Frito-Lay in CT has changed drastically in the last decade, becoming more and more hostile towards employee's. When first looking for a job there it was simple, put in an application and if you got hired it was full-time. Eventually they changed the hiring practices about 9 years ago to you start as part-time and could bid to become full-time as postions opened up. This formula changed again to you got hired as a temp worker for 90 days and then you would become part-time with ability to bid on full-time jobs. It has rapidly become worse since that desicion because of overtime rules. As a temp worker you could be forced to work OT, as much as 28 extra hours a week over your 40. So you start as a temp with outlandish amounts of overtime, making decent money to part-time with a cap of 30 total hours until you could become full-time, which they steadily reduced the amount of open to not pay benefits. Then a few years later they changed the formula again, you could be a temp for 6 months before being offered a part-time position. When they realized they could dangle the part time positions over temps to work more and more overtime they changed one more time to only hiring people through temp agencys for about $5 less for 6 months, then offer a direct temp job for 6 months then give part-time. So in less then a decade you went from hiring full-time to hiring from a temp agency for less pay, to a temp, to a part-timer, to maybe a full-timer.
Here is how over time works so people can understand the nightmare this really is. Let's say your schedule is Thursday-Monday with Tuesday/Wednesday as your days off. Every day on your regular work week you could be forced to work over for 4 hour or early the next day for 4 hours. Two hours before the end of your shift you would have to look at a list in which they would post who had OT. Here is the thing, if you had 1st 2nd or 3rd break your last break was over before the list was posted. So you could be ready to clock out and walking to the clock at the end of your shift only to find out you had to stay over for 4 hours, and you had to go straight to your machine, so no calling anyone to let them know until your first OT break. The same went for your weekend days off. You could find out monday night that you had to come in for Tuesday, 2 hours before the of the shift Monday. In CT you can not be forced to work more than 6 days in a calander week so you would assume that OK I worked Tuesday so now I have Wednesday off. They got around this by offering you a day off when they needed the least crew. So you could be forced to work both of your normal days off and you would be offered a day off randomly in the week, with two hours notice the night before. So in this instance you could work 4 hours over every single regular day with 2 hours notice, be forced to come in on both your days off with 2 hours notice and then be given friday off, again with 2 hours notice. This applied to all temps and full-time. As can be imagined you now had to start as a temp with $5 less an hour with this kind of outlandish schedule, get used to it for a year, then go to part-time with a cap of 30 hours, only to fight for a full-time bid that was less and less common to keep costs down. It became a revolving door of temp workers who couldn't keep up with the demanding schedule and a smaller pool of full-time workers to fill the gaps. To force full-time workers to fill all the gaps they changed all bids about 6 years ago to slash bids, meaning you now had 2 and sometimes 3 seperate jobs in different departments. If there was no work as a packer for your weekend, instead of getting it off you had to check with your slash bid, usually sanitation, to see if they were going to force you to work. This also applied to the 4 hours early and over in both positions. You had people with 30 years under there belt at the same position who had finally managed to be high enough seniority to have weekends off now being forced into a second position and no longer getting days off as normal and working more and more OT.
This is a snapshot of one of the many problems Frito-Lay has, I wont get into all the other ways Frito was horrible to the employees yet. Here is why they are in a perfect position to unionize, there is only one plant in all of New England that services most of all the chips you see in the stores. Unlike the southern and western United States, New England is supported by only this one plant in CT. If the workers were to strike it would force them to ship chips from as far as North Carolina or further causing a huge amount of overhead costs. To even further the case Frito-Lay in CT created a bottle neck about 5 years ago. Frito used to have warehouses all over New England but in an effort to cut costs closed about 95% of them down and moved everything to the location in CT and now have a GES system where they ship from the plant to store. If employee's were to close the plant down, there are no warehouses to ship the chips to, causing even more headaches and costs of trying to ship from the south directly to stores.
I no longer work there, I managed to escape the madness, but if you know anyone in a union who can help, work in a Frito-Lay yourself somewhere else, or know anyone working in the CT Frito-Lay, help them see that change is possible and they are in a position to make some changes possible for them and their families.