Union kills the twinkie

No doubt, considering that all their tools came from Playskool, or Fisher-Price.

Total sales for the Hostess group have been steadily dropping

Regarding Prof. Haubs demonstration, I presume he made sure to eat an adequate amount of protein as well as other micronutrients. One issue with junk food is that empty calories leave your body craving more food to get nutrients that it is missing. Not all these nutrients can be found in a pill either.

There are several other long term issues that his 2 month experiment did not reveal. High spikes of blood sugar tend to trigger insulin resistance, damage the blood vessels, amd contribute to fatty liver if you are prone to that. The other issue is trans-fat. Twinkies are loaded with it. This is used because it is not found in nature and it does not spoil because bacteria do not recognize it as food. The walls of all our cells are made of lipid (fat) compounds. The trans fats replace the natural lipids when cells divide leaving a component of our cells that has never existed in nature in the 4 or 5 bilion years since the first cell came to be. Once it is a part of your cells, you cannot get rid of it. Here is one of many studies that show it does not seem to have good effects.

Cutting his salary by 8% instead of raising it by 300% would have yielded enough money to pay each of the 18,500 workers an additional $100. That is just the CEO, if the rest of the executives had taken a similar haircut, they might have been able to save the company, but since their goal was to loot it, it is really a moot point.

NOPE

Total revenues have been dropping since at least 2003:

It's interesting to note that during this same time, the actual cost per unit produced ( COGS) decreased steadily....

So, on average that $100 would be about 3.33 hours overtime.

So instead he gets 0 a year. Can you say "Pyrrhic Victory"?

The people who worked for Hostess, like drivers or bakers, should have no problem finding another job. There is a huge demand for drivers and, I assume, steady demand for bakers.

i

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This assumes that Hostess would have not gone chapter 7 in the near future anyhow.

By going out now, they at least stopped any more looting of their pension plan, which is now short c. 982 million $US. In retrospect, the unions should have gone out at the first wage cut, or at least the first missed pension fund payment, which is not corporate largess but deferred wages. When the initial wage cuts is combined with the missed pension payments, the employees got well over a 50% wage cut. If you are willing to work for nothing you can indeed generally get a job. It is well to remember that cuts in wages and also cuts in taxes, and the rest of the taxpayers must make these up. Anyone know what kind of tax abatements or special financing Hostess got at tax payer expense?

I would suggest that any interstate corporation that does not show a profit measured by paying net federal income tax, e.g. including carry forward tax losses, over a 5 year rolling period should be placed in automatic chapter 11 [reorganization] and the officers/directors replaced. If you are a for profit corporation, then you must show a profit, otherwise the corporation is just another tax wheeze, and a stockholders, employees, and creditors scam, and should be disolved or reorganized.

Really? When they stated that the entire industry has excess production capacity? Why would they need that more workers?

The other companies wouldn't need as may drives anyway. One union forced Hostess to use separate drives & vehicles for different products. Baked goods & snacks went from the bakery to the same stores with two sets of trucks & drivers. That's one of the things that shut the company down.

It's what I would expect of the Daily Kos. They conveniently paper over the other problems. like massive featherbedding by the Teamsters and other unions that they worked with...

Hostess had bought several brands over the years, and they all came with their own different Union Contracts that had to be honored - which usually meant keeping a separate distribution fleet for each brand and product line. The Sweets (Twinkie) drivers couldn't deliver Bread products, and vice versa. Which meant massive inefficiencies in the delivery chain, with a half dozen different trucks visiting the same stores.

And the delivery drivers were just that - Delivering to the Back Rooms of the stores only. They needed to send out a separate Stocker to take the product out and put it on the store shelves, and pull the outdate product to take back to the warehouse. And separate stockers for each product line.

Oh, and the drivers can't load their own trucks, that's a separate classification. And they had different loaders for each of the different product lines.

And each of these separate contracts had Healthcare and Pension costs in "Pooled" accounts between multiple employers, where the healthy companies are dinged more to support the weak companies - and you could never get a straight answer about what the costs actually were. Deliberately muddied so they'd get paid.

If they could get rid of that mess so they had One crew of loaders that did all the trucks, and more Drivers who would service all the various Breads and Sweets and Specialty products at the store straight to the shelves and pull the out-dates all by themselves, they could slash the costs and provide MORE jobs...

Each route Driver serves fewer stores per week because he spends more time there, so all of the former Stockers and Loaders become Drivers and get their own store route to service. Sales go way Up because the product will be there where it's needed, and costs go down because it's only handled once.

Now Hostess should have been able to get the labor contracts modified or tossed in Bankruptcy Court, but I'll bet you they were warned not to touch them by the Teamsters or they'd all walk. But it seems the Bakers Union pushed them all in front of the bus first.

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Would _YOU_ hire a guy who just shot down his last company in flames? Me, either.

I would have no problems hiring a former Hostess driver, if he has a good driving record. Right now, I am not looking for a driver, of course, so this is hypothetical.

My surplus trading experience, though, makes me rather scared of any kind of unions, though.

i

Smart man.

Gunner

The methodology of the left has always been:

1. Lie
2. Repeat the lie as many times as possible
3. Have as many people repeat the lie as often as possible
4. Eventually, the uninformed believe the lie
5. The lie will then be made into some form oflaw
6. Then everyone must conform to the lie

While there are exceptions such as Hershey in the late

1930s, the general rule is companies get the type and amount of union they deserve. What goes around comes around.

A problem union generally indicates a problem company [i.e. management], who frequently rely on "the union" to provide a scapegoat and excuse for their own failings and inertia. I have been in meetings where division management offered the excuse some local action (such as contracting out tool resharpening) could not be taken because of union opposition, until it was [again] pointed out to them our location did not have a union. They still did not take any action but stopped using that excuse (until the next opportunity). FWIW -- both Fortune 500 companies with this management mindset are now out of business.

Interesting. Would you really? If I were in the position of hiring, I wouldn't knowingly hire a previously-unionized person (or other commie.)

Smart man. Ditto here. I've seen too much for that.

One would think so, but I do hear a lot of crying about not being able to find work. I hear this mostly from college educated people who insist on finding work in their educational degreed niche. I am 64, beat up, worn out, barely functioning, and I bet $1,000 that if I went to the oilfield areas in ND or surrounding states that I would be working in less than a week. Lots of people want a job, but few are willing to work.

Steve

"Ignoramus1661" wrote

In my welding business, I did not ever hire one person who had been a union member. They all eliminated themselves when they put starting wage at about three times going rate.

Steve

This is mostly true.

There is a guy who works for a company that exchanges used car batteries. We used their services at some point. Hs job is to drive a beat up flatbed pick-up truck, load used batteries and unload refurbished batteries.

I chatted with him once and he told me that is formerly was a banker.

i