While the media is busy blaming the union for Hostess's demise, nobody is reporting that CEO Brian Driscoll helped himself to a 300 percent pay increase. Just another example of the one percent literally taking food out of the mouths of everyone else -- in this case Twinkies and Ho Hos.
Driscoll's salary went from $750,000 to $2,550,000. Another executive's salary went from $500,000 to $900,000 and another doubled his salary from $375,000 to $656,256.
In the meantime, the company was eliminating its largest debt -- the Union Health and Welfare/Pension to which it owed $989,323,000 as reported in January 2012. If there's no money to pay workers and you're asking them to make concessions such as lower pay and higher insurance premiums, where do you get off doubling and tripling your salaries? Ask workers to take a pay cut while you suck every available dollar out of the company you can and steal their pensions and you wonder why they won't accept your deal?!
Hostess clearly has had numerous problems for a long time now. They first filed bankruptcy in 2004. Then after Driscoll helped himself to his 300 percent raise, Gregory Rayburn was appointed CEO -- the sixth CEO in the past ten years. He immediately reduced the salaries of the four top executives to $1 per year. A day late and a dollar short.
Even without the pension costs, which the company quit paying this year, experts have been commenting on the company's struggles and dim outlook for the future. They emerged from the 2004 bankruptcy more in debt than when they went in. Combine that with bad sales and poor, greedy management eating up all the profits. It's no wonder Twinkies are now extinct.
Image Source: lindachaousis.com
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Comments: 5
Now instead of a job, all the previously employed have 24 hours a day to be on the public dole.
The quote you have made, can not in anyway be true. Inasmuch, as all Employee Labor Unions are prohibited from becoming a business and neither can a Labor Union accept a share in the ownership of a business nor could they have a Union Representative as a paid officer on any business's Board of Directors.
Labor Unions which represents employees, must be totally devoid of all activety within the employees workplace other than representing the employees in negotiating the benefits, wages and hours of work along with associated ancillary parts and parcels of the Employee / Company Contractual Agreement.
Therefore both scenarios which you have quoted would be against federal labor laws, of which both the company and the labor union would in violation thereof if they were involved in such agreement between the two entities.
Doesn't sound like such a great deal, now, does it? And conservatives are calling the union members "thugs" and "greedy" for wanting a livable wage. What a shame.
Companies are owned by investors who want to make a return on their money. When their is no return the companies go out of business.
Start placing blame where it belongs - government policies that encourage sending jobs overseas, high taxes both Federal and State on corporations, overburdening regulation and sweetheart deals to let foreign goods into the US cheaply.