Labor Day is a celebration of the American Labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity and wealth of our country.
Unfortunately, as I have written in past articles: a) Sears: A Profile in Job Loss! and b) Motorola Employees Reactions to Lenovo’s Takeover many U.S. icons like Sears and Motorola are dying and shedding workers! The latest to join this list is the manufacturer of Twinkies.
Twinkies was born in Chicago in 1930. The parent Hostess at its peak had 11 plants and a unionized workforce. Unfortunately, on October 19th, its last Chicago area plant will close in Schiller Park. This will end 84 years of being manufactured here and displace 400 Chicago area workers!
Many factors affected the downfall of Twinkies including:
- Protracted union negotiations. For example, in May about 280 of Twinkies workers voted to unionize against the wishes of management.
- Many competitors, such as Golden Sponge Cake (sold at Jewel-Osco), Little Debbie Cloud Cakes, Golden Crème Cakes (sold by Wal-Mart) and Nice! sponge cakes (sold at Walgreens) have popped recently up at 5-50% lower cost than the Twinkies per cake price of 68 cents.
- A growing consumer interest in healthier foods with more natural ingredients that has hurt sweeter, unhealthy snacks like Twinkies.
Whatever the reason, this is another death nail in the coffin of U.S. manufacturing, which I have written in many previous articles, including What Is Manufacturing?, needs to be revived! At stake is our prestige as a country and health of our workers.
Most engineering recruiters, scientific recruiters, technical recruiters and executive recruitment agencies have been sounding this alarm for decades. In fact, just yesterday, I interviewed a candidate for an open position we have at our technical recruitment agency for an electrical engineer recruiter who said, “if we do not wake up soon, we will be a 3rd world country!”
Besides our selfish reason of loosing placement fees, all executive recruitment firms have a vested interest in sharing this alarming trend that is getting worse by the day! If we cannot manufacturer our own planes, trains, tanks and ammunition, we cannot successfully fight the villains of the future such as ISIS! Then we will not be able to celebrate any more future Labor Days in America!
What are your thoughts?
