Looks like Mediation failed.
Some argue the Hostess situation is 100 percent the fault of the unions, who greedily insisted on contract terms the business could no longer support. Others put the blame solely on venture capitalists, exploiting a vulnerable enterprise's struggle as an opportunity to squeeze its workforce while ensuring their pockets are lined, whether their restructuring is successful or not.

Elements of both stances are valid. If anything, the calcification of each side has stoked the other, encouraging short-sighted me-first-ism on both sides. Should-be allies seeking to salvage their mutual investments became combatants.

Hostess has been a badly run company in an industry where new efficiencies have made traditional ways of doing business unnecessarily expensive. Employees have had to agree to concessions before, only to see top executives cash out. The current management team has had its own strategies it hasn't been able to implement while the bickering continued. About all the two sides agreed on is that they are at the breaking point.

Painting unions as intractable grants a license for draconian measures and battle pay for the trouble. Coloring management as greedy marauders out to pillage a company emboldens and ennobles a refusal to compromise that can only end in a war with casualties.
Rayburn cited the fact that the proposal rejected by the bakers union but accepted by other unions, including the Teamsters, and nonunion workers called for across-the-board givebacks, even extending to the lawyers working on the company's Chapter 11 case.

But the U.S. Trustee, an agent of the U.S. Department of Justice who oversees bankruptcy cases, has objected in court documents to bonuses company insiders are in line to receive in the wind-down plan Hostess has proposed, deeming them overly generous, and seemingly fueling the union case.
Bittersweet question: Is Hostess management or union getting just deserts?