Posted on 11/23/2012 6:13:32 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Drat! I’m bummed—saddened by the news that the Hostess company, home of the Twinkie and other venerable sugary snacks, is shutting down.
I’ll bet I haven’t eaten more than three or four Twinkies in the last 30 years, so the demise of Hostess doesn’t adversely impact my lifestyle. It’s just that, for baby boomers like me, the Twinkie has historic significance in popular culture. Being a kid in the ‘50s meant watching “The Mickey Mouse Club” and “The Lone Ranger” and snacking on Twinkies and Tootsie Rolls. Twinkies were as American as baseball. Now the company that makes them is facing liquidation. Why?
Because the bakery union wouldn’t agree to the concessions needed to keep their employer afloat. Look, I don’t wish lower wages on anybody, and having personally worked with great people in two unions (UAW and NEA), I have a natural sympathy for working men and women, but I can’t respect a union that would kill off the Twinkie and their own jobs due to a false sense of pride.
Hostess lost $341 million last year. The money for the compensation that the bakery union wanted simply wasn’t there. Even the Teamsters union, whom nobody would ever accuse of wimping out during contract talks, looked at Hostess’ books and acknowledged that the only way to keep the operation afloat would have been for workers to accept lower compensation.
The bakery union, however, would have none of it. They couldn’t have been so stupid as to misunderstand the simple arithmetic of Hostess’ financial predicament, so one can only conclude that they went berserk with ideological madness—“better to destroy the company than to make concessions to management” seems to have been their cold-hearted calculus.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
BTW, I was being facetious.
No...I got that. I just wanted to jump onto the point you made.
Nothing strange about that. No more strange than the lefty administration giving themselves tons of money while going under.
First, no one defines “executives”. Second, no one mentions that the Union President makes $264K / year. Third, few mention that workers have decertified this union left and right for the past ten years, dropping membership drastically. Plus, no one mentions that the poor “workers” average $84K /year.
Protest their own unions over that,they protest everything else. just wondering.
Correct. Creative Destruction.
If it is not allowed to happen, we end up with the Soviet Union style of life and collapse.
The message will be loud and clear: Don't F with Teamster's jobs. And if I was this Baker Union Guy I'd already be hiding out.
Sounds like one of those things put out by the brainless, 99% goons living in mom and dad’s basement.
“It wasn’t the “18,000 workers” that made Hostess close its doors. It was only around 5000 stubborn union members that killed the company and made the decision for the other 13,000.”
From what I have read, you are picking on the wrong union. The Teamsters wanted the deal because 8% off of their $130k a year “salaries” for driving the delivery trucks was a pittance. The Bakers were just the pond scum who worked for low wages at the bakeries themselves. And check out the Teamsters “work rules” which featherbedded their piece of the labor pie.
As I've said before:I'd like to take this time to wish all the union thugs and their famalies that killed Twinkies a very Merry Christmas and a healthy and prosperous New Year.
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