Union Jack

The right-wing anti-union ferver is on at the Oklahoman, where they chose to run three (!!) letters condemning unions as the cause of Hostess' problems and, now, bankruptcy.

Consider the maddening letter from Dennis Miller (not, clearly, the comedian) of Edmond, who sarcastically writes:

Way to go, union workers at Hostess! You showed that terrible company who's boss! Of course, you're out of a job. No problem. Another company will buy up the rights to produce Hostess products and they must hire you. Wait, they already have bakeries and employees and your reputation of putting a company out of business won't put you at the top of their hiring lists. 

Again, no problem. You're a union and you got Barack Obama re-elected so he'll extend your unemployment benefits as long as you want them. Wait, he can't do that. Congress could but the country is broke. Once again, no problem. You can just retire. Wait, there's no pension since there's no Hostess. No problem! The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. will take over your pension. Wait, they're technically broke, too — with more liabilities than assets.

What the hell is that about?!? I emphasized a few crazy lines, but I might as well have bolded the whole  thing, because it's all nuts. To understand, let's just look at some realities.

In 2004, Hostess filed for bankruptcy due to poor management with lots of debt-- most of it to a hedge fund. In order to keep things afloat, labor agreed to massive concessions in salary and benefits amounting to over $110 million a year. A worker who was making ca. $48,000 in 2003 was making ca. $36,000 after the concessions, not including cuts to benefits.

Then:

a private equity company called Ripplewood Holdings brought the company out of bankruptcy in 2009 for $130 million and rechristened it Hostess Brands. The hedge funds and other lenders forgave some old debt and extended some new debt. Ripplewood convinced the other stakeholders that it could turn the company around and, apparently, convinced them so completely that only Hostess Management and Ripplewood had seats on the board. Neither the unions nor the hedge funds acquired voting seats as part of the deals struck to keep the company afloat. They just trusted Ripplewood to turn things around, implement new technologies, introduce new products, and rebuild aging infrastructure.

That obviously didn't happen. Instead, by 2011 the company had lower sales and greater debt than before Ripplewood bought it. Still, when the CEO-- Brian Driscoll-- resigned, he was still able to walk away with his $1.5 milllion in salary.

Once the next round of negotiations came, workers were looking at taking cuts so that they could make something like $25,000 a year. Remember, just a few years ago, they were making almost twice that. As one employee said, "[i]t will be hard to replace the job I had, but it will be easy to replace the job they were trying to give me." And that about sums it up. At $25,000 a year, you're looking at ca. $12 an hour. This is supposed to be the annual wage for a household's breadwinner (no pun intended), and the anti-union people think that that is OK?

As Jake Blumgart notes,

Pegging a horrendously managed company’s fate to labor’s larger troubles provides an exceedingly limited understanding of the wider context. The Hostess debacle is only half the story of labor’s decline: Manufacturing companies that are still organized from the glory days of the mid-20th century are seen as representative of the union movement because current American labor law makes it almost impossible to organize workers in, say, the growing service sector.

Back to Mr. Miller's letter, though. Would any serious letter include a gratuitous jab at President Obama here? And about those pensions...

In July of 2011 we received a letter from the company. It said that the $3+ per hour that we as a Union contribute to the pension was going to be 'borrowed' by the company until they could be profitable again. Then they would pay it all back. The Union was notified of this the same time and method as the individual members. No contact from the company to the Union on a national level. 

This money will never be paid back. The company filed for bankruptcy and the judge ruled that the $3+ per hour was a debt the company couldn't repay. The Union continued to work despite this theft of our self-funded pension contributions for over a year. I consider this money stolen. No other word in the English language describes what they have done to this money.

Somehow, though, this is all the fault of unions. Not management, but unions. This is the message the plutocrats at the Oklahoman want to push, and so they let their brainwashed readers do the dirty work. Ironically, this sentiment has left many Oklahomans struggling to lead a middle-class lifestyle as they, too, are forced to work for low wages and few benefits. But hey, at least they aren't in a union!