Union Results: 3 Closed Bakeries, 627 Unemployed People

Also, a quick search shows people claiming the CEO received TRIPLE pay before filing bankruptcy, and apparently tripled it TWICE during the year. Makes it easy to take a buck the next year when you've already given yourself a multi-year "advance".

 

BY RACHEL FEINTZEIG

Creditors of Hostess Brands Inc. said in court papers the company may have "manipulated" its executives' salaries higher in the months leading up to its Chapter 11 filing, in what the creditors called a possible effort by Hostess to "sidestep" Bankruptcy Code compensation provisions.

The committee representing Hostess's unsecured creditors alleges that information it has gathered suggests "the possibility" that the company converted a chunk of its top executives' pay from performance-based bonuses to salary, "at least in part to sidestep" rules designed to ensure that companies in bankruptcy aren't enticing their employees to stay on board with the promise ...

*You need a subscription to see more, but I've highlighted the issue in bold.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304072004577323993512506050.html

 

I found their salaries...and was surprised somewhat. They are relatively low, even after the massive "raises" they got....from themselves. I highlighted one sentence in red.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/20...ont-shoulder-the-blame-for-hostesss-downfall/

Hostess Blames Union For Bankruptcy After Tripling CEO’s Pay

By Annie-Rose Strasser on Nov 16, 2012 at 3:50 pm


Today, Hostess Brands inc. — the company famed for its sickly sweet desert snacks like Twinkies and Sno Balls — announced they’d be shuttering after more than eighty years of production

But while headlines have been quick to blame unions for the downfall of the company there’s actually more to the story: While the company was filing for bankruptcy, for the second time, earlier this year, it actually tripled its CEO’s pay, and increased other executives’ compensation by as much as 80 percent.

At the time, creditors warned that the decision signaled an attempt to “sidestep” bankruptcy rules, potentially as a means for trying to keep the executive at a failing company. The Confectionery, Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers International Union pointed this out in their written reaction to the news that the business is closing:

Certainly, the company agreed to an out-sized pension debt, but the decision to pay executives more while scorning employee contracts during a bankruptcy reflects a lack of good managerial judgement.

It also follows a trend of rising CEO pay in times of economic difficulty. At the manufacturing company Caterpillar, for example, they froze workers’ pay while boosting their CEO’s pay to $17 million. And at Citigroup, CEO Vikram Pandit received $6.7 million for crashing his company, walking off with $260 million after the business lost 88 percent of its value

Read this part of that last sentence again..."walking off with $260 million after the business lost 88 percent of it's value." Yikes! At least those executives at Hostess only took a couple mil.

 

Have you bothered to figure out how much the separate trucks (for twinkies and bread) plus the added personal (pullups) were costing the company? If you have ever heard the phrase "penny wise and pound foolish", you might be surprised just how applicable it would be to your worries about the CEO's salary.

 

That's disgusting!

Also why the religious right would love to see "Twinkies" disappear.

 

Themistokles has started something awful. I wrote a few comments and had to delete them, for decency's sake. I can say that it involved young boys and "services" at their church though.

 

Look, if you go to your church with your kids and hear the pastor/priest/whatever say the word "twinkies" while staring at your kids, turn the hell around and leave. GOD will understand.

 

View attachment 798

 

Apparently, there is a lot more information coming out about the vulture capitalists the drove Hostess into the ground. Updates to follow but at least the knee-jerk reaction from the Right to blame all the workers was a quaint if not imaginative narrative to start with.

 

In their minds, highly-paid executives grabbing every dollar they can from their companies, even after they drove those companies into bankruptcy, is the American way.

 

It used to be that paying executives huge salaries was stupid because everything over a million dollars was taxed at 90%. Instead of paying out huge salaries that would only be lost to taxes anyway, companies used reinvest all that profit back into the company instead. Businesses grew, the middle class grew, and life got better for everyone. Then greed took over and the very few at the top started using businesses as their own personal piggy banks even though many of them inherited, leveraged, stole, or just plain plundered the businesses they sucked dry and then sold off. Today, this predatory business model which does nothing to strengthen this country is defended by the greedy and supported by the ideologues that gleefully manufacture the ropes that are used to execute their own social class. Hopefully, enough of us that aren't so willing to see our social class degraded through class warfare collaboration can save a sinking ship in spite of those punching hole in our collective hulls.

 

I could never agree on anything over 50% or so, even for people like Gates. I forget exactly what it is at now (maybe 35%?) but it's obvious to me that it's a bit too low. I could see 40 or 45% as a viable rate.

I highlighted the main reason we are even having this discussion: greed. Personally, even after growing up poor with health issues that money could fix, I have no desire for a rich man's (or women's) gold.

A kids gold though, now that's different. He/she is just being obnoxious showing me that @#$%! Don't they realize I'm bigger than them? Little @#$%#^&*!

Oh yeah, that gold is mine! I wouldn't keep it, of course. I would take it, and the kid, out to sea and see which one sinks faster.

OK, that was just awful lol

 

With 18,500 jobs on the line, the baker's union still can't reach a deal even through mediation. The Teamsters reached a deal with Hostess; what's the bakers union's problem?

View attachment 811

 

Death of Twinkies: A Union Contract Hit
November 19, 2012

In the death of Hostess Brands, progenitor of Twinkies, Devil Dogs and Ding Dongs and other artery-clogging, icing-adorned icons of Americana, plenty of factors get the blame.​

​

Management didn’t cut deep enough, soon enough. Plants didn’t update. Marketing failed to innovate. The product line stayed unstintingly junky, defiantly flouting America’s reluctant reset to low-fat fare.​

​

But the real reason Hostess had to die at this particular time? This was a union contract hit.​

​

And that offers a disturbing glimpse into the delusional, drunk-with-power mindset of unions -- which represent barely 7% of the private work force in the U.S. -- as they embark on a second term of way-too-cozy relations with their supplicant in the White House.​

​

President Obama, ever grateful for the millions of dollars and thousands of foot soldiers provided by union support, will continue trying to end-run Congress and make it easier for unions to sink their hooks into business.​

​

Yet unions are in stark denial of the need for significant cutbacks in their lush contracts if their employers are to survive. This is especially true in the demise of Hostess Brands.​

​

Hostess’s hired gun and CEO, Gregory Rayburn, the workout “cleaner” creditors had brought in to try to save the company, had said repeatedly that he would have to shut it down unless a dozen unions accepted cutbacks in pay, benefits and stupid, featherbedding union work rules.​

​

Even the Teamsters had agreed to his plan. (And those guys “will crack you over the head,” as a union guy warned me many years ago when a strike loomed at the Detroit News and I, a lowly intern, had said I might cross any picket line.)​

But the 5,600 workers in the bakers union at Hostess went on strike. The leadership of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers whispered to workers that the company was bluffing, or a white-knight buyer may emerge. Hard to know whether this was blatant deception or foolish miscalculation; I’d suspect a bit of both.​

​

Then Rayburn, somber not swaggering, came on-air with me on “Markets Now” in the noon hour on Thursday and reiterated his threat: The bakers must return to work by 5 p.m. that day, or the company would file to liquidate on Friday. See the video here.​

​

Rayburn even had a company press release hand-delivered to picketing workers at a dozen plants, warning them of the 5 o’clock ultimatum. He was hoping to separate the members from their kamikaze leadership.​

​

It didn’t work. On Friday, Hostess filed in bankruptcy court to liquidate the company. With extreme prejudice. Today, Rayburn seeks court permission to start selling off pieces.​

​

So now all 18,500 workers at Hostess Brands just lost their jobs. Way to go guys! Bake me a lie, as fast as you can.​

Brace yourself for a wave of union propaganda-as-apologia. You’ll hear Obama-echoes of sniping against private equity a la Mitt-Bain Capital: “Romney-Style Economics Behind Decline of Hostess, But Workers Are Paying the Price,” says one website affiliated, predictably, with the AFL-CIO.​

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Those vulture capitalists must have sucked out hundreds of millions of dollars by leveraging up the company, right? (Answer: wrong. Ripplewood Holdings injected a total $150 million in three dollops as Hostess sank deeper into trouble. It lost every dollar.)​

​

The unions will say management had given itself millions in pay raises while demanding worker cuts. (True, but the raises were barely a rounding error at a company that had lost almost half a billion bucks in two years; and Rayburn rescinded the raises anyway, making the brass work for a dollar a year apiece.)​

​

The unions will blame the company for taking on almost $900 million in debt. (Yet that debt cost Hostess all of $45 million in interest last year, when its total losses swelled up to $340 million).​

​

And here’s what you won't hear the unions ever talk about:​

​

--Hostess paid out almost $100 million in health benefits for retirees last year, but over half of it covered workers who never had worked at Hostess. The Teamsters’ onerous and antiquated “multi-employer pension plan” foists the pension obligations of a bankrupt company on to the balance sheets of surviving rivals—ensuring a steady death spiral in any declining industry. A similar “MEPP” almost killed YRC, one of the largest trucking companies.​

​

--Union rules forced Hostess to run separate truck fleets for delivering bread vs. sweets. A sweets driver, serving a 7-11 store, was forbidden from restocking shelves with breads already delivered and waiting in the back—he had to call for a bread driver to swing by and handle.​

​

--The union restrictions on the 5,500 distribution routes at Hostess made it unprofitable to serve tiny outlets, yet Hostess was barred from using smaller, sleeker—and non-union—distributors.​

​

--Workers were asked to take an 8% pay cut and pay 17% of their health-care costs instead of zero. Welcome to the club, guys. For this, they would have received 25% ownership of Hostess plus $100 million of Hostess debt to be paid back to the unions.​

​

But the bakers wouldn’t budge.​

​

In the months ahead a chop-shop or food giant may resurrect various Hostess brands, but those 36 plants are shuttered, those 18,500 jobs are gone for good. The union preferred to picket while an 85-year-old company suffocated . . . rather than risk having to face inevitable demands for similar concessions at other employers across the country.​

​

Those demands will be forthcoming, anyway, because, as President Obama likes to say in slapping the rich with higher taxes, the math doesn’t work. The only questions are which union will be next, and whether anyone reasonable (or sane) will be listening.​

​

Even a parasite is smart enough to know not to kill its host. In the case of unions, the presence of such preternatural intelligence isn’t yet readily apparent.​

​

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Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/investing/2012/11/19/death-twinkies-union-contract-hit/#ixzz2DIfMxot3​

 

Union contract hit!? Like this: View attachment 871


!?

 

Another example of class warfare: "Twinkie CEO Admits Company Took Employees Pensions and Put It Toward Executive Pay"

It's really all the fault of the unions though.

 

Hostess offered the baker's union a deal to return to work. The union balked and now 18,500 people are laid off. Who is to blame?

 

The management made out like the robber barons that they are, the pension fund got raided more or less legally, the brands are worth a lot and are being sold off to the highest bidder, manufacturing will resume somewhere where the workers are more easily exploited, the supply of those weird little embalmed cakes will resume and all will be well with the world.

 

If only the baker's union had agree to return to work like the Teamster's agreed to do. 18,500 employees would be working right now instead of wondering where their next paycheck will come from. Tsk tsk.

 

Gosh. When you put it like that Coin Hostess is just swell!

Did they offer this deal before or after they had pilfered the pension funds?