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Twinkies maker Hostess going out of business

DaveFagan said:
"The bakery union workers have already given leadership the right to strike. ... 1 month before filing bankruptcy this company gave ALL upper management a HUGE pay raise and ... paying into the pension and yet have KEPT that 3.40 an hour and out it in their pockets."I couldn't find the link to verify this, but I had remembered reading it yesterday. Upper management tripled its pay. The union paid $3.40 per hour, $136 per week back to the company and the company kept the money and that is a lot of money. There's two sides to this story. It was taken over by Bain Capital type vulture capitalists and milked of its assets and that's just good business, eh?Here's the link BCTGM Strike Vote Wednesday | emporiagazette.com
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In your article I see where Hostess stopped contributing the $3.40 to the pension fund, but did not see your assertion as stated here:

1 month before filing bankruptcy this company gave ALL upper management a HUGE pay raise and ... paying into the pension and yet have KEPT that 3.40 an hour and out it in their pockets.
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This would seem to be a pretty nefarious assumption on your part. Can you clear that up for me?
 
j-mac said:
In your article I see where Hostess stopped contributing the $3.40 to the pension fund, but did not see your assertion as stated here:



This would seem to be a pretty nefarious assumption on your part. Can you clear that up for me?
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Originally posted by MaggieD in different section
I wasn't aware of some of this stuff:

The latest dispute with the bakers' union started in August 2011 when the company stopped making contributions to their pension plan and froze it. The union filed suit to recover the $3.40 an hour employees were contributing to that pension plan that the company failed to contribute. $136.00 a week!! That money was lost.

During the re-structuring in 2009, the employees were asked to "give back" $10 a week to help the company re-organize. They did so. They also gave up some entitlements at this time.

While some point out that Hostess was able to negotiate the Teamster's contract, what isn't widely known is that the company gave a 25% equity stake to the union in return for their concessions. No such deal was offered the bakers' union.

Several years ago, top management gave themselves HUGE raises several years ago. The CEO who engineered that has now left the company, and the present CEO got three of the top executives to agree to $1 a year until they were out of bankruptcy. That was a good thing; but not before executives had raided the company.

Hostess deserved to go out of the business. The bakers' union employees are out of jobs, but this is, in my opinion, an unethical company who's finally getting what it deserves.

The Winfield Daily Courier > Opinion > Staff Commentary

How the bankruptcy judge could allow the company to KEEP the $3.40 an hour the employees donated to their own pension funds is absolutely beyond me.

Does this change your opinion of the strike? It changes mine...
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The Winfield Daily Courier > Archives > Opinion > Staff Commentary > The death of Twinkies and 450 Kansas jobs


In other words the money that the bakers were putting into (from their own money) the pension plan was not going into the pension plan but being used by the company for operations. That $3.40 /hr they lost (or in my opinion stolen from them), a larger amount of money then they were being asked to cut from their compensation. I dont know about you, but if someone steals from me, my trust in them drops to zero
 
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Lord Tammerlain said:
Originally posted by MaggieD in different section



The Winfield Daily Courier > Archives > Opinion > Staff Commentary > The death of Twinkies and 450 Kansas jobs


In other words the money that the bakers were putting into (from their own money) the pension plan was not going into the pension plan but being used by the company for operations. That $3.40 /hr they lost (or in my opinion stolen from them), a larger amount of money then they were being asked to cut from their compensation. I dont know about you, but if someone steals from me, my trust in them drops to zero
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Thanks for that LT, and in light of this revelation, I hope the execs that engineered this portion of what happened face charges.
 
j-mac said:
Thanks for that LT, and in light of this revelation, I hope the execs that engineered this portion of what happened face charges.
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It was generally legal because the pension fund is generally considered a company asset. They will not be facing charges.

By going bankrupt the company will not have to pay back the pension, and the PBGC will take the remaining pension assets to continue to pay out any pension obligations, but at a drastically reduced rate (perhaps 60% of what pensioners were getting before.


During the boom years in the 1990s companies pension funds were seeing very high returns, any returns that were over and above the pension requirements were put into the companies general funds and increased profits drastically.
 
Lord Tammerlain said:
Originally posted by MaggieD in different section
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The problem is, you said a month prior, that article says several years. So it in fact does not support your statement at all.

And what, they got $3.40 an hour into their retirement package? Damn, I wish I had one half that good. Besides, I thought that was part of the job of the unions in the first place. TO collect all that "paneion money", so they could invest it into junkets and casinos in Las Vegas then demand ever more.
 
Lord Tammerlain said:
It was generally legal because the pension fund is generally considered a company asset. They will not be facing charges.
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And who actually has these "pension funds" that were given out by Hostess?

Well, quite often it is not Hostess at all.

http://www.teamster.org/sites/teamster.org/files/Teamster_Hostess_Pension_Funds_april_27.pdf

Looking through this list, quite often it is the union itself that holds the "pension funds", so they are not held by Hostess at all.

The only thing cancelled was the money they themselves put into it, not the fund itself. Those are still right were they were before, unless the union blew them.
 
this is one worker's take on the situation.

Daily Kos: Inside the Hostess Bankery

the source site has lousy credibility, but i don't have reason to believe that the employee is lying.

i still maintain my position that the strike was timed terribly. however, if this poster is telling the truth about the salary cuts, i think that might have been my "**** you" point, also.

CNN also has interviewed another baker making the same numbers claim : Workers react to Hostess closing with range of fear to acceptance - Nov. 16, 2012

basically, a baker making $48k in 2004 saw his salary drop to $34k last year. additional cuts would have brought it down to $25k in five years. add in loss of pension contribution and a doubling of weekly benefit contributions by the employee.

again, this is what workers say they're looking at. i'm not sure how that jibes with the published offer to workers.
 
Oozlefinch said:
The problem is, you said a month prior, that article says several years. So it in fact does not support your statement at all.

And what, they got $3.40 an hour into their retirement package? Damn, I wish I had one half that good. Besides, I thought that was part of the job of the unions in the first place. TO collect all that "paneion money", so they could invest it into junkets and casinos in Las Vegas then demand ever more.
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Sounds alittle like class envy

The did not get $3,40 an hour into the pension plan, that is the issue



Because of the pension freeze, the BCTGM Union filed a lawsuit in federal court to recover the $3.40 per hour contributed by the employees that was not contributed to the Bakery Confections International Pension by Hostess during the freeze. For a 40-hour work week, Hostess employees were contributing $136 weekly for a 40-hour work week to the frozen pension fund, which was not being contributed by Hostess.
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Hostess filed bankruptcy in September 2004 as Interstate Bakeries and came out of bankruptcy in 2009. During the restructuring, employees were asked to contribute $10 per week back to Hostess to help the company rebuild. Until the recent strike, the $3.40 per hour and the $10 per week were still being extracted from Hostess employees’ paychecks.
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Oozlefinch said:
And who actually has these "pension funds" that were given out by Hostess?

Well, quite often it is not Hostess at all.

http://www.teamster.org/sites/teamster.org/files/Teamster_Hostess_Pension_Funds_april_27.pdf

Looking through this list, quite often it is the union itself that holds the "pension funds", so they are not held by Hostess at all.

The only thing cancelled was the money they themselves put into it, not the fund itself. Those are still right were they were before, unless the union blew them.
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In this case the union members by the looks of it were having $3.40/hr from their paycheck by the COMPANY which was supposed to go to the pension plan, but was not being deposited into the pension plan but being retained by the company
 
It does't matter how much was put into the fund - what matters is that some people apparently think that even when a company is struggling to stay afloat and above water they should maintain the same level of monetary output.

I think that's bull**** - you can't. I'ts not possible . . . if your revenue is reduced then your output needs to be reduced, too. . . preferably AHEAD of being totally ****ed.

I think they waited too long and weren't proactive enough - they should have been doing all these drastic measures a long time ago, over a period of several years.
 
CalGun said:
Well everyone has opinions but I'm extremely proud of crossing the line of a blue flu as a young officer and giving my community 14 hours a day - not too mention the 6 hours of over time was killer. If you think anyone not in a union is a boy toy of the rich what is a unionite - a boy toy of a socialist union boss?
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You have to believe everybody is as slavish as you and that sticking up for your rights really means slaving for a different Master.
 
Oozlefinch said:
So why the unions and strikes then?

I tell you, I lost all my confidence in MLB and in one of my favorite pitchers, Orel Hershiser, when they went on strike. Back in 1994, he was the Players Spokeshole during the strike, when we had no baseball at all. And back then, he went on camera and almost cried at how "abused" the players were, and how they "were not getting their fair share".

All the time, he was making over $4 million a year.

Oh yes, my heart really bled for him. It bled so bad I have never been to a baseball game ever since. This is a guy that is tallented, but he makes more throwing a ball in 2 months then I will ever make in my entire lifetime. Then he has the nerve to get up and say how it is not enough.

That is my general opinions of unions now. They will lie, cheat, and abuse the system however they can to exploit as much money as they can. And what about the thousands of others that work at the stadiums? I have sold concessions at sporting events myself, for comission and nothing else. Now I made pretty damned good money doing it, but when there is a strike it throws all of them out of work also. And the cleaning crews, and the security, and the parking attendents, and everybody else that relies on that income to put food on the table.

So they feel abused and strike, and to hell with the people who really are working hard to make ends meet. Baseball, football, hockey, basketball, I for one am sick to death of all the overpaid union primadonnas. They make often times insane wages, and the burden is then shifted to those of us that buy their products. But they do not are, as long as they get the most they can.

$18 and free health benefits for bagging groceries? $4 million a year for throwing around a baseball? $25 an hour for driving a school bus 4 hours a day? It is no wonder that our economy is broken, and more and more people are trying to ditch unions when they can.

And don't give me the "they deserved it" nonsense. The Teamsters thought the offer was more then fair, and they and their members voted to accept the new contract. And they are pretty pissed at the Bakers, for forcing them all to loose their jobs because they were not willing to negotiate. So because of one union, two unions now have members without jobs.

Good going there.
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More hypocrisy by those who don't show such resentment to their very own bosses. There is a kind of union of CEOs that gets them their obscene salary and bonuses, 456 times the lowest paid worker as opposed to Japan's 11 times. But you only show sympathy for the underpaid sports-concession worker, never for the victims of the pigs who oink out such propaganda against workers sticking up for their rights through the power of numbers, the only power they have in this topheavy system. In sports, I call the owners grassgrowers. If you eliminate the players, the only revenue the owners would get would be from people who wanted to watch the grass grow. It's the same everywhere else, but Capitaliban advertising makes people believe that the corporate bigshots create the products. From an unbrainwashed perspective, the owners and CEOs only hike the ball; the employees make the ball move.

Imagine a graduate of a Capitaliban madrassah commenting on a 90-yard run from his new Oinkonomics perspective. "The center just created a touchdown!"
 
when workers own their workplace, they can do whatever they want. Until then, tough cookies as long as the law is being complied with.
 
PrometheusBound said:
From an unbrainwashed perspective, the owners and CEOs only hike the ball; the employees make the ball move.
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In your scenario, when there are as many centers as there are halfbacks, then we'll talk.
 
PrometheusBound said:
More hypocrisy by those who don't show such resentment to their very own bosses.
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Actually, my boss is the US Taxpayer. So no, quite obviously I do not show resentment towards them.

Should I start to resent them? I know, I and my other million plus will unionize, and go on strike, demanding fair wages and overtime compensation. I mean, what in the heck do the people of this country think, making me work 24-36+ hour shifts, with no compensation! And to tell me I have to pack up and move from California to North Carolina to California to Alabama to Texas to California, just because that is where they think I should be!

Member of the US Military, largest section of Government employees, without a union.
 
I'm thinking part of the company reorganizes down here in the south, except they will be making Twankies.
 
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