The story:
The owners of Stella D’oro, the longtime Bronx Italian cookie and breadstick baker, said Wednesday they have sold the company – and its operations will be moving to Ohio by the end of the month.
Some 150 union and other plant workers will be out on the street.
“What are we going to do?” said a tearful Sara Rodriguez, a single mother of two who has worked as a supervisor at the Kingsbridge bakery for 11 years. “There’s nothing to do.”
Lance Inc., maker of Toastchee snacks, bought the company from Brynwood Partners, a Connecticut-based private equity firm, for an undisclosed sum.
Union workers went through a bitter strike that began last year after Brynwood, which bought Stella D’oro from Kraft Foods in 2006, demanded sharp cuts in wages and benefits.
Brynwood told the 136 members of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union they’d shut down otherwise.
The strike ended in July when a National Labor Relations Board judge ruled Brynwood had negotiated in bad faith with Local 50 and ordered it to pay lost wages and benefits. Brynwood then said it would have to sell the firm.
This shows how amazingly obtuse unions can be – a collapsing economy is not the time to engage in an all-or-nothing strike. Now there won’t be any wages or benefits – there will be no jobs at this firm, run by money managers who only care about quarterly profits. The new owners will set up shop, elsewhere, likely with less-expensive labor and make the same product at a higher profit. Its a win for consumers, its a win for rich people – it seems a big loss for these blue collar workers, shoved off an economic cliff by their idiot union.
What to do? The union is pledging to fight on, but I can’t see what they will actually do – are they going to try to get a court order prohibiting the shut down of the firm? I can’t see how they’ll have any success at this. On the other hand, there is much that can be done.
Now, the only thing the workers lost was an employer who wanted to pay them as little as possible – and they’ve also lost the equipment they used to make the products. But they are still the people who made the products – which, by the way, are apparently quite prized by New Yorkers as a friend of mine originally from that area asked my wife to pick up a couple packs of the cookies when she visited New York earlier this year. They can’t use that particular brand name – but they can make the very same cookies and there can be a name which will speak to what the product is…that it will be the “real thing” as opposed to the replacement stuff being made in Ohio.
What I’m saying is that these workers can start to do it on their own. Oh, they’ll need help – and if we were really trying to stimulate the economy, it is to people like them we’d give the money to…if they show willing to put their own sweat equity in to making it work. Its all about making, mining and growing things – and its all about the average folks taking charge of their own destiny. These people are not destitute – they don’t have money, but they have their skills, which are of a high order in their field. Its like taking away the stadium and equipment from the New England Patriots – they are still the Patriots and they can still play football. Get it?
These people have to stop being union workers and start being free workers – workers who take charge of their own and do it for themselves. No crawling after a union or corporate boss to pretty please give some crumbs…no: free men and women making their own wealth and then using it as they see fit. This is the grandest opportunity of their life, if they’ll only seize the moment.
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