[txru]

4 breaks a day isn't either enough or too much in general-- it's very job and industry dependent.

Refusing to provide breaks is illegal, true, but it's trivially easy to legally force employees to take many fewer than they're entitled. Amazon employees in FCs don't piss in bottles because they're very into logistic efficiency of picking...

True, there will always be entities that abuse understandings, employer and employee. The thing is, corporations are superentities with monopsonic power. Employees are units, discouraged from communicating, with limited time in a day to make complaints or study potential improvements to working condition (or law, for that matter).

Unions are a method for setting up a superentity that has the bargaining, informational, and legal power to have a more equal footing with the corporate superentity.

Particularly when Unions have substantial ownership of the company, they have no specific wish to lose dues-paying members or make the company fail.

[Alupis]

> or make the company fail

Hostess famously failed due to the Bakers Union stalling wage talks, even though the Teamsters (representing the other portion of the employees) agreed. Now... nobody works for Hostess and everyone lost their jobs.

Not all Unions actually align their goals with what's best for the employees. Sometimes, it's all about collecting union dues...

[bsder]

> Hostess famously failed due to the Bakers Union stalling wage talks

Except that Hostess had a bunch of debt loaded up from financial "engineering", and Hostess had already asked for and been granted concessions several times.

At some point, you're better off forcing the company into bankruptcy and rolling the dice--especially if the owners are bleeding it of cash via financial arrangements. It's going to be dead anyway; the only question is whether the owners also get to bleed the retirement fund, for example.

If Hostess can't employ those people after bankruptcy and reorganization, then those jobs were certainly dead, anyway.

[txru]

I don't think you can use Hostess as a simple case of the BCTGM getting too hungry for dues, since Hostess has reformed under a new corporation after a defensive bankruptcy filing, to hire an entirely new set of employees. That is something that companies can do, and have done so for centuries.

At the very least, that seems like a case of a mix of vulture capitalism and failed union negotiations.

[Alupis]

The Hostess of today isn't the Hostess of yesterday. It was shredded up and pieced out. What is today called "Hostess" is owned by a holding companies and is not the original ownership.

They went from well over 30,000+ employees, down to 2,000 today.

Pretty sad honestly. The company was in a tight financial situation, and asked to postpone paying into the pension fund for a few years. The Bakers Union was the only holdout... and now nobody has a pension or wages.

[txru]

I suppose I look at this as sad from a different angle than you. The brand itself has been losing consumer trust for decades, due to changing tastes and increasing health-consciousness. Eventually, that makes it so the company can't pay on its obligations. The debtors say those obligations are non-negotiable, the company folds, and now we're left with the private equity firms driving down costs at the cost of what consumer trust was left.

If a company I worked for was ever late on a paycheck, or refused to continue paying for a pension/matching 401k, I think it's perfectly reasonable that the company should collapse.

[Alupis]

> If a company I worked for was ever late on a paycheck, or refused to continue paying for a pension/matching 401k, I think it's perfectly reasonable that the company should collapse.

Perhaps. Personally, I'd take it as a sign of whats-to-come, and leave. If other employees decided to stay, and agreed to some terms to save the company, let them.

In Hostess' case, I believe it was the Teamsters that had negotiated an equity stake in the company during a previous bout of poor financial times. There's always options.

I have a hard time believing the 30,000+ employees wanted their union to destroy the company, particularly since many of them had worked there all their life, their town had little or no other large company to provide jobs, and their pensions/retirement were tied to the entire mess. It's entirely possible Hostess was in bad times partly due to Union negotiated wage and pension funding levels.

In general, I guess I'm more skeptical of Unions than some. I've never been in a Union personally, and would chafe at the idea of being compelled to pay union dues (some jobs require this), and not being able to negotiate my own salary and benefits that fit my situation best.

[perl4ever]

The phrase "destroy the company" seems like an emotional appeal. If the company can restructure its debt, that leaves more of the pie for everyone else. Employees who didn't get a say in taking on the debt shouldn't have moral compunctions about creditors being stiffed. It's just business.