether an investigation is warranted, said the Labor Cabinet's Lowry.

He declined to disclose the Kellogg employee's name and said complaints are confidential. If the agency eventually decides to examine the matter, he said, they would interview the complainant and managers and also review the union contract to ensure terms are being enforced.

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But he echoed other labor authorities in saying that no state or federal law prohibits employers from drafting employees to work overtime. Existing laws don't define how much is too much overtime. As long as an employer pays the required time and a half for hours worked in excess of 40 hours in a seven-day period — and double the rate for holidays — the employer isn't in violation, Lowry said.

Employers have the upper hand in deciding how many hours to work an employee and can fire and hire them at will. Since these workers have the right to collectively bargain, they can have some say in defining working conditions, noted Gary Burtless, a labor expert at the Brookings Institution.

"This doctrine obviously offers U.S. workers little legal protection against abuse. The assumption is that since the worker can legally quit employment at an abusive employer and find work elsewhere, no further legal protection is needed under (the) law," Burtless said in an email.

The Girl Scouts of Kentuckiana and the national office declined to comment and referred a reporter to Kellogg's Battle Creek, Mich., headquarters. A company spokeswoman there declined to respond to some questions about working conditions and the environment at the Shively operation.

The price of OT

Asked about overtime, spokeswoman Kris Charles said in an email that employees worked an average of 52 hours a week during a recent five-week period. The company "works hard" to avoid mandatory OT, she added.

Employees, for their part, told of struggling through a brutal last year, forced to work Saturdays and Sundays on top of five weekdays where they often are expected to pull at least three 12-hour shifts. Calling in sick or submitting a doctor's note after an appointment, they said, can earn them an occurrence.

Nelson didn't deny that workers have taken on more overtime, but he said union reps "have gotten on top of it." During a Feb. 3 meeting with new plant manager Ronald Deaver, he said, the union asked about easing overtime and giving members more weekends off.

"We addressed it from the standpoint of safety ... when the body is fatigued and the mind isn't sharp, that's a problem," Nelson said. "You can only work a person for so long and eventually you've got to give them some time off."

In the plant, workers clad in steel-toed shoes, hard hats and gowns man assembly lines where an estimated 2.5 million cookies a day are baked and coated. Packers rotate around the assembly line loading cookies into trays and pushing trays into slots for wrapping. The packages are loaded into boxes, then into cases for shipment.

Kellogg declined to allow a reporter to visit. But video of the Louisville operation aired on a Food Nework's "Unwrapped" show in 2011, detailing the "secrets" of how the second-best selling chocolate and coconut Samoa gets its unique crunch.

Workers described an environment where the exhausting pace in the past year has changed a place where people once enjoyed going to work. Voicing concern about the long shifts, they said, is met with hostility — and veiled threats that they could all be out of a job if they don't keep pulling their weight.

Charles, who declined to speak with a reporter by phone, wrote that "when combining scheduled time off and unexpected employee absences, other employees may be required to work additional overtime to ensure we don't experience a production shutdown."

With ABC Bakers in Richmond, Va., the other licensed vendor, the two plants produce the estimated 200 million boxes of Girl Scout cookies sold annually, worth nearly $800 million, said Kelly Parisi, chief communications executive for Girl Scouts of the USA in New York City.

Many veteran employees at Kellogg Snacks, as the plant is known now, started on the lines as packers and case tapers in the 1980s, making $5 and $6 an hour and finally earning $16.17 an hour now. Nelson estimated 80 percent are women.

A worker, who told of running a red light early one morning after an exhausting string of shifts, said time off has been spent seeing doctors for back problems and other ailments. At other times, she skips family gatherings and church to drop into bed, exhausted and depressed.

"I don't know how much longer I can do it," said another worker who's on the overnight shift.

"There's no place in Louisville that works people like" this, she said.

Reporter Grace Schneider can be reached at 502-582-4082. Follow her on Twitter @gesinfk.