Real News:' What Brought the Death of the Twinkie, Management, Unions or the Consumer?

Hostess announced Friday that they would be asking a court to allow them to liquidate their company, shuttering business doors after 82 years and laying off 18,500 employees. The company, having already gone through a bankruptcy in January, said it could not sustain a nationwide strike by its bakers union. Management told union representatives that if they couldn’t bend on wages and benefits by Thursday, they would shut down the company. Union representatives called management's requests "outrageous," and said they would not take "draconian wage and benefit cuts on top of the significant concessions they made in 2004 and give up their pension so that the Wall Street vulture capitalists in control of this company can walk away with millions of dollars."

The union did not bend and now the workers are out of jobs entirely.

Business Insider reports that Hostess, maker of the Twinkie and Ding Dong, is now controlled by a group of investment firms that will sell its assets to the highest bidder. Possible buyers could pick up Hostess's more popular products at auction and package them at other companies. Beyond labor costs, CSM notes that increased competition in the snack space and Americans being increasingly conscious about healthy eating also could be attributed to Hostess's fall.

The Hostess announcement was analyzed by the panel on "Real News" Friday, building out to examine how this news of an iconic company falling against private labor union demands compares to the debate surrounding public sector unions that we have seen over the last year.