“Question 3: If it’s not true, how can we kill this meme that execs killed the company not the union”
Think about it... Why would an exec raise their salery to the point of bankrupting the company and killing the goose that laid the golden egg?
It was a privately held company if they wanted to pay themselves that money it was their right to do so.Who told the workers that they were entitled to what the owner had built?
If the company was operating under bankruptcy protection, would the brankruptcy judge approve such an increase?
ask them why drivers that deliver cake cannot deliver bread and drivers that deliver bread cannot deliver cake so they had to have two different trucks to deliver cake and bread products to the same store and then another employee to move the product from the store room to the shelves and why drivers wouldn’t load their own trucks and or why workers who loaded bread are not allowed to load cake???
it's called feather bedding...
It sounds like the Hostess execs wanted to squeeze all the money they could out of the company before they filed for bankruptcy.
What business is it of the Unions ,how much money Executives make?
These lefties aren’t too concerned about the exploding pensions in the public sector management, like professors,etc?
These are all good responses, but in the new post-American world we have to avoid bourgeois constructs like math and ask, “Why didn’t Obama save Hostess!”. Obama lied, Twinkies died!
CORRECTION: An earlier version of as well as an earlier headline of this post incorrectly stated that Greg Rayburn received a 300 percent raise as CEO of Hostess as the company approached bankruptcy. Rayburn wasn't CEO of Hostess until after the company filed for bankruptcy. The post also incorrectly stated that he was paid a salary of up to $2,550,000 per year. His salary when he joined the company was $100,000 per month, according to a company spokesman.
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.
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.
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.
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.