Head Tale

Kellogg’s workers in the States who have been on strike since October (in the US, apparently workers aren’t guaranteed their job after a strike as I believe is the case in Canada) were in the process of being laid off en masse by the company who wanted to hire 1400 permanent replacement workers.

A bunch of young people, many on Reddit’s r/antiwork sub-reddit, who realised this was pretty evil decided to intervene and crashed the site Kelloggs was using to recruit new workers.

There’s a weird distant connection Shea and I have to this – two hunters from Ohio who used to come up to hunt geese on her parents’ land every fall worked at a cereal factory in Ohio years ago (can’t remember if it was Kellogg’s or not but Ohio isn’t a state on any list of striking plants that I’ve seen.)

Anyhow, one was a true blue Democrat worker/union activist and the other was a red Republican who was in management (and lived the stereotype in your mind right down to the NRA member’s magazines in his bathroom!) 😉

But in a reflection of an earlier, simpler, pre-social media time, they were buddies who lived relatively close to each other, socialized regularly and even took hunting trips together to Saskatchewan.

They even shared the same name so they were nicknamed “Big Jim” and “Little Jim”.

Big Jim…

Little Jim (who lived steps from Lake Erie and took us out on his boat during our visit!)…

Little Jim’s backyard with Lake Erie in the background…

Shea and I did a driving trip around Lake Erie during a semester break when I was in library school in Ontario and looked them up.  We arrived at the manager’s house to what is still one of the biggest fish fries I have ever experienced in my life.

Fish Fry…

Then we stayed at the worker’s house overnight and we still have the duck he carved out of wood and painted which he gifted to us and is in our house to this day.

Anyhow, a good reminder that even if people are still on opposite sides of the union/management divide, they can still be friends.