Hostess and Twinkies just did the unthinkable… now this has happened.

10 Jul, 2016 by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

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You can extort the market and milk companies and employers for all they are worth for just so long. Look’s like technology is about to kick the unions in their collective butt. Hostess has fired 95% of their union workers and replaced them with robots and technology. This will get rid of the pension millstone around their necks as well as the crushing union influence. It’s survival – we are moving from the industrial revolution into the digital revolution. To stay afloat, companies like Hostess must cut costs and streamline production. Robots are the wave of the future.

From Next Big Future:

Hostess, the producers of Twinkies went bust, twice, as a result of heinously bad union arrangements.

The most recent investors who bought it out of bankruptcy did not in fact buy “the company.” They bought just some of the assets. By buying the Hostess assets out of bankruptcy, Apollo and Metropoulos took them on free of employee benefits and other labor obligations that had weighed down the company.

They went from local bakeries and delivery routes to a much more concentrated production system and delivery into warehouses.

Employing people is a cost. And when that cost rises, fewer people are going to be employed.

In 2012, it looked like the maker of Twinkies was about to go out of business. They had slipped into bankruptcy and it seemed the American icon would be no more. Now, Hostess Brands is back with a vengeance, with new plans to become a publicly listed company and return to a market that had once left it for dead. The deal, announced Tuesday, would give the maker of Twinkies, CupCakes and Ding Dongs a market value of roughly $2.3 billion. The sweets giant has in recent years staged a remarkable revival, spearheaded by a billionaire turnaround artist and promoted in company marketing as “the sweetest comeback in the history of ever.” They have gone on a serious worker diet, cutting their ranks from over 22,000 to just 1,170 workers. The company has invested $130 million to upgrade production lines and industrial ovens in its three core bakeries in Indianapolis, Indiana; Emporia, Kansas; and Columbus, Georgia. Its other bakeries have disappeared – 37 of them. Based in Kansas City, Missouri, the company has closed all 600 or so of its Hostess outlet thrift stores and now delivers directly to warehouses, helping avoid the inefficiencies of regional bakeries, small distribution lines and direct-to-store delivery. This is smart business and now they are fit and trim and will make healthy profits. Unionism was killing them… technology was the cure.