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Greed, Obstinacy and Twinkies

Hostess is shut down. Wonder Bread is gone. Wow. After years of railing against snacks like HoHos, Devil Dogs and the like society finally got its wish. Hostess is closed. Oddly, the brands are likely to get sold and to continue in some form similar to their current one, while the management and workers are all laid off.

The bulk of the news indicates that Hostess' closure was the result of the refusal of the Bakery Workers' union to accept a new contract and go back to work. Both The Daily Kos and Forbes offer a different view, that the union was being strangled and soaked by a management that had rewarded itself large raises. There is enough irony, fingerpointing and pain to last all concerned for their lifetimes. Certainly the CEO's income went from 700,000.00 to 2.5 million, a number difficult to swallow for leading a company that hads gone though bankruptcy twice in 8 years. Equally certainly 92% of the union's members voted to reject a contract that offered tham a wage of 43,000.00 yearly, not a trivial amount of money for baking.

But Hostess' story is a caution for our politicians. One side kept upping their salary while the company was shrinkning, and the other side demanded a nice salary in reutrn for work that is not worth that much money. Now instead of an 8% wage cut and a loss of pension contributions, not only all the bakery workers but everyone else working at Hostess, 18,500 in all, have no work.

Could not these visionary leaders of the sugary snack business have found a way to get a compromise? Isn't 43,000.00 yearly enough to bake Twinkies? Isn't 750,000.00 enough to support a family? I am put off by a CEO that gets a raise of 1.75 million dollars. I am also pupt off by a union that howls about mistreatment and overpay of CEOs while happily ignoring total labor costs to Hostess of 720,000,000.00 (40,000.00 x 18,000 workers).

The CEO is now out of work, but bet he can afford it, while thousands of workers who want work are now ilde. And, in a great irony of unionism, the companies that buy the Hostess brand names will certainly bake those snacks with non-union labor. Not only did the union help kill Hostess, but their insistence on what they were worth has led to their workers losing their jobs, while HoHos et al continue to be made by the very labor forces unions want to oppose.

You have to love it when any group's policy leads to their downfall. People laugh at that, and they have every right to do so. Republicans in the House really need to think this example over....

Ted

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 17, 2012 at 12:07 AM

    You know, the company should have called me when it was in trouble: I would have been willing to be CEO for only half of the $2.5 million demanded by the CEO Hostess had. What a bargain for the corporation I'd be! Next time a baking company on the verge of bankruptcy wants to pay their CEO a salary that is more than six times what the president of the United States makes, please have the decency to call me so I can apply for the position...

    :)

    -D-

    ReplyDelete

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