Management was looking for ways to remain solvent, but the one union wouldn’t budge. (The Teamsters union did accept management’s proposal.) It was a much smaller version of what happened to the auto industry. A company just cannot pay out sweet benefits, pay, AND pensions to retired workers and stay solvent, especially when your competitors are not following your same socially responsible model.
That being said, I’ll concede that doubling top executives’ pay before you ask the workhorses to take a pay cut certainly stinks to high heavens.
Off topic, but I think that the next “revolution” is this country is going to be the middle class workers demanding the executive compensation be reeled in. Executive pay has risen dramatically in the last few decades. I’d support laws capping executive pay at x times the lowest paid employee. I’d also support a change of the board of directors to mandate that the workers have some representation. Currently, we have the executives creating their own benefit packages. Not suprisingly, they are sickeningly generous with themselves.
I think a grass roots organization would solve this problem. Our legislators won’t do anything because our politicians are in bed with the executives.
Hostess and the bakers union have agreed to mediation on Tuesday in a last ditch effort to avoid liquidation and the loss of jobs. If the talks are unsuccessful, Hostess will be back in court on Wednesday to seek permission to close out the business.
No, the word “shouldn’t” made this into an emotional thing. And economics may be objective, but I wouldn’t call it “very” objective, because different approaches yield different results. I for one don’t see why increasing the pay of unskilled workers requires a corresponding increase in pay of skilled workers. Sure, the latter will want it, but unless the unskilled price goes above the skilled price, there still will be people willing to take the job.
And how skilled are these machine operators, anyways? I thought they were trained on the job. If so, then I know bankers (machine workers trained on the job) who make $10 an hour to the unskilled wholesale grocery box pullers who make $12 an hour. This works because the bankers do not want to do the highly physical work of the pullers, nor do they want to work at night.
I’d imagine the Union will make concessions. I can’t see their members wanting to lose jobs and their pensions four weeks before Christmas.
Hostess isn’t bluffing. They will pull the plug. Really they’ve already done that and it’s only this judge’s intervention that is giving the unions one last chance to save their jobs.
Even if Hostess goes under in another year or so, that still buys time for the bakers to find other work. Or even start retraining for other work. But, right now whats important is earning a paycheck.
To put it another way: nobody spends 4 years earning a degree so they can earn the same amount of money as the guy who walks around emptying the garbage cans.
I understand the desire for this to actually be the case, that “physically demanding”, or “undesirable due to becoming sweaty or dirty” or “working at night” jobs should be remunerated more heartily.
But it is true, what a previous poster said about supply/demand. If anyone can do the job of hefting a garbage can at 2AM, then that makes the garbage can-hefter pretty easily replaceable.
If the garbage can is so heavy that not everyone can heft it, that’s when you will find a worker pushing a button on a machine. Again, an easily replaceable position.
It doesn’t sit well with some of us, sure, but it is the way it is, and rightfully so, in my estimation.
There is a distinction here: “can anyone do the job” versus “will anyone do the job.”
Both have an effect on the wage. It doesn’t matter how unskilled a job is if nobody will apply for it at the current wage, and a field that requires special training but is glutted with people may not pay so well as you’d think.
Trash collectors in these parts actually make very good wages (and great benefits), but they are also considered skilled laborers. In addition to having crappy hours and working in extreme temperatures, they also have to have CDLs. (They used to have 2 men per truck, but now one man drives and picks up the trash.)
I was actually thinking of the guy who collects trash in an office setting, who is usually some old guy trying to suppliment his Social Security payment. Literally a job that anybody could do.
Anyway, I’m a bit surprised that the last-chance effort failed. I thought the union would have been thinking, “Holy shit, they’re really serious about closing the company! We’d better deal!” Again, I’m wondering if this is the national union throwing the local chapter under the bus in some misguided effort to appear tough.
