About a week before Thanksgiving, I happened to pass a Hostess bakery. The sun was just setting and that bone biting November chill was coming on. About 20 striking workers, all bundled up, were waving picket signs as I drove by. The next day, these 20 workers, and about 18,000 others like them were out of a job.
Hostess had filed bankruptcy and begun the process of closing its plants across America. The company big wigs blamed the demise of the company on the greedy workers for failing to take concessions in pay and pension benefits. That’s it! The workers are GREEDY!
Hold the phone. The workers are greedy? Most of you probably know that Hostess executives asked the bankruptcy court just yesterday to allow them to shell out $2 million in bonuses to a handful of top managers. Methinks I smell irony here. . . irony is a somewhat elusive concept, but here’s what Wikipedia says it is: an event or description “highlighting certain discordant features of reality.” If it is good enough for Wikipedia, it is good enough for Halfpond.
There is discord between the sight I saw–bundled workers fighting to keep crappy jobs, because they had rent or mortgages to pay and kids to feed–and executives awarding themselves BONUSES for spectacularly failing at running a company.
Here’s what I think might be another irony–you be the judge. Remember Mittens and the conservatives espousing the virtue of personal responsibility during the recent campaign? Of course, as a big loser, Mittens can no longer legitimately be considered the spokes model for his party, but he did win the nomination after saying that workers should buy their own unemployment insurance, and not depend on the public unemployment insurance system. So, the justification to the bankruptcy court put forth by the Hostess execs for summarily canning thousands of workers? The workers could begin to collect public unemployment insurance immediately. (Where is Linda Blair? Someone needs to teach me how to spin my head and spew green stuff–that would surely reduce the pressure building in my brain. . . . )
What happened to taking responsibility for running a company into the ground, racking up debts that cannot be honored, and hurtling 18,000 fellow citizens–who showed enough personal responsibility to show up for work on the line every day–into crisis?
If that was your legacy, would you have the chutzpah to suggest that you deserved a bonus?
~Coming soon from Halfpond: “Meditation on Greed.”
From the Tao Te Ching: “[S]he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.”