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This article from the New Yorker asserts that Unions are being made the scapegoat, it was management and its failure to adapt:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/11/who-killed-the-twinkie.html

EXCERPT:

Management, of course, blames the company’s demise on the greedy, unreasonable unions. But, while the strike may well have sent Hostess over the edge, the hard truth is that it probably should have gone out of business a long time ago. The company has been steadily losing money, and market share, for years. And its core problem has not been excessively high compensation costs or pension contributions. Its core problem has been that the market for its products changed, but it did not. Twinkies and Ding Dongs obviously aren’t anyone’s idea of the perfect twenty-first-century snack food. More important, the theoretical flagship of Hostess’s product line, Wonder Bread, has gone from being a key part of the archetypical American diet to a tired also-ran.

Hostess’s management certainly bears some of the blame for its failure to successfully adapt, though the company made numerous (and failed) attempts to introduce healthier products. But the simple truth is that this kind of failure is endemic to the system—there are always going to be companies that are unable to change in response to the marketplace. And those companies are supposed to go out of business. Not to be too clichéd about it, but this is what creative destruction is all about.

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I saw this while living in Michigan in the 1980’s. The employees of a bankrupt grocery chain, the state’s second oldest, voted to PUT THE COMPANY OUT OF BUSINESS (and themselves out of a job) rather than accept wage concessions.

But Richie Trumka was instrumental in Obama winning his re-election, so help is on the way. Look for the taxpayers to end up owning Twinkies (even as Moochelle spends even more of our money in an effort to convince us not to eat them).

BTW, stay away from Walmart stores on Black Friday. The unions are going to launch their full-court press to organize them and it’s gonna be chaos.

I was in a unionized company for 17 years before it essentially went belly up. We made great product, had one of the world’s greatest R&D organizations and had a pretty good relationship with management. They overestimated the demand for their product, overexpanded to meet that demand and gave unrealistic profit expectations to investors. When the bottom started falling out many employees actually bought more stock because they couldn’t believe a company so good could be run so badly. They thought it was a blip. Our stock lost over 90% of its value. Massive layoffs left once busy factories looking like downtown Detroit. Just about everyone was devestated except the top management team, who walked away rich, fat and happy. Sure, they walked away with millions instead of hundreds of millions but hundreds of thousands of families were devestated. I can’t even begin to think about the losses other than financial. Dissolving marriages, bankruptcies, even suicides. The failure was entirely because of mismanagement. The company was Lucent Technologies, look it up. The company I started with before Lucent was spun off, AT&T, isn’t run much better. I have no idea how it is still even in business.