Yes, not all food is baked goods. Grains don't ripen much off the stalk. Fruit is pickedand shipped before it is ripe. What does any of this have to do with baked goods?
Tariffs carry their own load of negative effects, but I'll let the economists talk aboiut those, if they are so inclined.
The Hostess products are very long "shelf life", with pretty high value/weight at the checkstand, and being "baked goods" is irrelevant to the economics of producing them anywhere on the planet. What is relevant is the cost of labor, and as is the case in many other specific products, the removal of tariffs facilitates relocating production offshore/outside this country. . . . . and is the principal economic fact that has meant American soil union jobs have been lost.
Yet our unions have supported the legislation on tariff reductions, and cost American union members their jobs.
The disproportionate costs of American Labor vs. Maquiladoras shops in Juarez were obvious from the eighties, and only one area of US legislation enabling "globalization" in trade. Other disadvantages we have engineered to our own destruction of our American middle class workers include disproportionate costs such as environmental regulations we impose on ourselves, and "safety net" social costs such as social security, medicare, Obamacare, and a thousand other things we have done to shoot ourselves in the foot, so to speak, as a nation. . . . . even importing virtual "slave labor" workers from poor countries for our farms, food processors, meatpackers, and virtually every other labor-intensive production facility you could name.
We import engineers, medical caregivers, even business "managers" such as hotel/motel nightclerks, auto mechanics, home builders and all kinds of construction workers. . . . all at the expense of what used to be "Union" jobs in large numbers. . . . and our unions have been on the bandwagon every step of the way.
Unions today don't give a damn about maintaining adequate living wages or the welfare of their workers. The managers of Unions are just as happy to collect dues from slave laborers as anyone else. All they care about is their piece of the pie.
Which, logically, brings us back to the Hostess bakers' union that tried to, or pretended to, negotiate a stronger pay package. . . . and the corporate managers who all Romney-esque just knew they had a brand and product that could be produced anywhere but didn't care to do it here anymore, who believed they could sell the brand at a nice price even with their declining business in the USA, and probably to some "robber baron" cartelists located across the Rio Grande, who would use our new Brownsville-Chicago superhighway and Mexican trucking to deliver to the US market. . . . and maybe set up a bakery in Shanghai too. So it's really no big deal to us if a few of our capitalists sell off a piece of our economy, pocketing huge bonus/incentives amounting to many times the hoped-for wage/benefits of twenty thousand Americans supposedly because of "union" stupidity or intransigence.
It's really more of a "what took them so long to do this" story.
Even for "baked goods".
