The war on supervillainy just got a lot harder.

I always wanted to make an Architect arc where the player thwarts Lord Recluse by giving him Hostess fruit pies. Or maybe Nemesis. Of course, no one under age 30 would get it, maybe even older.

The evil private equity firm, Ripplewood Holdings, was founded by Timothy C. Collins, a major Democratic donor. Collins was looking to invest in troubled companies with union workers. Collins apparently thought if he could work with the unions to turn around a business as iconic as Hostess it could be a model for saving other businesses. Instead he failed to save Hostess and Ripplewood is expected to lose most of the $130 million they invested in Hostess. Ripplewood's lenders aren't expected to do any better. If these are "vulture capitalists" they aren't very good at it.

Management at Hostess was incompetent. They gave themselves huge pay raises at a time when they were asking workers to take a pay cut. They failed to adapt to the changing marketplace. They made a lot of mistakes.

At the same time the baker's union did things that made it hard to lower costs or improve efficiency. For example, the union required bread and cakes to be delivered by different people even when they were going to the same place. This was not a safety issue. Contrary to a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign I once played in Wonder Bread and Twinkies do not combine to form a highly volatile explosive compound capable of leveling a city block. This was a greed issue. Double the delivery men means double the dues paying union members.

In the last 10 years the baker's union has lost over 30,000 members as local after local has voted to decertify the union. Just to be clear, that means that a majority of union members if those locals voted to leave the union. Not surprising given that over 500 complaints have been filed against the union over their duty of fair representation. These are not the strong jawed champions of workers' rights that some people seem to think they are.

In short, there's a lot of blame to go around. Management was incompetent and did a lot of bad things but the union wasn't helping the situation either.

Yeah, I'm not impressed. You don't allow your executives to raise their pay while decreasing the pay of others. That makes the unions recalcitrant, and these guys have a history of breaking heads.

Edit to add this isn't a political thing, this is a business malfeasance issue. Republicans and Democrats both engage in this because A) it's legal and B) the other guy will do it if you don't, which means you'll go out of business.

Yes, you don't give yourself a raise while asking other people to take a pay cut. You also don't force a struggling company to retain redundant workers and engage in deliberate inefficiencies that drive up business costs just to line union pockets.

I didn't particularly want to get political but other people already had in this thread so I thought it was worth mentioning. Just like it's probably worth mentioning that Richard Gephardt was involved in Ripplewood coming in to Hostess and as part of that arrangement Gephardt's son was given a seat on the board of directors making $100,000.

I've already said, and I'll say it again, that the executives shouldn't have given themselves raises. However, things like the separate deliverymen for bread and cakes was in place long before Ripplewood got involved.

People like to ignore the fact that there's money and power in leading a union. Union leadership are just as drive by greed as everyone else. Hell, why do you think organized crime has taken such an interest in unions? Because they're worried about worker's rights?