Goodbye Twinkies.

[kandrathe]

I would imagine the Teamsters were willing to play ball primarily in the hopes of recovering the pension funds. Younger workers with less time invested in building a pension (and also less time building up seniority based pay raises) might see a raw deal as a raw deal. You can't really look at the average situation and say people made a good vote or a bad vote, because not everyone is in the same place.

To give the extreme example, some of my coworkers at UPS will make around $10,000 dollars this year. A truck drivers nearing retirement at UPS could be making six figures. Those are people in the same union working under the exact same contract, and one is making 15 times as much as the other (also working a lot more hours, but that's part of the deal). We have contract coming up next year and I expect it will go pretty smoothly. But outsiders who look at the situation through a few articles, statements released by the company and/or union, etc. don't understand how differently individuals will be affected by the situation. If we were to strike, people who don't work in the industry would have no understanding of the dynamics behind it.

My impression is that Hostess was a sinking ship and it was just a matter of when. They had filed for bankruptcy some years back and workers had to make concessions back then. Apparently that wasn't enough to solve the company's problems. I would buy Twinkies or donuts or Wonder bread when they were on a good sale, but there are plenty of good alternatives at the grocery store. For the suggested retail price of Hostess stuff you could often get superior product fresh from the bakery.

I recently attended a seminar on labor being given by one of the local top union's leadership. They viewed the growing global economy as the major reason unions in the US are having a hard slog. Just after WWII, the US was pretty much the major unbroken industrial economy, and so management and labor became rich, and complacent. They were not forward thinking to the 1980's when everyone would have recovered from the war. Couple with that the explosion of productivity enhancements due to technology (computers, software, and robotics are just the obvious). The US had the luxury of giving labor whatever they wanted, and writing into law bunches of regulations. But, Hostess is an extreme example of a product that no longer has a market. Like film, VHS tapes, record players, or CRT's.

The unions are trying to be realistic in working with companies to create workable labor partnerships. No companies, means no jobs, no dues, and no unions.