Do we import any large-scale baked good? Is it really feasible?
Yup, unions are awesome!
- Thread starter Scat
- Start date
Do we import any large-scale baked good? Is it really feasible?
If they taste good and I want them I'll buy them, no matter where they're made.
This world will be a much better place when workers in China want twinkies, big screen tvs and fancy cars...and can buy them. I don't want to starve the world in the name of American prosperity. If they make good twinkies in China and sell them at a price I think is fair then more power to them.
This world will be a much better place when workers in China want twinkies, big screen tvs and fancy cars...and can buy them. I don't want to starve the world in the name of American prosperity. If they make good twinkies in China and sell them at a price I think is fair then more power to them.
Despite the jokes, Twinkies do actualy go stale and/or develop mold (as do all the other cakes, pies, etc.). Baking non-locally seems like a recipe for regularly wasting a lot of product.
food is routinely shipped internationally. . . . everything from staples like grain to bananas.
If the "value added" part of the price makes it worthwhile shipping ingredients to China and products back to the USA, and the labor cost savings will pay the freight, that's what we will do.
just sayin' . . . . . of course it also works if we can import cheap labor and have them live in tightly packed housing, working and sleeping as if they were inside a nuclear submarine for a year, we'll do that too.
Unions today have been turned into lapdogs for corporate management generally, and however stupid some unions may be in cases where they pretend to stand on "principle", they can hardly claim to be morally superior than "management" when the bosses are corrupt and just as bent on feathering their own nests as the "management" side. But the original concept of unions as worker watchdogs and a meaningful force for bettering working conditions was a good one, and is badly needed today as much as ever, all across the world.
And yes, tariffs are a good idea too, because they will encourage local production of essentials, ensuring more competition and preventing exploitation by the larger cartelists.
Last edited:
The working conditions in China and the expectations and desires of the common Chinese workers are changing, as the expectations and desires of early industrial age workers in the U.S. have changed. China is emerging from a long dark age. The emergence is at the same time threatening and encouraging. The most populace nation on planet Earth, filled with more human life than three nations such as the U.S.. I wish them well. It's a hard journey, but well worth the trip.
vegas
Well-Known Member
A couple of comments regarding unions:
1. Unions are more powerful in some states than others. Utah is a right to work state, so employees have an option to join their respective union and pay dues, or not. Also unions negotiate exclusive contracts in some cases. In Las Vegas it is common for construction companies to create a sister company that is union specifically to pursue such contracts.
2. Union executives also are paid very well. They don't clear what CEOs do, but it's a good chunk of change.
I don't mind unions protecting the worker, and they definitely shouldn't be done away with. I don't agree when they engage in anticompetitive activities like PLAs (project labor agreements).
As far as Hostess goes, Politico is not likely to blame the union and omit info that does. Just as a conservative outlet like fox will likely focus on anti-union aspects of a story. I read all three links posted, the fox one is really a CNN Money story, so they are all left leaning outlets giving the story. I didn't see much more than propaganda. CNN shows the cuts to be 8%, which is confirmed by our poster here and realistic imo. Also the drastic cuts sited on KOS do not show a reference and is a blog post from an individual who only discloses a screen name. I guarantee that would be all over major media if those numbers were verifiable. It would be interesting to see the actual contract.
1. Unions are more powerful in some states than others. Utah is a right to work state, so employees have an option to join their respective union and pay dues, or not. Also unions negotiate exclusive contracts in some cases. In Las Vegas it is common for construction companies to create a sister company that is union specifically to pursue such contracts.
2. Union executives also are paid very well. They don't clear what CEOs do, but it's a good chunk of change.
I don't mind unions protecting the worker, and they definitely shouldn't be done away with. I don't agree when they engage in anticompetitive activities like PLAs (project labor agreements).
As far as Hostess goes, Politico is not likely to blame the union and omit info that does. Just as a conservative outlet like fox will likely focus on anti-union aspects of a story. I read all three links posted, the fox one is really a CNN Money story, so they are all left leaning outlets giving the story. I didn't see much more than propaganda. CNN shows the cuts to be 8%, which is confirmed by our poster here and realistic imo. Also the drastic cuts sited on KOS do not show a reference and is a blog post from an individual who only discloses a screen name. I guarantee that would be all over major media if those numbers were verifiable. It would be interesting to see the actual contract.
I agree, from my relative ignorance, that the best hope we have is the ability of the ordinary Chinese people to improve their lives in a peaceful way within their present circumstances. . . . and that there seems to be good reason to hope for this . . . . and I wish them well, too.
According to my sister-in-law, whose father served in the Chinese Navy and whose mother has quietly and almost inconspicuously lived as a Christian through her whole life, life is getting better and particularly for the fairly strong "capitalist" business manager class, who are arguably responsible for the resurgence of American auto company fortunes. . . . . In mainland China, every advancing family "must have" their own Buick.
But there are still a whole lot of Chinese workers who are dying from the cadmium in the paint they use on toys for export. . . . .and in many other specific hazardous working situations.
And the air we breathe is being impacted from our downwind position on the globe.
Yes, not all food is baked goods. Grains don't ripen much off the stalk. Fruit is pickedand shipped before it is ripe. What does any of this have to do with baked goods?
Tariffs carry their own load of negative effects, but I'll let the economists talk aboiut those, if they are so inclined.
The Hostess products are very long "shelf life", with pretty high value/weight at the checkstand, and being "baked goods" is irrelevant to the economics of producing them anywhere on the planet. What is relevant is the cost of labor, and as is the case in many other specific products, the removal of tariffs facilitates relocating production offshore/outside this country. . . . . and is the principal economic fact that has meant American soil union jobs have been lost.
Yet our unions have supported the legislation on tariff reductions, and cost American union members their jobs.
The disproportionate costs of American Labor vs. Maquiladoras shops in Juarez were obvious from the eighties, and only one area of US legislation enabling "globalization" in trade. Other disadvantages we have engineered to our own destruction of our American middle class workers include disproportionate costs such as environmental regulations we impose on ourselves, and "safety net" social costs such as social security, medicare, Obamacare, and a thousand other things we have done to shoot ourselves in the foot, so to speak, as a nation. . . . . even importing virtual "slave labor" workers from poor countries for our farms, food processors, meatpackers, and virtually every other labor-intensive production facility you could name.
We import engineers, medical caregivers, even business "managers" such as hotel/motel nightclerks, auto mechanics, home builders and all kinds of construction workers. . . . all at the expense of what used to be "Union" jobs in large numbers. . . . and our unions have been on the bandwagon every step of the way.
Unions today don't give a damn about maintaining adequate living wages or the welfare of their workers. The managers of Unions are just as happy to collect dues from slave laborers as anyone else. All they care about is their piece of the pie.
Which, logically, brings us back to the Hostess bakers' union that tried to, or pretended to, negotiate a stronger pay package. . . . and the corporate managers who all Romney-esque just knew they had a brand and product that could be produced anywhere but didn't care to do it here anymore, who believed they could sell the brand at a nice price even with their declining business in the USA, and probably to some "robber baron" cartelists located across the Rio Grande, who would use our new Brownsville-Chicago superhighway and Mexican trucking to deliver to the US market. . . . and maybe set up a bakery in Shanghai too. So it's really no big deal to us if a few of our capitalists sell off a piece of our economy, pocketing huge bonus/incentives amounting to many times the hoped-for wage/benefits of twenty thousand Americans supposedly because of "union" stupidity or intransigence.
It's really more of a "what took them so long to do this" story.
Even for "baked goods".
I don't think so. Less than a week, in most cases.
I didn't think it would be that long, but there's a reason I'll use "most" in discussions like this.