Hostess targets workers

By Jim Hightower

OtherWords

Here’s a case of good news oozing out of bad news, and vice versa.

The bad news is that Hostess Brands has sunk into bankruptcy. It couldn’t stay afloat with the $860-million debt piled onto it after a group of Wall Street speculators took over the 82-year-old company.

The good news is that devoted customers can still get their fix of five kinds of sugar, partially hydrogenated oil, polysorbate 60, artificial flavors, and yellow dye No. 5 — just a few of the ingredients in Hostess Twinkies. When top executives filed for Chapter 11 in January, they said the company would keep chugging out Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, and the like while working out the details of restructuring.

Twisted logic

Those “details” constitute the bad news flowing out of the good news. The CEO says that to become “a highly competitive company that provides secure employment for our employees,” Hostess must make those employees less secure by busting their pensions, cutting their medical benefits, and abrogating their labor contracts. Does this Twinkie-in-Chief understand how twisted his logic is?

Meanwhile, the workers point out that they’ve already made concessions — and it’s time for the profiteering corporate executives who filled Hostess with all that debt to stop sucking all the cream out of its Twinkies.

Jim Hightower, a radio commentator and public speaker, is also editor of the populist newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown. He wrote this for OtherWords, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies.