There’s been a lot of contempt sweeping the internet towards anti-worker corporations including both organized virtual and real protests. One of the latest corporations is the maker of Hostess Twinkies.
What many in St. Louis may not know (or remember) is that the very same corporation under the ITT conglomerate was hit by a boycott back in 1971 from ACTION, an interracial, direct-action protest organization. Because all the ACTION demands were never met, the boycott remained in effect.
Recently Hostess Brands announced it was seeking bankruptcy in the midst of contract disputes with its union workers. The national union threatened a strike after hearing that the company intended to pay $1.75 million in bonuses to 19 of its executives. The company countered that proposed action with a bullying threat to shut the company down which would impact 18,500 jobs and other associated vendors.
Even as it was throwing the blame of the company’s dismal future at the feet of the workers, Hostess had already given its executives pay raises earlier this year. The CEO’s salary tripled from $750,000 to about $2.5 million. This doesn’t exactly sound like a company in financial trouble. It sounds more like a company who wants to maintain superprofits for the top execs and its shareholders on the backs of its workers.
Maybe the struggle between the company and workers won’t rise to the level of the 1970s protest as there are reports that both sides have agreed to mediation. ITT stands for International Telephone and Telegraph, and at one point its portfolio included a number of seemingly unrelated industries such as bakeries, hotels, insurance companies and electronics for weapons of war.
Back in 1971, the boycott campaign led by Percy Green and ACTION proved to be incredibly successful even without the internet and cell phones. Within a few months, stores had snatched Wonder Bread and Hostess products off their shelves. The protests and subsequent reactions dominated the local news for months.
The company brought out its few black employees as the front guard of their fight, including its PR man Sam Wheeler (former Harlem Globetrotters basketball player), who called the protest “black against black.”
The black drivers who received commissions from the sales of the delivered bakery products were encouraged by Wheeler to set up a protest at the ACTION headquarters. The drivers who were misled by the company apparently hadn’t realized an important element of discrimination uncovered by ACTION: that the black drivers’ routes included small black convenience stores while the white drivers got the big grocery chain stores.
When the company’s tactic to pit their black employees against ACTION didn’t work, the corporation tapped into its buddies in higher places. Then Missouri Attorney General Jack Danforth filed an injunction and conspiracy suit against ACTION. The antitrust suit claimed that ACTION and Colonial Bread were in cahoots with one another to bring Continental Bakeries down. A surprised Colonial Bread was Wonder Bread’s competition and it became an unintended beneficiary of the ACTION boycott.
This tactic backfired as well. It catapulted the conglomerate and all its dirty linen into the national spotlight for several years. It put the resources of a peer corporation into action (no pun intended) and forced the state attorney general’s office to settle the suit agreeing that there was no wrong doing on Colonial’s part.
The conglomerate became a target of antitrust groups. But more volatile was being a target of the anti-war movement, prompting a national boycott of Wonder Bread with the slogan, “Don’t Buy Bombs when You Buy Bread!” ITT‘s ugly ties to the CIA’s toppling of the democratically elected Chilean leader Salvatore Allende were also uncovered during this time.
The historical struggle of workers against companies like Hostess is a testament that we must stay vigilant in our efforts to uphold racial and gender equality, pay equity along with issues of worker safety and product quality.
Here we are some 40 years later with a similar fight against the same company. Let’s make sure we are fighting for immediate victories for Hostess workers but also for worker security and rights that will endure into the future.
