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As Canada71 is continuing to lie, and continuing to lie about having been caught and demonstrated to by lying repeatedly,

As I've noted before, you've yet to provide any evidence of this.

and continuing to make the same false claims that tghe Bakers Union is somehow entirely not responsible for the outcome of their actions,

The way you've phrased that makes it difficult to determine what your intent was.  I think the Bakers Union was definitely at least partially responsible for the outcome of their action, it was clear to everyone that that was a possible, even probable, outcome of them taking the stand they took.  But I would categorically state that they are not entirely responsible for the decline and eventual failure of the company.  If you are making such a claim, then you are ignoring the vast body of evidence to the contrary.

I think we can put this paid Union employee to rest.

I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of a union, nor paid by a union, directly or indirectly.

Wait until you see how badly unions screw over their own employees, Canada71.  Unions are the only employers worse than governments.

Unions typically employ very few people.

Yet ANOTHER lie of yours.  Had the Bakers Unions not scuttled the company, then this bonus wouldn't exist, because, as you would know had you actually read the article, it is for doing the work of winding up the company.

There was no lie in my statement. The fact that the company being in a mess is in large part due to mismanagement is a generally accepted fact.

You do realize, of course, that "I believe your statement to be incorrect" is different from "you are lying", though, right? Accusing another of lying is a serious accusation which you appear to be making repeatedly and without merit/justification.

Incidentally, do you have ANY support for your claim that these are the same people who have been running the company for the last decade, or is that just another desperate attempt on your part to divert attention away from the fact that the Bakers Union didn't want any of the workers to have jobs any more?

I never made that claim. You do bring up a fair point, however, in that the extent of the blame for the company's long march to failure shouldered by executives is very much dependent on the extent of time they've been with it.

You make the claim that "the Bakers Union didn't want any of the workers to have jobs any more". I find that claim specious. At the very best, its incredibly poorly qualified, at the worst, its disingenuous.

Still making mistakes about the article that demonstrate you haven't read it, even after having been called on not having read it.  This IS a bad option, since the bonus is notably smaller than the norm for this situation.

Again, the existence of better options does not make an existing option bad. Winning $1,000,000 in a lottery is better than winning $100,000 in a lottery, but that doesn't make winning $100,000 bad. Having a viable option to continue in one's job for reasonable, if not strictly competitive, pay is not a bad thing, particularly in today's economy.

Nice of you top finally admit that you already knew that the Bakers Union is entirely responsible for the company collapsing.

Straw man, I admitted no such thing.

How can I possibly need to cite the lies and evasions Shane already demonstrated you to have made?

To the best of my recollection, he has accused me of lying once, and I have already rebutted it. To cite a statement which has already been made and refuted without addressing that refutation is intellectual dishonesty, be it in academic circles or everyday conversation.

Yes, being given rather less than is the norm to keep them from going and getting jobs with companies that haven't been deliberately destroyed by a single union and stay around to speedily wind up the firm.

Being given a hefty bonus to stay around and clean up a mess that was in large part their own doing does not evoke sympathy from me.  It also goes counter to the claim that they could end up losing money, being paid less than nothing, effectively.

That does not mean that they might not have better options, which they are of course free to exercise.  What it does mean is that this option is not a bad one.

And, as noted in previous comments, the company was run into the ground through mismanagement and unyieldy debt loads incurred under peculiar circumstances. One union refused to knuckle under to a very bad deal in order to help keep it afloat longer, at which point management shut the company down.

  (Did you even bother to READ this article before referencing it?  It's impossible to relate to your previous lies and evasions in any event.)

Yes, I read it. And I have not lied or evaded on anything. If you believe I have, cite the case.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hostess-20121130,0,1027676.story

Yup, those poor executives...   

Yes, I'm taking about the actual executives of actual Hostess. Try and keep up.

Then how would those executives have stood to lose money? To this point, you've only been talking how about Ripplewood would lose money, not how the Hostess executives would have lost money.

NOT FUCKING ONCE did you make it clear that you SPECIFICALLY meant the executives reducing their pay to one actual dollar (and that would have been a completely stupid point for you to make anyway). ONLY after I called you on it did the amount suddenly matter.

When I made the claim, you responded in your very next post with the statement that my claim was an outright lie.  Which I then responded to in my very next post with "As I stated, there is no evidence those other executives, whose salaries were raised 80%, voluntarily lowered their salary to $1 per year. Facing a pay cut, not of their own choosing, is very different from voluntarily lowering one's own salary to $1 per year." Short of time travel, there is no sooner that I could have made that explicit, which those two statements do, than in my next post.

To be fair, the original post didn't explicitly restate it, it relied on a common understanding of the word 'same', which is why in my next post, as quoted above, I made it explicit.

No, that's a fundamental difference in kind.

I've already ceded the difference. I'll happily concede it again, if you'd like. And you've yet to address the core point about the debt load of that bankruptcy increasing.

As I said, the executives were most likely looking at net losses, to start out with. How do you even CALCULATE a pay cut that goes into negative numbers???

Hostess executive != Ripplewood Holdings stakeholder.

AHEM: "I should note that there is no indication that other executives who received exorbitant raises for a moribund company did [agree to pay cuts]." You NEVER mentioned an amount with the executives; just that they didn't agree to cut their salaries. Now you're backpedalling to try and say you made a claim that would have been completely irrelevant to begin with. That's a fail if I ever saw one!

Quote mining.  The full quote, in context was:

"After being paid $100,00 a month, he did, apparently, agree to lower his salary to $1 a year. I should note that there is no indication that other executives who received exorbitant raises for a moribund company did the same."

To simplify, A did X, there's no indication that B did X. And I've been very clear throughout the entire discussion that that was the claim I was making.

That never happened. Ripplewood got a 50% equity stake, that was it.

That's quibbling, but fair enough. But regardless, that was the bankruptcy and debt load situation I was referring to.

Far from it. You consider them different only because you WANT them to be different.

Having a salary of $1 a year and having a salary which is to be drastically cut after having been drastically raised are substantively different, numerically and semantically.  Its the difference between getting paid and (effectively) being a volunteer.

But complaining that the executives wanted to cut worker's salaries without cutting their own is just an outright LIE.

Had I made that claim, then it would have been an outright lie. But I didn't make the claim. I simply didn't make a claim that they had no plans to cut their own salary, that's a straw man. My statement was that they didn't voluntarily reduce their salary to $1 per year in the same way that the CEO had.

There seems to be a misunderstanding here. What I'm referring to is not the current/impending bankruptcy, but the preceding one in which Ripplewood Holdings acquired Hostess. Its the increasing of the debt load after emerging from that bankruptcy that I was referring to.

If you can't see the difference between voluntarily reducing one's salary to $1 per year, effectively immediately, and having one's pay cut at some point in the future after having had it raised 80%, voluntarily or involuntarily (not every executive would have had a say in that decision), then I don't know what more I can say to refute your 'outright lie' accusation. But I think its fair to state that most reasonable people would treat those as different, very different, scenarios.

Yes I did. $75 million bankruptcy loan.

Which goes virtually nowhere in explaining how you can emerge from bankruptcy with a higher debt load. The purpose of bankruptcy is to make a company more financially feasible, almost invariably by reducing its debt by giving its creditors pennies on the dollar. The notion that it would emerge from bankruptcy with a higher debt load, and thus less likely, not more likely, to be able to achieve profitability should raise eyebrows. I can't state authoritatively that there is anything funny going on here, but it should make one very suspicious. The claim is that the debt load was higher because the company had "expectations of 'growing' into its capital structure". This I also find suspicious, because there is no evidence to suggest that they actually had that expectation, or that a rational person would have had that expectation.

Outright lie. Most executives were faced with a drastic pay cut--perhaps even net losses--as a result of the bankruptcy and restructuring.

Nice try. As I stated, there is no evidence those other executives, whose salaries were raised 80%, voluntarily lowered their salary to $1 per year. Facing a pay cut, not of their own choosing, is very different from voluntarily lowering one's own salary to $1 per year. I should also note that those pay cuts would have have to have been pretty dramatic just to return them to where they were prior to their pay raise.

AT NO POINT do I blame unions for the bankruptcy, AT ALL.

Excellent.

Yes, addressed in the podcast. I even give the numbers.

Cite the reference. I've listened to it from 12:00 onwards four times, and if its there, I'm missing it. The word 'debt' isn't even mentioned, much less any numbers discussing the debt load before and after bankruptcy. You don't mention any numbers indicating how that debt came to be,  most particularly how that debt burden came to be increased during the leveraged buyout by a private equity owner, Ripplewood Holdings. I would agree that you give numbers, but none relevant to the debt load.

How much of a cut were the union workers asked to take, compared to how much of a cut the CEO asked for himself?

After being paid $100,00 a month, he did, apparently, agree to lower his salary to $1 a year. I should note that there is no indication that other executives who received exorbitant raises for a moribund company did the same. But, again, if your boss or CEO agreed to the same deal, would you then agree to lower your own salary? How low would you lower it? To $1/year? Can you not at least agree that there becomes a point where your salary could be lowered to a point where it would become untenable?

The rest of your bullshit has already been refuted. Repeating it does nothing. Respond to the refutations or STFU.

Again, as far as I can determine, at no point in the podcast or in this form have you addressed the simple fact that the vast majority of the blame for the failure with this company lies with ownership and management, not the union.

Covered in the podcast, along with the fact that they will most likely LOSE money because of Hostess shutting down. Try again.

Not addressed in the podcast. This is a typical technique for equity firms, burden the company with excessive debt, which is of course owed to you. If the company can manage to dig itself out of the now deeper hole, great. If not, then at least you got that initial money out of it, up front.

Why was that not the case with the Teamsters?

One union decided it was willing to swallow yet another wage cut and one union decided enough was enough.  How much you are willing to take is something different people are going to draw different lines on.

If these arguments were made about any other subject, they'd be called paranoid conspiracy theories--and rightly so. NO ONE WANTED THIS. NO ONE did this intentionally. And THEY ARE GOING TO LOSE MONEY BECAUSE OF IT.

They'll be fine, they've already paid themselves handsomely up front. Admittedly, there's no proof they intentionally ruined it, but they certainly didn't exercise any significant amount of care, competence or due diligence to try to keep it afloat.

What puzzles me is that the obvious blame for the failure of this company lies not with the union that decided it wasn't worth debasing itself to try to keep on life support for a few more months but rather with the blatantly incompetent ownership and management that drove it into the ground in the preceding years. You yourself have acknowledged that it was managed badly. So why save the majority of your venom for the union, not the people who actually ruined it?

You seem to be ignoring that the debt increased after being taken over by a venture capital firm after bankruptcy.  It would be hard to interpret that as anything other than raiding.  Asking for wage concessions in factories where it had already been pre-determined that they would be closing is similarly disingenuous.

The union was faced with making an ever-increasing spiral of wage cuts, for no perceptible benefit.   It was clear that the business was being intentionally run into the ground, with whatever capital could be extracted from it siphoned off in the meantime.

Imagine your boss dramatically cut your wages, and then cut them again, and wanted to cut them yet again, all while being almost totally incompetent at his job.  How long would you put up with that?

http://www.cps-news.com/2012/11/18/the-demise-of-hostess-brands-was-at-the-hands-of-venture-capitalist-not-unions/

http://www.politicususa.com/romney-vulture-capitalist-style-management-killed-hostess-unions.html