Posted on 11/18/2012 7:12:53 PM PST by Explodo
So I'm getting the business from the local lefties here in Minnesota on the Hostess thing.
They Keep bringing up how some of the Hostess Exec's received a 300% raise while the company was in trouble and negotiating with the union. Somehow this alleged fact removes all resonsibility from the union.
I've been trying to research this and all I've found on the web are links to the uber-leftie sites who use this to justify union actions
Question 1:, Is this factoid true? (Execs gave themselves a huge Raise
Question 2: If true, why did the execs do this?
Question 3: If it's not true, how can we kill this meme that execs killed the company not the union
Thanks for comments in advance, appreciate your time
There was a documentary called “Who Killed the Electric Car?” Now we should have one called “Who Killed the Twinkie?”
Jon Corzine should buy Hostess out of bankruptcy. He’s wonderful at managing money. And he has $1.6B hidden somewhere that he can invest into the company.
Well. I don’t think the pay of the CEO or a few executives is going to bankrupt the company, why would shareholders allow that? It doesn’t really make much sense.
Anyways...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2960918/posts
A Labor Victory Over Hostess (satire)
Tell them unions lie. Tell them the Teamsters accepted the contract after examining the company’s books.
Tell them to give you proof to support their claim about executive pay because the Teamsters did not see fit to kill the company and all those jobs. Otherwise, it is a bakers’ union lie designed to cover up a major failure that lost 18,000 innocent people their jobs.
Except he is right.
But blame is properly shared all around.
Best response I’ve seen so far, and be sure to mention that the Huff Post retracted the ‘tripled salary’ lie.
No he isn’t. That is just more baseless ‘beat up on capitalism’ demagoguery.
Wow! Thanks for that link.
unless it can be shown that any “bonuses” were contractual, based on longevity or something like that -— what you assume happened would be criminal fraud -— you cant suck money out in anticipation of bankruptcy and get away with it.
Here’s a fairly in-depth article giving background from earlier this year:
http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/26/hostess-twinkies-bankrupt/
The important thing to remind anyone about this is that the offer given to the baker’s union wasn’t made by management, but by the BK court. The company has been in BK since early this year. Management’s hands aren’t free to do whatever they want - the court (or their appointed administrator for the DIP) is running the show.
He is not correct. He basically has stated that the republicans are guaranteed to sell out everyone to the dims.....now if you really believe that then what I say is you probably ought to frequent Alex Jones’ boards.
Well excuse me, princess. What does it sound like to you?
The real losers in this are the kids who didn’t want to go to college and now have lost the opportunity to apply in the future for these good jobs. The present continues to eat the future.
Sorry I am not as cynical as some of the diehards around here. Not all republicans are out to destroy the nation hand in hand with the dims. You can’t possibly believe that John Kasich is a sell out....but then again maybe you can. Tell me that people like Jim DeMint and Allen West are sell outs....adn I still won’t believe you.
so be as cynical as you want I am not getting on that trolly
Even as it played the numbers game, Hostess had to face chaos in the corner office at the worst possible time. Driscoll, the CEO, departed suddenly and without explanation in March. It may have been that the Teamsters no longer felt it could trust him. In early February, Hostess had asked the bankruptcy judge to approve a sweet new employment deal for Driscoll. Its terms guaranteed him a base annual salary of $1.5 million, plus cash incentives and “long-term incentive” compensation of up to $2 million. If Hostess liquidated or Driscoll were fired without cause, he’d still get severance pay of $1.95 million as long as he honored a noncompete agreement. When the Teamsters saw the court motion, Ken Hall, the union’s secretary-treasurer and No. 2 man, was irate. So much, he thought, for what he described as Driscoll’s “happy talk” about “shared sacrifice.” Hall says he tracked Driscoll down by phone and told him, “If you don’t withdraw this motion, these negotiations are done.” Hostess withdrew the motion a few weeks later when Driscoll left — the same Driscoll who, Hostess told the court in its motion, was “key” to “reestablishing” Hostess’s “competitive position going forward.” Abbott and Costello couldn’t have made this stuff up if they’d gone to Wharton. The board replaced Driscoll with Greg Rayburn, a restructuring expert Hostess had hired as a consultant only nine days earlier. Rayburn was a serial turnaround specialist who had worked with such high-profile distressed businesses as WorldCom, Muzak Holdings, and New York City Off-Track Betting. He became Hostess’s sixth CEO in a decade. Within a month of taking over, Rayburn had to preside over a public-relations fiasco. Some unsecured creditors had informed the court that last summer — as the company was crumbling — four top Hostess executives received raises of up to 80%. (Driscoll had also received a pay raise back then.) The Teamsters saw this as more management shenanigans. “Looting” is how Hall described it in TV interviews. Dick Gephardt, former House majority leader and current CEO , Gephardt Group Dick Gephardt, former House majority leader and current CEO , Gephardt Group Rayburn announced that the pay of the four top executives would go down to $1 for the year, but that their full salaries would be reinstated no later than Jan. 1. Hostess pays Rayburn $125,000 a month, according to court filings. At the same time Rayburn became CEO, Gephardt’s son Matthew, 41, the COO of the Gephardt Group, was put on the Hostess board as a $100,000-a-year independent director.
The people who put money into the company to keep it afloat were probably Management. To bring the Bakers Union on board they gave them 25% equity and a seat on the Board. They may have then voted themselves a raise in return for dilution of equity to recover what they lost there.
Check the schedule 10-K/SEC filings. Public Corporations have to list the compensation of the top Executives. This inoformation is on line.
You should be able to look at the last several years to see how much their salaries have increased.
as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced I fear something terrible has happened www.unionfacts.com | Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers |
From what I understand, this all has to do with transportation. They have two different unions...one for bread and one for sweets. What the company wanted to do was to be able to transport BOTH at one time....currently or before they closed, the bread could not be transported with the sweets and vice versa....isn’t that the craziest? The question I have is, why would the unions want this end? They are out of money now too aren’t they? All those employers are out of work and can’t pay their union monthly fees. It seems like there are zero winners in this mess.
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