“Hostess Brands Inc., the maker of iconic treats such as Twinkies and traditional pantry staple Wonder Bread, said Friday it is shuttering its plants and will seek to liquidate the 82-year-old business.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324556304578122632560842670.html
Looks like US society has finally peaked.
i have heard horror stories about twinkies…are they really that fattening? (never tried it/seen it myself)
Tastykakes are better anyway.
Surely Twinkies are protected by UNESCO as some kind of world heritage product?
In any case, there must be fallout shelters full of the things anyway. If I recall, they are pretty much impervious to spoilage as long as the packages are unopened.
I suppose they are as fattening as you would expect any sugar/butter cake filled with cream to be.
Hard to believe there will be no more Wonder Bread! An American staple.
They’re liquidating, so someone will buy the rights to Twinkies and Wonder Bread. I bet those striking workers now wish they had accepted the labor deal that was on the table.
Nicely done union workers.
The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp needs to be dissolved. Or, at least their charter should be amended to disallow union workers that drive their company out of business from receiving pension benefits. It’s a huge and unfair bargaining chip. How long would this strike have lasted if the workers knew without a deal their retirement savings would evaporate? My guess is they’d be more willing to negotiate.
Instead, about 5,000 workers of one union ruined an entire company of 18,500 employees - most of them members of other unions like the Teamsters - right in time for the holidays. What a bunch of assholes.
^Yup. Hostess closing as bakers union won’t take an 8% wage cut. The sad part is, there are 6,000 members of this union, but 18,500 total workers. Now they all are out of work. I hope like hell none of these baker union members behind this can get any unemployment. Or, make the union cover them! At least your union bosses still have their big check,DUMBASS!
There was an 8% wage cut, but they would get 5% back through wage increases over a few years. Also, the union would get two board seats (out of 8, I think), which is a big deal actually. There was some sort of change to pension and/or health plan contributions. However, from what I read, they were mostly mad about the 8% cut.
I mean… I sympathize a bit with the union guys. 8% pay cut is of course not good for them. However, if it’s a matter of company survival, what are you supposed to expect?
Well, they received a 100% cut instead. I guess management won?
Do any of you have any idea how important Wonder Bread is to my favorite BBQ places? You can’t eat Gates BBQ without it. God damn them all.
Yo Bchad. I need to hear your objective wisdom. What is the point of unions? This is not the first time a union has crimped a reputable US company. UAW was griping through 2007 about pay being too low. They won. Then in 2008-2009, well, you know the rest.
Nobody won. I bet this will be a business school case study for many years. The real losers of course, are our children, who will be deprived of a great cultural heritage…
Well… the general argument is that unions provide bargaining power to workers, who would otherwise be exploited. This reduces income inequality and whatnot. I am generally anti-union, in case that was not apparent. I can see how collective bargaining would be important under some circumstances. However, somewhere like the US where there is a lot of career freedom and generally high standards of living, I believe unions do more harm overall than good.
bchadwick is clearly a smart guy and I enjoy reading his posts, but I wouldn’t take anyone here as truly “objective”.
One of the key takeaways I got from one of my all time favorite movies “Zombieland” was that Hostess products such as Twinkies do in fact have an expiration date.
Might be bought by Mexican billionaire who owns “Gurpo Bimbo” (publicly traded bakery company)
So “Bimbo Twinkies”… What a great turn of events
He’s the best hope we’ve got. In fact, probably the only hope.
As usual the Simpsons summed it up nicely:
Burns’ Grandfather: Come on, men! Smash those atoms! You there, turn out your pockets. [Two goons seize a waifish worker and turn out his pockets] Burns’ Grandfather: Aha - atoms! One, two, three, four… SIX of them! Take him away! Waif: You can’t treat the working man this way! One of these days we’ll form a union, and get the fair and equitable treatment we deserve! Then we’ll go too far, and become corrupt and shiftless, and the Japanese will eat us alive! Burns’ Grandfather: The Japanese? Those sandal-wearing goldfish tenders? Ha ha! Bosh! Flimshaw! Mr. Burns: Oh, if only we’d listened to that young man, instead of walling him up in the abandoned coke oven.
Bimbo is awesome… if you live in SoCal you can find him at all your local carnicerias. He’s a bad ass little bear that hikes, parachutes, snowboards, you name it… he does a different adventure on every bakery item. He even has the nerve to sell you pre-made toast! He knows we’re too lazy to put our own bread in the toaster, and he’s not afraid to capitalize!
I have mixed feelings on unions. In general, I think a world with some way for employees to avoid being divided and conquered by a management that would clearly pay them slave wages if they can get away with it is a world less likely to spin off into extremes of wealth and poverty, class warfare, and the like. I think that’s a good thing, and unions have been helpful on these issues in the past. Getting rid of them entirely is likely to plunge us back into the Guilded Age, which might seem great, as long as you’re sure you’re on the winning side of that bet. But, almost by definition, most of us won’t be, and that’s a bad outcome to guarantee.
But that’s a long way from saying that unions always make the optimal decisions for economic growth and/or their workers, and in recent years, I agree that there are many cases where unions seem to have been holding things back more than they have been helping. Low unionization rates have also made unions less effective, but forcing people into unions against their will is also a draconian measure that really does smack of socialism.
Union leaders can get entrenched and lazy too, and unions can stifle adaptation. I’ve often felt that unions need to be looking out to make sure that their labor forces remain relevant and skilled and flexible, rather than just fight to secure their existing benefit packages in the face of a world that is changing technologically and in terms of labor arbitrage. Somehow forcing unions to break apart and then recreate themselves around more modern skill sets might make them more responsive to the current environment.
In the US, unions really got legitimized in the interwar years and gained strength after WWII. I think that unions were a good thing when the wind was at the back of the US’s economic expansion, but somehow we need a different strategy with global headwinds like these. The challenge is that unions seem to be tied to specific skill-sets, particularly those that were required in the early and mid-20th century. Many of these kinds of skill sets are especially vulnerable that can be outsourced and/or automated, but it’s hard to get a union like the teamsters to say, “Yes, we are going to evolve from driving trucks and now turn into PERL coders,” or something. Yet, something of this type is probably what needs to happen.
I am concerned that the world is turning into a place evermore where people either collect rich rents on capital provision or are left to sell their labor at a pittance. There was a time when real worker wage gains were tied to improvements in labor productivity, but this is really falling apart, leading to a situation where workers start to feel “well, we’re screwed either way, so at least we’re taking you guys with us.” At some point, capital providers may find a way to insulate themselves from that, and then the stage may be set for even nastier conflicts.
I don’t know enough about the details of the Hostess case, but part of me wonders if maybe this will stimulate some kind of last-minute agreement to accept a wage deal. Brinksmanship on both management and labor’s part.