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[–] CrazyInAnInsaneWorld 4 points 4 points (+8|-4) ago 

Bullshit. The very reason Hostess was in trouble in the first place was oversized executive pay and golden parachutes. For example, while they were filing for their SECOND BANKRUPTCY, the Board voted to cut Baker Pay by 8% and Benefits by 32% (Remember these wages and benefits are contractual obligations the company must meet as part of negotiations with the baker's union, there is no "We're hurting right now, so we have to ask you to take a pay cut" because it was a concrete business agreement) while at the same time the CEO got a 300% RAISE!

Even the Wall Street Journal, hardly a pro-union publication, notes that creditors of Hostess think what Hostess did was fishy as a Polish fishmongerer's stand:

Creditors of Hostess Brands Inc. said in court papers the company may have "manipulated" its executives' salaries higher in the months leading up to its Chapter 11 filing, in what the creditors called a possible effort by Hostess to "sidestep" Bankruptcy Code compensation provisions.

The committee representing Hostess's unsecured creditors alleges that information it has gathered suggests "the possibility" that the company converted a chunk of its top executives' pay from performance-based bonuses to salary, "at least in part to sidestep" rules designed to ensure that companies in bankruptcy aren't enticing their employees to stay on board with the promise of cash, according to documents filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, N.Y.

Then they try to turn around and say that these salary raises were based on performance? By whose definition of the term?!? The company got run into the ground, that's not something you reward Management for, it's something they should have been fired for!

Then it comes out WHY Hostess no longer wanted to fund pensions.:

Hostess later admitted to using wages that were supposed to help fund pensions for the company's operations.

So they were looking to eliminate their pension-obligation, because they had raided the worker's pension fund to run other parts of the company, when they had given themselves massive increases in pay, even as they ran the company into the ground. The Board of Directors basically gutted Hostess from the inside-out, split the spoils amongst themselves, then placed the blame on the workers.

Don't get me wrong, I despise overreaching Union power and Union Corruption just as much as the next Right-leaning guy...but don't act like this wasn't a problem at the top of the command chain, because what actually happened was well-documented. The internet never forgets. This was clearly a case of management gutting the company, for personal aggrandizement, then trying to deflect blame onto the workers after they had already made off with most of the Lifeblood Capital of the company, in essence blaming the workers for the consequences of Management's mismanagement of the company.

Fuck off with this Pro-Corporate-Raider propaganda...