A judge on Monday denied Hostess Brands Inc.'s bid to shed deals with its biggest union, the Teamsters, sending the bakery company back to the drawing board as it tries to emerge from its second bankruptcy in recent years, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported. Just a week after clearing Hostess to reject labor deals with the second-biggest union in the case, Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain reversed course when considering whether Hostess could use bankruptcy to replace its current collective bargaining agreements with the Teamsters with a fresh proposal engineered last month. The problem with Hostess's last offer to the union---which would have slashed benefits and ended the union employees' participation in its most risky pension plans---boiled down to a few concrete issues, Judge Drain said: a 1 percent difference between the pretax earnings projected under the company's proposal as compared to the union's proposal, and Hostess's intention to only shift existing employees into more stable multiemployer pension plans.
