The news that the baker’s union strike effectively shut down Hostess should be sobering news to Americans and a wake up call to the damage that unions and their coerced wages do.
Of course most of the coverage in the mainstream media is sympathetic to the union workers and condemns Hostess for shutting down. And we see statements like this from the union president:
“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. 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.”
Got that? This company, who provided jobs that otherwise would not exist, was abusing its employees by cutting their wages and benefits in order to stay in business. This is sheer nonsense and a twisted view of labor and capitalism.
If it were not for capitalists who save and invest money in businesses like Hostess, all those 18,500 jobs would have never even existed. Jobs do not exist in nature. It is up to entrepreneurs to invest in capital which increases productivity and therefore creates higher paying jobs.
There is no such thing as a “right” to a job or a certain level of compensation. In a free and just society these are negotiated in a peaceful manner in the marketplace. In a statist society, such as we have now, labor unions use the violence of the state to demand their wages by coercion.
John Keller has a blog post up at LewRockwell.com called Debunking Pro-Union Spin that makes the case for market wages rather than coerced wages by union thugs.
And here’s a video of Dr. Tom Woods explaining how the standard of living in America has been higher than anywhere in the Western world despite having the lowest amount of unionized labor.
You say it like the unions forced this company out of work, but forget to mention that number of employers have been particularly aggressive in their actions against workers.
Hostess filed for bankruptcy because their workers refused to take a 30% pay/benefits cut after gutting health plans and pensions (oh, and giving the executives an 80% salary increase while grossly mismanaging the company).