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0 pointstxru5y ago0 comments

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.

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Alupis5y ago· 3 in thread

> 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...

bsder5y ago

> 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.

txruOP5y ago

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.

Alupis5y ago

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.

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