Say goodbye to Twinkies

It always comes down to the same thing.

Unions claim that Management are idiots and ruined the company with debt. The workers should get paid more for doing the "Work".

When they don't get what they want, they strike and hope it puts so much pressure on the company that they cave in and give the workers what they want. I think generally it gets worked out. In this case, the company said "Screw it" and shut its doors.

Now there are probably a lot of issues playing into it; bad economy, change in appetite, bad acquisitions etc but the union issue is a part of it. It's the final straw.

Hostess is a private company so I don't know it's financials but I've gleaned that they had assets of almost a billion at the beginning of the year. They had liabilities of 1.43 billion. Included in that is debt of just under 900 million. Not good. Part of those liabilities were pension obligations to workers.

At the end of the day, the workers are always going to get hurt when a company shuts down and with 18,000 workers it's a huge expense that will have to be tweaked if a company is to stay afloat. Evidently the 5,000 unionized workers were enough make a difference... And they did.

So closing the doors is probably what needs to happen here.