Thread: Will Twinkies be reborn through new Mexican ownership?

Will Twinkies be reborn through new Mexican ownership?

by Adrian Carrasquillo, @RealAdrianC3:02 pm on 11/17/2012

Next week may be Black Friday but sweets lovers across the nation hung their heads in sorrow on a dark Friday yesterday as Hostess announced they would cease making their line of products, which include the iconic Twinkies brand, because of the Bakers Union Strike.

But now as the brand heads toward liquidating and selling off its assets, a Mexican company may be angling to resurrect the golden Twinkies.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, while food producers ConAgra and Flowers Food, the American company behind Nature Valley granola, have expressed interest along with Little Debbie baker McKee Foods, Mexico’s Grupo Bimbo may hold the inside track.

Grupo Bimbo is the world’s largest bread baking firm, which already owns parts of Sara Lee, Entenmann’s and Thomas English Muffins and previously made what was considered a low-ball offer of $580 million a few years ago, Forbes reports. Now Hostess may only be worth $135 million.

Economists say high sugar prices tied to US trade tariffs were a big reason Hostess was struggling, but a Mexican company could be a lifeline for Twinkies because it would be able to take advantage of access to lower-priced sugar in Mexico.

While Hostess was clearly struggling, analysts believed Grupo Bimbo had an eye on the company since the early 2000′s because it saw Hostess as a key ingredient for North American expansion with delivery routes that penetrated across the country into convenience stores, gas stations and grocery markets, according to Forbes.

Daniel Servitje Montull runs Grupo Bimbo, which was founded by his family in 1954. His family is worth $4 billion.

Servitje Montull, has already worked magic before, taking on Mexico’s tortilla market and positioning white bread in Latin America.

If Grupo Bimbo pulls off a deal with Hostess for Twinkies, his next challenge will be resurrecting an American favorite.

http://nbclatino.com/2012/11/17/will-twinkies-be-reborn-through-new-mexican-ownership/

Look who bankrupted Hostess and their salaries .... Pay notice also to their political donations

Officers and Employees

• Average Total Compensation: $94,797.07

• Total Employees: 58

• Employees Making more than $75,000: 31

http://www.unionfacts.com/union/Bakery%2C_Confectionary%2C_Tobacco_Workers_%26_Gra in_Millers

FEC
Overall Contributions

Democrats: $1,474,204.00 (0.9973)

Republicans: $4,000.00 (0.0027)

Democrats (99.73%)

BCTGMI's Political Action Committees

Political Action Committee	Total Contributed
Bakery, Confectionery & Tobacco Workers	$1,389,224.00
Bakery & Confectionery Workers Local 19

Spending

The Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) requires unions to report how they spent their money in a number of categories. For the first five, OLMS requires unions to provide detailed information on any recipient that received more than $5,000 per year.
Total Spent in 2011: $13,923,506.00

Overhead (9.20%)

Spending Breakdown

• Representational^?: $4,259,011.00 (30.59%)
• Political Activities and Lobbying^?: $75,551.00 (0.54%)
• Contributions, Gifts, and Grants^?: $36,663.00 (0.26%)
• General Overhead^?: $1,167,473.00 (8.38%)
• Union Administration^?: $1,516,360.00 (10.89%)
• Strike Benefits^?: $1,849,651.00 (13.28%)
• To Union Officers^?: $1,429,843.00 (10.27%)
• To Union Employees^?: $2,353,880.00 (16.91%)
• Education^?: $0.00 (0.00%)
• Fees^?: $0.00 (0.00%)

Union Facts: Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers (BCTGMI) Profile, Membership, Leaders, Political Operations, etc.

Financial Information

The Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA), which is enforced by the Office of Labor-Management Standards, requires labor unions to file annual reports detailing their operations. Contained in those reports are breakdowns of each union's spending, income and other financial information.
Total Assets Trend

Basic Financials

• Total Assets^?: $31,463,770.00
• Total Liabilities^?: $18,260,040.00
• Total Income^?: $13,917,334.00
• Total Spent^?: $13,923,506.00

» See Historical Financial Information

Assets (Change from previous report)

• Cash^?: $0.00 (0.0%)
• Accounts Receivable^?: $0.00 (0.0%)
• Investments^?: $0.00 (0.0%)
• Fixed Assets^?: $0.00 (0.0%)
• Treasury Securities^?: $0.00 (0.0%)
• Other Assets^?: $0.00 (0.0%)
• Loans Receivable^?: $0.00 (0.0%)

Liabilities

• Loans Payable^?: $0.00
• Accounts Payable^?: $131,542.00
• Other Liabilities^?: $18,128,498.00

Other Liabilities (2011)

Office of Labor Management Standards

Description	Total
Tenant security deposits	$13,343.00
accrued sick leave - OPEIU Local 2 unit	$56,429.00
unremitted payroll tax withholdings	$55.00
disbanded local union treasuries	$36,072.00
disaster relief fund	$3,958.00
unfunded pension plan liability	$18,018,641.00

• Mortgages^?: $0.00

Income

• Dues^?: $0.00
• Per Person Tax^?: $10,327,307.00
• Investments^?: $1,466,435.00
• Supplies^?: $10,845.00
• Loan Repayment^?: $0.00
• Interest^?: $240,770.00
• Dividends^?: $27,431.00
• Rents^?: $1,137,847.00
• Fees and Fines^?: $70,306.00
• Loans Obtained^?: $0.00
• Other Receipts^?: $613,962.00
• Affiliates^?: $22,431.00
• Members^?: $0.00
• Reinvestments^?: $0.00
• All Others^?: $36,644.00

Greg Rayburn, CEO of Hostess voluntarily cut his own salary to $1/yr. The Bakers union was unwilling to take an 8% cut even while the Teamsters union and other Hostess employees took voluntary cuts to save the company. Look who's running the Bakers' union which just bankrupted Hostess and got 16,500 workers fired! These are the ACTUAL top salaries of the Baker's union. These folks won't be out of a job or have a lower salary.....But But But they swear it was "those greedy owners."

Overall Political Contributions to: Democrats: $1,474,204.00 (99.73 %) Republicans: $4,000.00 (.27 %) You can verify at Union Facts: Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers & Grain Millers (BCTGMI) Profile, Membership, Leaders, Political Operations, etc.

The Bakers' union decided it would be better to take a 100% pay cut for 16,500 workers instead of a 8% pay cut. They wanted $50,000 a yr while Greg Rayburn, CEO of Hostess voluntarily cut his own salary to $1/yr. The Bakers union was unwilling to take an 8% cut even while the Teamsters union and other Hostess employees took voluntary cuts to save the company.
http://www.unionfacts.com/union/Bakery%2C_Confectionary%2C_Tobacco_Workers_%26_Gra in_Millers

Posted at 12:04 PM ET, 11/19/2012Nov 19, 2012 05:04 PM EST
TheWashingtonPost

What the Twinkie’s demise tells us

By Greg Sargent
As you may have heard, the Twinkie may soon be no more — Hostess, the maker of the iconic snack, is closing its plants and letting around 18,000 workers go, after the bakers’ union announced a national strike.

The company is blaming the union, and much of the insta-Twitter-reaction from the right seems to agree. But more careful commentatary tells a more complex tale, one that you’d think unions and workers would want to tell.

As the New Yorker’s James Suroweicki explains, the company had hoped to use bankruptcy as a way to slash workers’ wages and benefits, leading the union to go on strike. The company says this is forcing it to go out of business, and blames union greed for its demise. But Surowiecki notes that the company had been losing money and market share for years, and that its core problem was not high wages or pensions; it’s that the market for its products changed, and the company failed to keep pace.

As Surowiecki points out, workers are getting scapegoated for company failings — a familiar refrain. And labor needs to push back on the larger idea that it’s unreasonable for workers to demand pensions and other guarantors of economic security:

It was once taken for granted that an industrial worker who worked for a big company for many years would get a solid middle-class lifestlye, and would be taken care of in retirement. Today, that concept seems to many like a relic. Just as Wonder Bread does.

Paul Krugman goes bigger, and links the Twinkie story to the present battle over the fiscal cliff and whether to raise taxes on the wealthy:

we’ve forgotten something important — namely, that economic justice and economic growth aren’t incompatible. America in the 1950s made the rich pay their fair share; it gave workers the power to bargain for decent wages and benefits; yet contrary to right-wing propaganda then and now, it prospered. And we can do that again.

One of the primary messages of the conservative movement in the last few decades is that the push for economic fairness is a major threat to overall prosperity — as if economic unfairness and inequality are necessary by-products of growth, and doing something about those things risks tampering with the natural economic order of things.

The Twinkie is instantly recognizable to millions of Americans, and this story is an attention grabber. So organized labor has an opportunity to seize on public attention to tell a broader story on its own terms about workers rights, the scapegoating of employees for company failings, and the real causes of the decline of economic security for the middle class. And I suspect you’ll be hearing more from the major unions along these lines soon enough.
******************************************

UPDATE: Via Steve Benen, Forbes had a good piece on what really happened here, including this:

Hostess has been sold at least three times since the 1980s, racking up debt and shedding profitable assets along the way with each successive merger. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2004, and again in 2011. Little thought was given to the line of products, which, frankly, began to seem a bit dated in the age of the gourmet cupcake...

As if all this were not enough, Hostess Brands’ management gave themselves several raises, all the while complaining that the workers who actually produced the products that made the firm what money it did earn were grossly overpaid relative to the company’s increasingly dismal financial position.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/what-the-twinkies-demise-tells-us/2012/11/19/7df187a6-3265-11e2-bfd5-e202b6d7b501_blog.html?hpid=z3

Laid-off Hostess workers face tough job market

By Annalyn Kurtz @CNNMoney November 16, 2012: 12:55 PM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Hostess Brands is cutting more than 18,000 jobs as it closes its doors for good. Those workers may find it tough to find new work.

All Hostess Brands employees will lose their jobs in the coming weeks, some sooner than others, the company announced Friday. The layoffs span nationwide, and represent a deep cut in mid-wage jobs that often came with benefits. The company had operated 33 bakeries, 565 distribution centers and 570 outlet stores across the country.

Many production workers earned up to $20 an hour, plus had access to medical benefits, according to Michael O'Brien, a former Hostess employee who had worked at the company for 45 years, in various sales functions, before he was offered a buyout last year.

"People inside the plants really made a good living," O'Brien said. "I feel sorry for them."

The company has struggled to keep up with competition and keep peace with its union workers. A recent bakers strike was the final nail in the coffin, the company said.

"We deeply regret taking this action," the company said. "Widespread strikes by the Bakers Union forced us to cease operations because we can longer produce or delivery product."

Related: Hostess Brands closing for good
According to a letter sent to employees, workers will not receive severance pay or pay for unused vacation time. Hostess is directing employees to COBRA for continuing medical insurance coverage.

Striking workers are not entitled to unemployment benefits in most states, but those workers who were not striking will likely have some access to weekly benefit checks.

Meanwhile job opportunities at Hostess competitors are hardly plentiful.

"The industry has overcapacity. We're overcapacity. Our rivals are overcapacity," Hostess CEO Gregory Rayburn said in an interview on CNBC.

At least 5,000 of the laid-off workers worked in food production and were represented by the Bakers Union.

Related: The end of Hostess
Nationwide, the entire food manufacturing industry has yet to gain back all the jobs lost in the recession, but the industry has been adding about 1,400 jobs a month over the last year.

Another 6,700 Hostess workers were represented by the Teamsters, a union that was sharply critical of the Bakers' decision to strike. Those jobs largely include truckers, many who both transported and sold Hostess products.

Trucking is a higher paying field, offering a national average of $22 an hour. Including base pay and commission, Hostess Teamsters workers could have earned between $50,000 to $100,000 a year, said O'Brien.

Trucking is also a growing field, adding about 3,900 jobs each month over the past year.

Still, the 18,500 Hostess job cuts are likely to show up in the national jobs report only gradually. Striking workers are likely to be counted as job cuts in the November jobs report, while many of the remaining layoffs are unlikely to show up in the data until the December jobs report is released in January.

-- CNNMoney senior writer Chris Isidore contributed to this report.

video at link below

Laid-off Hostess workers face tough job market - Nov. 16, 2012



also this

Union members push Hostess Brands Inc. out of business, costing 18,500 jobs


Posted by The Right Scoop on November 16th, 2012


The bakers’ union rejected a deal by the court to reduce salaries by 8% in the first year of a five year agreement. Ultimately when not enough of them would cross the picket line Hostess decided it could no longer weather the strike and has decided to liquidate the company. This will cost 18,500 people their jobs. For those in the bakers’ union that can’t do math, that’s a 100% reduction in salaries for everyone.

Here’s the low down:

CNN MONEY – Hostess Brands — the maker of such iconic baked goods as Twinkies, Devil Dogs and Wonder Bread — announced Friday that it is asking a federal bankruptcy court for permission to close its operations, blaming a strike by bakers protesting a new contract imposed on them.

The closing will result in Hostess’ nearly 18,500 workers losing their jobs as the company shuts 33 bakeries and 565 distribution centers nationwide, as well as 570 outlet stores. The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union represents around 5,000.

“We deeply regret the necessity of today’s decision, but we do not have the financial resources to weather an extended nationwide strike,” said CEO Gregory Rayburn in a statement. …

Asked if the shutdown decision could be reversed if the Bakers’ union agreed to immediately return to work, he responded, “Too late.”
***
In September, one of its major unions, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, voted narrowly to accept a new contract with reduced wages and benefits. The bakers’ union rejected the deal, however, prompting Hostess management to secure permission from a bankruptcy court to force a new concession contract on workers.

The Teamsters union, which represents 7,500 Hostess workers, has been sharply critical of the smaller Bakers’ decision to strike, saying it was forcing the company to the cusp of liquidation. The Teamsters said Thursday that the Bakers’ union should hold a secret ballot vote on the company’s offer, rather than the voice votes that were held in union halls around the country that authorized the decision to strike.

“It is difficult for Teamster members to believe that is what the [Bakers union] Hostess members ultimately wanted to accomplish when they went out on strike,” said the Teamsters’ statement.

The Bakers’ union has made several statements earlier in the week saying management is to blame for the condition of the company, not the strike.

The new contract cut salaries across the company by 8% in the first year of the five-year agreement. Salaries were then scheduled to bump up 3% in the next three years and 1% in the final year.

Hostess also reduced its pension obligations and its contribution to the employees’ health care plan. In exchange, the company offered concessions, including a 25% equity stake for workers and the inclusion of two union representatives on an eight-member board of directors.

Union members push Hostess Brands Inc. out of business, costing 18,500 jobs » The Right Scoop -

Spending Breakdown

• Representational^?: $4,259,011.00 (30.59%)
• Political Activities and Lobbying^?: $75,551.00 (0.54%)
• Contributions, Gifts, and Grants^?: $36,663.00 (0.26%)
• General Overhead^?: $1,167,473.00 (8.38%)
• Union Administration^?: $1,516,360.00 (10.89%)
• Strike Benefits^?: $1,849,651.00 (13.28%)
• To Union Officers^?: $1,429,843.00 (10.27%)
• To Union Employees^?: $2,353,880.00 (16.91%)
• Education^?: $0.00 (0.00%)
• Fees^?: $0.00 (0.00%)

Hard to believe a little $2.50 item can pay for all these salaries doesn't it..greed hmmmm I would say so it seems as though there is plenty to go around on all sides..Hey everyone is whining about Twinkies what about Devil dogs, and Hostess cupcakes....Now just think about this in the case of Hostess they can go out of business liquidate etc, all the workers loose but it ends for the owner. In the public unions, the taxpayer gets to pay and pay and pay and pay and pay...well you get the idea, no one goes any where and the unions get such a deal......again, at the tax payers expense....that is free market versus not free market, or what the market will bare.

November 19, 2012, 2:29 PM

Judge Suggests Mediation to Save Hostess; Sides Agree to Talk

Getty Images

Dow Jones is reporting that a bankruptcy judge is urging mediation to save Hostess from liquidation. WSJ will have more to come as it comes out of the courtroom.

Here’s an update from bankruptcy reporters Jacqueline Palank and Rachel Feintzeig

A bankruptcy judge Monday asked whether he should preside over mediation between Hostess Brands Inc. and its striking union to avoid pulling the plug on the baker of Ho Hos, Twinkies and Wonder Bread.

At a hearing Monday on Hostess’s request to begin the process of shutting down its business, Judge Robert Drain of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, N.Y., asked attorneys representing Hostess and the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International union whether mediation could help the two resolve their issues and avoid the loss of more than 18,000 jobs.

“To me not to have gone through that step leaves a huge question mark over this case, which I think–I may be wrong–but I think will only be answered in litigation. And that’s no one’s desired outcome,” the judge said.

WSJ will have more as it comes out.

http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2012/11/19/judge-suggests-mediation-to-save-hostess/

RELATED

http://www.alipac.us/f9/who%92s-hiri...-wants-267480/

Moved article to

• General Discussion

"Will Twinkies be reborn through new Mexican ownership?"

Twinkies made with tortillas?
(Rice and beans extra?)

Judge orders Hostess to mediate with union

Boston.com

- ‎1 hour ago

Twinkies won't die that easily after all. Hostess Brands Inc. and its second largest union will go into mediation to try and resolve their differences, meaning the Irving, Texas-based company won't go out of business just yet. . .

Originally Posted by JohnDoe2

Judge orders Hostess to mediate with union

Boston.com

- ‎1 hour ago

Twinkies won't die that easily after all. Hostess Brands Inc. and its second largest union will go into mediation to try and resolve their differences, meaning the Irving, Texas-based company won't go out of business just yet. . .

I guess it is now back to who built that!! Here come's the Judge!!