Roughly fourteen hundred workers who make the Kellogg Company’s cereals — including Rice Krispies, Raisin Bran, Froot Loops, Corn Flakes, and Frosted Flakes — walked off the job on Tuesday, October 5, as their five-year contract expired. The striking shops are in Battle Creek, Michigan (the company’s hometown and site of its headquarters), Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Memphis, Tennessee, and Omaha, Nebraska. While only including a portion of Kellogg’s 31,000-person global workforce, the strike encompasses the entirety of Kellogg’s cereal plants.

Workers say the strike is necessitated by the company’s push to expand a two-tier system, previously agreed to in their contract, that created a “transitional” class of employees with lower pay and benefits. Currently, that class can constitute no more than 30 percent of the workforce. Workers say Kellogg is seeking to lift that cap, widening the gap between existing employees and new hires and setting the stage for a future with work predominantly on the lower tier.

“They want to take away new employees’ path to increases in wages and benefits so there’s no way to top out anymore,” says Kevin Bradshaw, a case-sealer operator at Kellogg’s Memphis plant, where he has worked for twenty years: