Labor hopes to turn Twinkie battle into ‘teachable moment’

By Greg Sargent, The Washington Post

So it’s now being reported that Hostess and the bakers’ union will go into mediation, meaning the cream hasn’t been drained out of the Twinkie for good just yet. This is good news in the sense that it means 18,000 workers may yet be spared their jobs. But beyond that, this is now likely to escalate into the sort of battle that raged around recent local skirmishes — such as those over collective bargaining in Wisconsin and Ohio — that labor unions tried to use to draw national attention to workers’ rights.  The AFL-CIO plans to try to turn this into a “teachable moment” and a “national discussion” to “educate people about workers rights and collective bargaining,” according to AFL-CIO spokesman Josh Goldstein. The AFL-CIO will be following the lead of the union that represents the Hostess workers, but it has offered to lend any assistance it can, and will separately use this story to draw national attention to labor issues in general.  To Read More.....