The Twinkie Defense, or What Does “Uncompetitive” Mean? | Jacobin
What Seth said. Or: Why “Competitiveness” as a metric is bullshit, and why it’s basically always an excuse for taking things out on workers.
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What we have here is a situation where a company offered a wage in the marketplace and couldn’t get any workers to accept it. Consequently, it went out of business. The word “competitive” gets thrown around a lot, often with the murkiest of meanings, but in this case there can be no doubt at all that a company, Hostess, was unable to pay a competitive wage. Ninety-two percent of its workers voted to walk out on their jobs rather than accept its wage, and they stayed out even after they were told it was the company’s final offer.
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