Mitt Romney would approve of the current business meme: When management executives decide to stage a feeding frenzy on a company's wealth, ala Bain, it's best to chum the waters first, letting everyone know it's really someone else's fault. Labor unions, say.
If you look hard enough, in fact, you'll eventually see that labor unions are the cause of global climate change, Hurricane Sandy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Dubya- and Reagan-era federal deficit spending sprees, rising gas prices, Fukushima, fracking, the BP disaster in the Gulf, unhelpful phases of the moon...
No, the latest bit of mind-altering news isn't coming from the states of Colorado and Washington where marijuana's just been given a thumbs-up by the population -- it's coming straight from the Hostess Financial Fabrication Factory, with management at the controls, running the Golden Story Machine full blast.
Hostess, of course, is in another round of financial straits. Management moans once again it's simply unable to weather a strike by union bakers.
The strike was called after Hostess management offered a contract that cut pay 8 percent -- this, after union members had continued to make concessions to help the company along through tough times.
The union also says the contract offered added insult to injury, cutting benefits by 27 to 32 percent.
Once again, though, it's the fault of the greedy old union and its workers that these people have lost their jobs. That's the peg on which the news stories are all being hung. Reports generally fall in line, wherever you see them, that the demise of Hostess is the workers' fault, not the looting of the company by management.
No, you won't see many stories that the CEO gave himself a whopping raise tripling his pay, and gave nine other executives raises that ran the gamut from half-again to more than twice their original pay -- all before deciding bankruptcy was the only way to go.
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