That sounds like feudalism

Organized labor is capitalism. These bankers want to pick and choose the terms of their risks and rewards while denying their suppliers and creditors the same options.

They're not capitalists, they're toadies and suck-ups who hide the favors they've been granted behind lies about market forces and invisible hands.

The union didn't fail the Hostess company. The union failed the Hostess workers.

2, Hm. I disagree. Organized labor is a response to capitalism. Labor isn't capitalism itself. That doesn't make any sense at all.

Perhaps the union failed the workers, but since the union isn't actually running the company, they don't have their hands on certain levers of control that the management team does.

Now if Hostess were run as a co-operative, or better: a worker-owned collective, things would be very, very different.

The primary banker was a huge democratic party donor, apparently
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-11-16…

@3 -- had the Union negotiated for better management or more safeguards in the case of factory closure or better anticipated the company's bankruptcy....

The people blaming the union apparently think that workers are indentured servants, and not free agents operating in a free market.

Let's say Hostess wasn't unionized and its un-unionized workforce decided, en masse, to up and quit when faced with wage and benefit cuts. What, effectively, would be different than what's happening now? Hostess can't replace thousands of employees overnight. And, had their unionized workers continued to strike, there was nothing keeping Hostess from hiring scabs, since labor protections in this country are a joke. But they couldn't do that, because workers aren't as disposable and replaceable as conservatives like to pretend.

And the irony isn't lost on me that it's conservatives and libertarians who go on and on about how workers are part of the free market, and, if they don't like how their employers are treating them, they are free to move along. When the shit hits the fan, libertarian neofeudalism spills out for all to see.

@5:

All of those things are completely outside the purview of labor contracts, which are, by law, limited specifically to the negotiation of wages & working conditions. Unions have no more right to dictate management practices than management does to dictate how a union is administered. Same with factory closures, which, by definition, would preclude there being any working conditions for which to bargain.

As for "anticipating the company's bankruptcy", that was already a known fact at the time negotiations began, since Hostess went into Chapter 11 - for the second time - back in January, so technically, there was nothing to anticipate.

What the unions COULDN'T anticipate was pretty much everything else that occurred after that, including: the generous bonuses the board would hand out to the then CEO and other executive staff; the hiring of a well-known liquidation specialist as the company's "Chief Restructuring Officer"; the subsequent resignation of the CEO nine days after that; the board's decision to appoint the newly-hired CRO as the company's new CEO; and the sequence of events that occurred as a result.

UNinterested, not disinterested. Please make a note of it.