First it was SEIU union thugs tossing beatdowns at TEA Partiers, and Democrat Congressmen letting them shout down citizens at constituent forums. Then it was the teacher's union in Wisconsin, trashing their statehouse and generally acting like a bunch of lawless creeps who I wouldn't trust with my children for a minute. Now it's a union killing their own employer and one of America's most ubiquitous brands.
The last couple of days I kept hearing about how Hostess management said they would be forced to cease operations and liquidate the company's assets if the union wouldn't agree to a deal. I figured it would be like most other labor disputes, with brinksmanship being tempered by the obvious reality that the workers would be better off with a job than with nothing at all.
But I was wrong. The unions decided to let their last hope of saving anyone's jobs go, and now the company looks like they'll be liquidated, and every single employee will lose their job. Amazing. Stating that the company doesn't have the resources to weather an extended strike, Hostess CEO Gregory Rayburn announced today that everyone's losing their jobs, and the company's assets will be sold. Big win for the union, I guess, but it's a huge loss for the 18,000 workers. Correction. Ex-workers.
The most mystifying thing about is that most likely Twinkies and Ding-Dongs and their related products will survive. The product brands will be sold, and we probably won't have to suffer any type of interruption in our Twinkie supply, thank God. The ownership will get screwed, of course, having to sell the brands for whatever they can get. But the biggest losers are the workers. With unemployment at 8% and likely to go higher based on all the layoff announcements I've seen the past couple of weeks, how many of these workers do you ecpect to find jobs at all, much less better jobs?
To everyone's great relief, the union bigwigs who caused it all will be ok. None of them are likely to lose their jobs, and they'll no doubt prance on, free to create more suffering at whatever lucky company gets to host their next shakedown. I wonder how many of the people in that picture up top had any idea how successful they'd be at "sticking it to the man?" Somehow I doubt this is the outcome they wanted.
I'm not sure what the deal was that the Hostess workers' union rejected, but I have to wonder if the union bigwigs feel like their workers are somehow better off with another 18,000 of them out of work. Well, they got what they wanted.
