The Evil Genius of the Baker's Union to Save Themselves and the Twinkie (?).

[evildevil]

The Twinkie is Dead! Long Live the Twinkie!
Did the baker's union get what they wanted all along?

Apparently, Hostess is close to selling off its venerable Twinkie brand to one of two investment firms.  You may remember that Hostess filed for bankruptcy last fall, after it was unable to come to terms with the baker's union.  Twinkies madness

Comments

[fenris_lorsrai]

Union-imposed work rules stopped drivers from helping to load their trucks. A separate worker, arriving at the store in a separate vehicle, had to be employed to shift goods from a storage area to a retailer's shelf. Wonder Bread and Twinkies couldn't ride on the same truck.

In no way does any of this make sense from an efficiency standpoint. I get idea you don't want things tacked on to contract that weren't originally there, but this is just batshit. The delivery guy should be able to, y'know, deliver goods.

[awfulbliss]

I've worked in three different workplaces with unions similar to the way Hostess is set up and in my experience that type of inefficiency is standard across the board. The extent to which mundane, easy tasks were needlessly separated as part of ridiculous union rules was pretty infuriating. You should have to employ someone because of an expansion in business, not because of rules like the one highlighted.

[carmy_w]

These sorts of rules are a very large part of why the railroads had to be rescued a few decades ago.

Every train had to have an eight-man crew (if I recall correctly), including a coal man and a brake man, in spite of the fact that the engines all ran on diesel instead of coal, and the brakes were all automatic air brakes, not manually operated.

[carmy_w]

There's a reason why the Teamsters is one of the most vilified unions in the US.

They may or may not be as crooked as a corkscrew now, but for decades, they were, plus being very nearly a wholly owned subsidiary of the mob.

[bnmc2005]

I understand the questioning of Union standards vs efficiency but can we please move away from the idea that Unions caused OhMyGotheHOLYTwinkies Hostess Company to die? Because this company had issues LOOOOOOONG before Unions got involved.

[silver_apples]

I agree. The teamsters certainly didn't help the case, but neither did the top levels of management. At least part of the reason the bakers refused to take concessions was because it wouldn't have saved the company, just given the people in charge a nicer severance package.

[halfshellvenus]

This makes a lot more sense now. No love for the Teamsters' profits dwarfing all the other workers, and pushing businesses to bankruptcy, especially by excepting obvious parts of their workload and forcing those to be done by someone else.

Reminds me of my days as an orchestra musician in Illinois. We were union, and paid, but not paid much. The conductor laid out the organization's expenses for us, and it turned out that the cost for one night's work by the stagehand's union was higher than the amount paid to the entire orchestra for 5 nights of work.

This has affected the arts everywhere: a city creates a nice performing venue for their orchestra/ballet/opera, but the stagehands' union is in charge of running the performances. Soon, the very organizations for which that venue was built cannot afford to play there!