On this last weekend in September 1987 the oven in Minneapolis' Wonder-Hostess bakery went cold for the first time in decades. All told, 200 hard workers lost their jobs, many never to work again.
Continental Baking plant #143 dated from the early 20th century, reputedly a hotel that didn't make it that was remodeled into a bakery for the Occidental milling and baking company. By the mid 1920s the sprawling 3 story, 100,000 or so square foot plant was owned by Continental Baking, and was one of its nationwide chain of a hundred or so bakeries.
Despite being spread over three stories and a basement, it was a versatile bakery that could bake any bread from Wonder White to whole grain organic. In fact, in its last years a customer requested a line of whole grain bread and we baked and delivered it for them. Same with buns, and we made everything in the Hostess line of Twinkies and Pies except donuts, butterfly rolls, and the HoHo/Ding Dong variations. Top floor was the cake shop, the most labor intense part of the bakery and darn near the hottest. 2nd floor was the bread shop, dominated by a brick tunnel as long as the building with a conveyer belt running through it. Main floor was distribution, where we sorted the bread and cake for each local depot and loaded over a dozen trailers a night with but a one stall loading dock. The basement held ingredient storage and the engineers shop. The engineers were so talented and their shop so well equipped that when something broke, they would simply make replacement parts themselves if none were available. They also were obsessive about preventive maintainence- the moment the bakery shut down early wensday and saturday mornings, they were all over the equipment to insure its continued reliable operation. Thus breakdowns were rare events, and the decades old oven never failed. We had a diverse workforce, thanks to our personel department's good habit of notifying local social service agencies of job openings.
Ours was just one of Continental Baking's chain of around 70 bakeries, arrayed about the country so no customer was more than a few hours away from a bakery. In fact, 80% of our bakery's bread was sold within 100 miles of the bakery, and the distribution lines were so short that you'd often find our bread still warm from the oven on Minneapolis area store shelves in the morning. Continental Baking was an independent company until the 1960s when it was sold to ITT, and turned a profit every year, including through the depression.
Then in 1984 ITT sold Continental Baking to Ralston Purina. RP had a new CEO who seemed intent on building a conglomerate, as they bought up Eveready Battery about the same time and moved them and Continental Baking to their St. Louis corporate HQ. RP at the same time tried to buy up much of the wholesale baking biz while shutting down whatever of their bakeries had ticked them off at the moment. First to be killed off was the iconic Wagner Bakery in Detroit, now home to the Motor City Casino. That bakery took up the better part of a block, and the bakers responded with a picket line clear around that block and then some. The Teamster deliver drivers honored the picket line, and by the time the strike was over Wonder had lost it's spot as Michigan's best selling bread and the bakery was abandonned for over a decade. Undaunted, RP kept right on closing bakeries.
By 1986 the city of Minneapolis, looking for land to build a new convention center, gave RP a chance to turn our bakery into cash. We bakery workers and delivery drivers tried to persuade the city otherwise, but the architect was headstrong and insisted that our bakery was the perfect place to dump his convention center on. RP led the city on that it needed a high enough price for the bakery to build a new one in the city, though we suspected the company would take the millions and run. We were right- after going through the motions of touring prospective sites for a new bakery, RP took the four million dollars the city paid for the bakery and ran. And though construction wouldn't begin on the site until spring, RP shut down our bakery at the end of september, leaving many workers a few months short of the years of service they needed to be vested for a pension.
All told, around 200 jobs were lost- the original estimate was lower, but several small businesses in the properties the city took for their convention center closed. Embarrassed by their gullibility, the city set up a dislocated worker program and as a sop the company kept about 30 distribution jobs at a suburban warehouse. By the time we got the dislocated worker program going 6 months later over a hundred workers were still unemployed, a few having been eligible to retire or having found other jobs. Some of our bakery workers transferred to the company's other bakeries, only to be laid off again as RP closed even more bakeries. The distribution center and its 30 jobs were lost a decade later. After merging with Interstate Bakeries and buying out regional bakers like Drakes and J.J. Nissen, the company, now known as Hostess Brands, has been in a downward spiral of mismanagement and less than 40 of the companies' hundred or so bakeries remain.
For the hard workers that baked and delivered the bread of CBC plant #143, even a quarter century later, the wounds have not healed. One worker, a recovering addict, returned to using shortly after the closing and shook his own infant child to death. One developmentally disabled worker applied for disability and had his application rejected. Unable to find any work, last I heard he was living with his elderly mother. Another disabled worker never found work again, and last I heard was in a long term care home. Another worker used the funding from the dislocated worker program to get trained as a heavy equipment operator, but in a quarter century has never been able to find more than temp employment in the field. As the company's downward spiral eliminated more jobs, even many of the survivors of the bakery closing have had to take early retirement to preserve what few jobs remain for younger workers. Before Hostess Brands death spiral began in 1984 the companies employed around 40,000 workers; Today, not even half that.
Today, Hostess Brands is in bankruptcy again. Next week management will try to force a concession contract on the Bakers who have soundly rejected it. If the company succeeds, the bakers will have no option but to strike, and the remaining ovens of Hostess Brands will go cold forever. More on that in a diary next week...
