On Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:49:23 +0000 (UTC), (Edward A.
Falk) wrote:

In article , azotic wrote:

Hostess management has been running the company into the ground for a
decade.

In 2005 the union made major concessions to the company, to the tune
of $150M/year.

They cut bakers pay by 8% and benefits by 32%

The CEO raised his own pay by 300%. Nine executives
received 60-100% raises while filing for their second
bankruptcy.

In 2011, they raided the employee pension fund and now owe it $160M

So now they blame the $20/hour employees for *their* failure.

A good article by someone who's had his annual salary drop from $43k/year
to $34k/year and Hostess wants him to go down to $25k/year:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/1...ostess-Bankery

It's what I would expect of the Daily Kos. They conveniently paper
over the other problems. like massive featherbedding by the Teamsters
and other unions that they worked with...

Hostess had bought several brands over the years, and they all came
with their own different Union Contracts that had to be honored -
which usually meant keeping a separate distribution fleet for each
brand and product line. The Sweets (Twinkie) drivers couldn't deliver
Bread products, and vice versa. Which meant massive inefficiencies in
the delivery chain, with a half dozen different trucks visiting the
same stores.

And the delivery drivers were just that - Delivering to the Back Rooms
of the stores only. They needed to send out a separate Stocker to
take the product out and put it on the store shelves, and pull the
outdate product to take back to the warehouse. And separate stockers
for each product line.

Oh, and the drivers can't load their own trucks, that's a separate
classification. And they had different loaders for each of the
different product lines.

And each of these separate contracts had Healthcare and Pension costs
in "Pooled" accounts between multiple employers, where the healthy
companies are dinged more to support the weak companies - and you
could never get a straight answer about what the costs actually were.
Deliberately muddied so they'd get paid.

If they could get rid of that mess so they had One crew of loaders
that did all the trucks, and more Drivers who would service all the
various Breads and Sweets and Specialty products at the store straight
to the shelves and pull the out-dates all by themselves, they could
slash the costs and provide MORE jobs...

Each route Driver serves fewer stores per week because he spends more
time there, so all of the former Stockers and Loaders become Drivers
and get their own store route to service. Sales go way Up because
the product will be there where it's needed, and costs go down because
it's only handled once.

Now Hostess should have been able to get the labor contracts modified
or tossed in Bankruptcy Court, but I'll bet you they were warned not
to touch them by the Teamsters or they'd all walk. But it seems the
Bakers Union pushed them all in front of the bus first.

-- Bruce --