Hacker News Reader

Comment by annacappa | Hacker News Reader

Funny how this is being framed by the article writer in terms in unionization. Are they suggesting that the workers should just give up their pensions and wages so that a clearly broken and mismanaged company should just lurch onwards? Why is it when a company succeeds everyone praises the management and heaps huge bonuses on the C suite but when they fail they try and blame the workers.

View on HN

Though the article did hit the nail on the head with this statement from the Teamster's head: “Today’s news is unfortunate but not surprising. Yellow has historically proven that it could not manage itself despite billions of dollars in worker concessions and hundreds of millions in bailout funding from the federal government."

The workers conceded quite a bit over the years, but despite that and the bailout, the management of Yellow still couldn't make it work.

To be fair, the workers made concessions, but they remained higher-cost than non-union competitors. Unfortunately for them, trucking is a highly-competitive industry with little brand loyalty where lowest cost usually wins.

Privatize the gains, socialize the losses. Even in the news.

"Socializing the losses". It will happen anyway. Perhaps not in the USA, but in Europe, the 30,000 unemployed would get an unemployment benefit for X amount of months, their formetly-private-provided healthcare wouldn't be paid for (thus covered by the state), and so on.

So, doing the math.. does it make sense to 'inject $€ X million to keep the company afloat, get the 30,000 and their families fed, the money would come back to the state via taxes, in the hope that the company will go back to the green?

If one (not me) can crunch the numbers, it could (or not?) point to the direction that it was money well spent - and net-net it wasn't "$€ X million" wasted but a fraction of that(?)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com