Hostess, the maker of Twinkies, Ding-Dongs, Zingers and assorted other delectable goodies is closing down, shutting its doors and getting ready to sell off it's biggest brand names. It's shutting everything down and laying off 18,000 employees just in time for the holiday season.
Now, I was never big on Hostess stuff. Wonderbread was OK. My Uncle has a long standing love affair with Raspberry Zingers (the ones covered with Coconut) but a Twinkie? A Ding-Dong? Didn't really inspire in me the passionate devotion that some people feel for the Hostess brand. On a whim, I swung into Hy-Vee to see if I could grab some final boxes of Zingers and maybe some Twinkies (never having experienced a deep-fried Twinkie, I thought it would be a shame if I never tried one before Hostess sailed into the history books.) Panic buying had already ensued so I came away a box of Zingers and a box of Ding-Dongs.
On the face of it, Hostess isn't really that big of a loss. It was, as a good friend pointed out on Facebook, just another way for kids to get fat and I think that's part of what did the company in, really. People wanted healthier things to eat. Twinkies, however delicious, could hardly be called healthy.
But what bugged me was how Hostess went down. It was already in Chapter 11, already on life support, trying to cut costs where it could and their union rejected such cost-cutting measures and went on strike, Hostess was blunt. They didn't have the cash to sustain operations during a nationwide strike, set a deadline and when the union didn't come back in from the cold, it was game over.
Now, I think there's a lot of blame to go around on this one. Hostess management has undoubtedly been flogging some kind of brand nostalgia to get by for years now instead of trying to change and grow the company again. But the union's behavior strikes me as particularly self-defeating and only underlines my personal ambivalence about unions in general. I'll agree that in certain work environments that could be especially toxic/unfriendly to workers, unions can do and have done good work. Lord knows Target and Wal-Mart workers getting hosed by their management this Thanksgiving probably could use someone in their corner.
But when unions fail to see the big picture like this, it makes me wonder. I mean, talk about cutting off your nose just to spite your face. I remember Ron Gettelfinger, head of the UAW telling people that they would fight for every inch of their contract when faced with 2008 Financial Crisis that lead to the auto bailouts. My thought then was that he was gonna look pretty damn stupid if the companies went under.
That's my thought now. Trying to fight for the best deal for your members is all well and good but when jobs are at stake, especially in this economy, you need to pull your heads out of your asses and see the big picture. I'd imagine that 18,000 of these workers might not be crazy about getting their wages and benefits cut yet again and understandably so- but at least they have jobs. I can imagine they're probably not all that tickled to be looking at unemployment in a bad economy just in time for Christmas today. A nice win for organized labor indeed.
Ironically, on one of it's final days, Hostess may some decent sales numbers if the bare shelves in the local supermarket were anything to go by and all the employees will have left is a bunch of old Twinkie wrappers and unemployment checks to look forward too.
That's not entirely fair. The Bakersblahblahblahwaytoolong Union was the one that refused to bend, and they only represented about 1500 of the 18,000 laid off. Teamsters was working with them up until the bitter end. The BCTGM had already gotten screwed over in negotiations with the previous management team - you know, they one that emptied the company coffers before leaving. And their members in Hostess didn't necessarily represent the majority of their total union membership. It gives them an advantage when coming to the table with other employers and shows their commitment to their members.
ReplyDeleteAnd really... this is SUPPOSED to be capitalism. And in capitalism, inferior companies producing inferior goods are supposed to fail. The fact that they didn't do so sooner is the real failure. Everyone gets so upset about jobs, but there is a big picture, and Hostess should have been out of it a long time ago.