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  3. Hostess Brands is not dead just yet, but the prospects for the company’s survival are now dim at best. Hostess—which still makes

Hostess Brands is not dead just yet, but the prospects for the company’s survival are now dim at best. Hostess—which still makes

admin2014-06-25  36
问题     Hostess Brands is not dead just yet, but the prospects for the company’s survival are now dim at best. Hostess—which still makes iconic food products like Twinkies and Ding Dongs—filed for bankruptcy back in January for the second time in eight years, in an attempt to get out from under a pile of debt and labor obligations. But last week, after Hostess put in place a contract that the bakers’ union said would end up cutting wages and benefits between twenty-seven and thirty-two per cent, that union went on strike. Hostess claims the strike has irreparably damaged production and made it impossible for it to continue operating. As a result, on Friday the company asked a bankruptcy judge to allow it to liquidate the company.
    Management, of course, blames the company’s demise on the greedy, unreasonable unions. But, while the strike may well have sent Hostess over the edge, the hard truth is that it probably should have gone out of business a long time ago. The company has been steadily losing money, and market share, for years. And its core problem has not been excessively high compensation costs or pension contributions. Its core problem has been that the market for its products changed, but it did not. The simple truth is that this kind of failure is regularly found in the creative destruction process.
    The problem, of course, is that that destruction is going to make the lives of thousands of workers upside down. And to the extent, then, that Hostess’s demise shows us something important about the plight of organized labor today, it’s not that greedy workers have brought on their own demise. It’s rather that one of organized labor’s biggest challenges over the past four decades has been that union strength was concentrated in industries and among companies that, though once dominant players in the postwar American economy, have often ended up in a slow slide to obsolescence, employing fewer and fewer workers and having less and less money to pay them with.
    The real issue here is that people’s image of unions, and their sense that doing something like going on strike is legitimate, seems to depend quite a bit, in the U. S. , on how common unions are in the workforce. When organized labor represented more than a third of American workers, it was easy for unions to send the message that in agitating for their own interests, union members were also helping improve conditions for workers in general. But as unions have shrunk, and have become increasingly concentrated in the public sector, it’s become easier for people to dismiss them as just another special interest, looking to hold onto perks that no one else gets. It was once taken for granted that an industrial worker who worked for a big company for many years would get a solid middle-class lifestyle, and would be taken care of in retirement. Today, that concept seems to many like a relic.
It can be learned that______.
选项 A、the future is still bright for Hostess’s iconic brands
B、Hostess filed for bankruptcy with debts that far outweigh its assets
C、the bakers’ union is an immediate trigger for Hostess’s death
D、Hostess secured a bankruptcy judge’s permission to go out of business
答案C
解析 第二段第二句指出，罢工很可能将Hostess逼上绝路，也即，面包师工会所掀起的罢工行动是Hostess停产的直接原因，[C]选项正确。
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