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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.
In the author’s view, Hostess’s demise tells us about______.
选项 A、the ends of greedy unionized workers
B、the weakening of union strength
C、the stagnation of American economy
D、once-dominant businesses
答案B
解析 第三段第二、三句指出：Hostess公司的倒闭为我们揭露了现如今工会工人的困境……工会力量主要集中在曾经占据主导地位、但如今行将灭亡的大公司。言外之意是，Hostess公司倒闭告诉我们工会力量的变化。再由第四段第二、三句所述“工会工人代表数在美国工人数中占很大份额之时，能够帮助广大工人改善条件，而当越来越缩水并集中在公共部门之时，则沦为广大工人眼中的利益集团”可以进一步肯定工会力量是在弱化，[B]选项更符合文意。
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