Walmart Workers Protest For Better Wages And Benefits On Black Friday

Think Progress
By Igor Volsky on Nov 23, 2012 at 12:18 pm

Workers at Walmart stores across the country are walking off their jobs to protest the national retailer’s low wages and poor working conditions in an effort to raise public awareness about how the company treats its employees on the busiest shopping day of the year. The strikes, which began earlier this month, are the first in the 50 year history of the company and come just as Walmart reported a 9 percent increase in third-quarter net income, earning $3.63 billion.
Workers are also opposing Walmart’s poor benefits, alleged systematic discrimination against women, and its decision this year to kick off Black Friday on Thursday night. As Fox News reported today, many employees say they fear retaliation for speaking out against the company’s policies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INh0syM0G0o&feature=player_embedded

Walmart filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board in an effort to stop the walk out last week, accusing protesters of violating a law “which prohibits picketing for any period over 30 days without filing a petition to form a union.”
The walk out is being organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and its subsidiary OUR Walmart. Walmart’s 1.4 million workers in the U.S. are not unionized.





Kansas City area workers rallied outside a Roeland Park Walmart.  They even sang a song for the occasion.  Check it out on the KMBC blog:  http://20poundsofheadlines.wordpress.com/2012/11/23/wal-mart-protest-in-song-at-roeland-park/

 About two dozen protesters holding signs outside the Roeland Park Walmart on Black Friday.  (Thanks to Micheal Mahoney, a very good reporter for KMBC).

Boonville Hostess Bakery Prepares to Close

KOMU
Posted: Nov 16, 2012 by Stacey Kafka

http://www.komu.com/news/boonville-hostess-bakery-prepares-to-close/

Vulture Capitalism Ate Your Twinkies

 

 

 The Nation Magazine

John Nichols on November 18, 2012 - 11:37 PM ET 

What happens when vulture capitalism ruins a great American company?

The vultures blame the workers.

The vultures blame the union.

And vapid media outlets report the lie as “news.”

That’s what’s happening with the meltdown of Hostess Brands Inc.

Americans are being told that they won’t get their Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos because the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union ran the company into the ground.

But the union and the 5,600 Hostess workers represented by the union did not create the crisis that led the company’s incompetent managers to announce plans to shutter it.

The BCTGM workers did not ask for more pay.

The BCTGM workers did not ask for more benefits.

The BCTGM workers did not ask for better pensions.

The union and its members had a long history of working with the company to try to keep it viable. They had made wage and benefit concessions to keep the company viable. They adjusted to new technologies, new demands.

They took deep layoffs—20 percent of the workforce—and kept showing up for work even as plants were closed.

They kept working even as the company stopped making payments to their pension fund more than a year ago.

The workers did not squeeze the filling out of Hostess.

Hostess was smashed by vulture capitalists—“a management team that,” in the words of economist Dean Baker, “shows little competence and is rapidly stuffing its pockets at the company’s expense.”
Even as the company struggled, the ten top Hostes executives pocketed increasingly lavish compensation packages. The Hostess CEO who demanded some of the deepest cuts from workers engineered a 300 percent increase in his compensation package.

“Wall Street investors first came onto the scene with Hostess about a decade ago, purchasing the company and then loading it with debt. All the while, its executives talked of investments in new equipment, new research and new delivery trucks, but those improvements never materialized,” explains AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.

“Instead, the executives planned to give themselves bonuses and demanded pay cuts and benefit cuts from the workers, who haven’t had a raise in eight years,” said the AFL-CIO head. “In 2011, Hostess earned profits of more than $2.5 billion but ended the year with a loss of $341 million as it struggled to pay the interest on $1 billion in debt. This year, the company sought bankruptcy protection, the second time in eight years. Still, the CEO who brought on the latest bankruptcy got a raise while Hostess demanded that its workers accept a 30 percent pay and benefits cut.”

When BCTGM workers struck Hostess, they did not do so casually.

They were challenging Bain-style abuses by a private-equity group—Ripplewood Holdings—that had proven its incompetence and yet continued to demand more money from the workers.

“When a highly respected financial consultant, hired by Hostess, determined earlier this year that the company’s business plan to exit bankruptcy was guaranteed to fail because it left the company with unsustainable debt levels, our members knew that the massive wage and benefit concessions the company was demanding would go straight to Wall Street investors and not back into the company,” recalled BCTGM president Frank Hunt, who described why the union struck Hostess rather than accept a demand from management for more pay and benefit cuts.

“Our members decided they were not going to take any more abuse from a company they have given so much to for so many years,” Hunt explained. “They decided that they were not going to agree to another round of outrageous wage and benefit cuts and give up their pension only to see yet another management team fail and Wall Street vulture capitalists and ‘restructuring specialists’ walk away with untold millions of dollars.”

On November 6, American voters rejected Mitt Romney and Bain Capitalism.

But that didn’t end the abusive business practices that made Romney rich. They’re still wrecking American companies, like Hostess.

Instead of blaming workers, we should be holding the incompetent managers to account and cheering on any and every effort to rescue Hostess from the clutches of the vulture capitalists.

Twinkie-Maker Hostess Fires 18,000 People: Blames Long-Suffering Workers

We hate to see this happen to our brothers and sisters across Missouri and the country.

Working In These Times
Friday Nov 16, 2012 8:50 pm

By Bruce Vail

Hostess Brands is blaming its liquidation on this week’s strike, by workers such as these in Schiller Park, Ill. The company’s financial woes, however, are years old.   (Photo by Scott Olsen / Getty Images).

Today, the owners of Hostess Brands—the company that makes widely recognized baked goods such as Twinkies and Wonder Bread—made good on a longstanding threat to close down operations, eliminating as many as 18,000 jobs.
Company spokesperson Lance Ignon told Working In These Times that some 22 bakeries around the nation completed their last production runs early on Friday morning, while delivery drivers finished their final routes this afternoon. The company has no plans to resume operations.
In a statement, Hostess CEO Greg Rayburn blamed the shutdown on a strike this week by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM).
However, his scapegoating of the union obscures a larger and more complicated story of corporate mismanagement and naked greed. In fact, the company has been in severe financial distress for more than a decade, management has been in disarray, and vulture capitalists have been circling in search of financial prey.

Hostess might be considered an "old economy" company in the sense that it manufactured, produced and marketed popular cakes to a mass market. In its newest incarnation—under the slicker, greedier sensibility of Wall St.—it  is something else altogether.

Hostess claims that a BCGTM strike begun on November 9 was the company's undoing. The strike started at four scattered Hostess plants and spread across the country, forcing 11 bakery closures, according to Ignon.

The union, however, notes that the strike came only after months of fruitless contract negotiations and the imposition by Hostess of  “draconian cuts” to wages and benefits. Prior to that, employees of Hostess were working under reduced incomes for almost 10 years. From 2004 to 2008 the company, then called Interstate Bakeries, went through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in which all union workers took forced cuts.
BCTGM President Frank Hurt was not available for comment on today, but told Working In These Times earlier this week that the BCGTM strike was the “tragic” result of the company’s ill-conceived plan to bust the unions, dismember the company and sell off the pieces to highest bidders. Hostess managers have made clear that they care little for the hardships imposed on the workers, Hurt said, leaving the union no choice but to strike in hopes of the bringing the company back to the bargaining table.
Hurt has made other comments over the last three months in which he made clear that he believes the owners of the company have no real desire to return the ailing Hostess to profitability. Rather, they want to strip the company of its valuable assets while discarding the long-term employees and financial liabilities.
Hostess confirmed at least part of Hurt’s analysis on Friday when the company also announced it wants to move quickly to sell its bakeries, distributions facilities, retail outlets and “popular brands.”
According to an article in Friday’s Kansas City Business Journal, that means the company will sell brand names such as Hostess, Twinkies, Wonder Bread, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos. Food industry analyst John Stout Jr. believes such sales would allow other businesses to resume profitable manufacturing of these products in other facilities.
Such a plan will require the approval of Judge Robert Drain of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Hostess filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition in Judge Drain’s court early this year, and under bankruptcy law most major business decisions at Hostess require his approval. Indeed, the imposition of the brutal wage and benefit cuts on BCTGM members was specifically approved by Judge Drain in October.
Hostess spokesperson Ignon said the company plans to be back in Judge Drain’s court next week to seek his okay for measures to further wind down operations. Hostess will not seek a formal conversion to a Chapter 7 liquidation proceeding, but rather a continuation of the status quo, in which the current owners and managers maintain control of the company, he said.
Whatever happens in Judge Drain’s bankruptcy court next week, an estimated 18,000 Hostess workers will have no job to return to Monday.
The company has been maintaining a payroll of 18,300 to 18,500 workers, Ignon says, and most were laid off Friday. An undetermined number of managerial and administrative workers will be retained for the immediate future, he adds, but it is too early to give exact numbers.
About 5,000 BCTGM workers will lose their jobs, along with 7,500 members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and hundreds of members of ten other unions representing smaller sectors of the Hostess workforce.
CEO Rayburn’s Friday statement made no mention of any assistance that the company plans to offer the newly jobless employees.

School board votes down plan to outsource Battle janitors

The custodian & maintenance staff of the Columbia Public Schools won an important victory when the school board voted not to outsource the staff for the new Battle High School.  The result would have been lower pay and loss of their state pension, in addition to probable future outsourcing of the staff district wide.  Not to mention the inevitable turnover and low morale that would result.  Kudos to those district workers who bravely stood up for themselves and the CMNEA President Susan McClintic, who spoke publicly and privately to the board and administration in opposition to the outsourcing.

 Columbia Tribune
By CATHERINE MARTIN
Tuesday, November 13, 2012

 The Columbia Board of Education last night rejected a proposal to outsource maintenance staff at Battle High School after hearing concerns from Columbia Public Schools janitors.

Administrators first asked the board to consider outsourcing to GCA Education Services, based in Knoxville, Tenn., at a meeting last month. The proposal was sent back to the administration after some board members voiced concerns about pay and benefits. A revised proposal, with increased pay and benefits, went to the board last night, but members agreed it still wasn't up to snuff. The measure was defeated 6-1, with Tom Rose casting the only vote in support of outsourcing.

In the initial proposal, pay from GCA started at $8.50 for custodians and topped out at $13.50 for hourly supervisors. District pay ranges from $9.15 to $16.05. A revised proposal changed the GCA pay range to $9.15 to $14.50. Employees for GCA also would have 20 fewer sick days or paid holidays.

Longtime janitor Alvin Sweezer said custodial employees who have been with the district for 10 to 15 years were worried about what the proposal would do to their jobs, and some even discussed early retirement.

The proposal was presented as a cost-saving measure — the initial plan with GCA would have saved the district $298,792, and the revised planned would have saved $240,756. Battle, the district's newest school, would have served as an experiment for outsourcing custodial staff, Superintendent Chris Belcher told the finance committee last week.

If it went well, the district would expand the plan. If it didn't go well, it would be a learning experience, Belcher said.

But custodians saw it differently, district custodial employee Jeff Hempstead said.

"This is being called a pilot program," he said. "Most custodians think it's the beginning of a program to eliminate our jobs within Columbia Public Schools."

Board member Jim Whitt said although the plan was just for Battle, the next logical step on many people's minds would be expanding it to the rest of the district.

"Everybody is going to look at this and say, 'This will cost me to lose 20 days,' " he said, referring to benefits. "At this point in time, I'm a little uncomfortable with that."

One of the biggest reasons for the cost savings was that the GCA plan only called for 12.5 full-time equivalent positions at Battle, while the district's plan called for 19. Some board members proposed bringing in a consultant to work on having a more efficient in-house system districtwide.

"What I'm struggling with now, I've heard enough from employees and community members that maybe now is just not the right time for this," board member Christine King said, pointing to recent board approval to outsource substitute teachers.

"That might have rubbed some people a little wrong. … My personal feeling is to see us say 'no' to this and say, 'Let's regroup and get a consultant and look at it in more detail.' "

Deputy Superintendent Nick Boren said he wasn't aware of such services but `would look into it.

Sweezer said "it was nice" that the board rejected the proposal, and he said he hopes the district provides more training to make sure its employees are working efficiently.

Reach Catherine Martin at 573-815-1711 or e-mail cmartin@columbiatribune.com.