The seemingly imperishable Twinkie has finally met its match, said Jennifer Rubin in WashingtonPost.com, and its name is Big Labor. Hostess, the 82-year-old maker of Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, and Wonder Bread, said last week that it will go out of business after failing to strike a deal on wage and pension cuts with its bakers’ union. This week a last-ditch attempt at mediation failed. No surprise there, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Workers’ over-the-top demands had long since pushed the company to the brink of insolvency. Hostess was forced to maintain no fewer than 80 health and 40 pension plans; “drivers weren’t allowed to load their own vehicles, and the workers who loaded bread weren’t allowed to load cake.” When the need for cuts became a matter of company survival, obstinate unions chose to “kill an American classic” rather than give an inch, taking 18,500 of their own jobs down with them.
Don’t scapegoat the workers, said John Nichols in The Nation. The unions didn’t ask for more pay or better benefits, and they’d already accepted thousands of layoffs and major concessions during Hostess’s last round in bankruptcy court, which ended in 2009. No, “Hostess was smashed by vulture capitalists” who loaded the company with debt and earned millions in fees, and by “incompetent managers” who gave themselves huge raises as the company faltered. The CEO who led the company back into bankruptcy earlier this year got a 300 percent pay raise, even as the company stopped contributing to workers’ pension funds, said Jake Blumgart in Salon.com. “To add insult to injury,” the current CEO has asked a bankruptcy judge’s permission to pay executives $1.75 million in bonuses. And somehow the unions are to blame for this fiasco?
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
'Horror stories of women having to carry nonviable fetuses'Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Haiti interim council, prime minister sworn inSpeed Read Prime Minister Ariel Henry resigns amid surging gang violence
-
Today's political cartoons - April 26, 2024Cartoons Friday's cartoons - teleprompter troubles, presidential immunity, and more
-
Issue of the week: Apple’s patent victory over Samsungfeature Apple's “sweeping victory” is among the biggest intellectual-property triumphs on record.
-
Issue of the week: Goldman Sachs’s ‘toxic’ culture
feature Greg Smith’s stinging public resignation from Goldman Sachs landed on Wall Street “like a bomb.”
-
Issue of the week: Can a mortgage deal revive housing?
feature Five big banks reached a settlement with state and federal officials to pay $26 billion to offset some of the damage caused by their misdeeds in the foreclosure crisis.
-
Issue of the week: Europe gets downgraded
feature Standard & Poor's lowered the credit rating for nine European nations, indicating that Europe has not yet convincingly dealt with the debt crisis.
-
Tom Toles: Cartoonist of the Yearfeature Meet the winner of The Week's Cartoonist of the Year award
-
Cartoonist of the Year finalistsfeature A brief look at this year's nominees
-
Issue of the week: Calling out the crash’s culprits
feature The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has just published its 635-page report on the financial crisis.
-
Issue of the week: Wal-Mart vs. its female employees
feature The case against Wal-Mart, which began with six female workers, has grown into a class action on behalf of as many as 1.5 million female employees.
