Atlas Ate the Twinkies

Occasionally, you hear about something on the news, and it seems like you are watching a bad movie.  That happened for me recently, with the death-rattles of the Hostess baking company, makers of the beloved Twinkie and several other well-known tasty treats. In case you haven't heard, they had to go out of business due to a union strike.  The union, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco and Grain Millers Union (BCTGM), declared a walk-out after the company tried to implement a wage cut to try to prevent bankruptcy.

Click the link:

Spare the Twinkie, Hostess

This is a very disturbing development.  After all, Twinkies and cockroaches were supposed to be the only things to survive the Apocalypse.  When the Earth is covered in mushroom clouds and everything is being dusted with a layer of radioactive fallout, there was supposed to be a final shot of a cockroach eating a Twinkie, so you could know that life will go on.  Now what am I supposed to hang my hopes on?  Diplomacy?  Please.

Of course, the whole thing is just an urban myth anyway.  It turns out that the supposed indefinite shelf life of a tasty Hostess Twinkie is really only 25 days.  I kind of wish I'd never researched that fact.  Ignorance is bliss.

Nothing Lasts Forever  (click the link)

 Be that as it may, the Hostess Baking Company has been making these little creme-filled delights since 1930.  They never really survived a zombie apocalypse, but they survived the freaking Great Depression.  They had a pretty solid product line that has stood the test of time.  Ever hear of Wonderbread?  Ho Hos?  Of course you have.   This stuff is an American icon.

So what brought this wonderful piece of Americana down?  Was it our increasing awareness of the dangers of trans-fats, processed flours, and sugars?  Please.  Americans were not about to abandon Twinkies.  Take a look at these pictures: 

You don't develop back boobs like these from obsessing over food labels.

I'm guessing he probably enjoys Twinkies.

No, it probably wasn't the nutritionally savvy American shopper that killed the Twinkie.  It was good old-fashioned collectivism.  Just the kind of stuff Ayn Rand writes about.  

Some examples:

*$52 million in workers’ comp claims in 2011, according to bankruptcy filing this January.

*372 union collective-bargaining agreements, requiring the company to maintain 80 different health and benefit plans, 40 pension plans, and a $31 million increase in wages and other benefits for 2012.

*Union work rules required cake and bread products to be delivered to a single retail location using two separate trucks (cake in one, bread on the other).

*Drivers were not allowed to load their own vehicles.  The workers who loaded bread weren't allowed to load cake.

I'm sort of amazed they lasted this long.

It would seem that the workers killed the golden goose.  They forgot that they were on the same team as the management and owners.  They were so obsessed with getting what they saw as their "fair share" that they cut their own life line.   What's more, they don't care.  

Twinkies bakers say they'd rather lose jobs than take pay cuts

 "I'd rather go work somewhere else or draw unemployment," said Kenneth Johnson, a worker at Hostess for 23 years.  Wow.  That says it all right there.  He would rather destroy the company altogether than accept a personal hardship.  Keep in mind that nothing at all was stopping him from quitting that job and finding one somewhere else.  Now there is no job at all, not even a low-paying one.  Good going, Kenny.

What Twinkies teach us about labor relations

It's a little reminiscent of Atlas Shrugged, though instead of railroad rails made of Rearden Metal, it's tasty treats made of enriched wheat flour and high-fructose corn syrup.  The important message is still the same.  We are all dependent on the producers in our economy.  If you squeeze them too hard, they just might stop producing, and the next thing you know, you're all out of Twinkies.