Hostess Saves Twinkies By Automating, Fires 94% Of Their Workforce (washingtonpost.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Where Twinkie once employed 22,000 workers in more than 40 bakeries, their workforce is now down to just 1,170, reports the Washington Post, relying mostly on robotic arms and other forms of automation. "This 500-person plant produces more than 1 million Twinkies a day, 400 million a year. That's 80% of Hostess' total output -- output that under the old regime required 14 plants and 9,000 employees."

"We like to think of ourselves as a billion-dollar startup," Hostess chief executive Bill Toler said Tuesday, announcing that Hostess Brands, which had twice filed for bankruptcy, now plans to become a publicly-listed company valued at $2.3 billion.

Comments

The Taste must have been fired also

[soksabay9499]

bloody 'ell mate they taste like cardboard now.

Re:The Taste must have been fired also

[Anonymous Coward]

As if the taste was any better before.

Re:The Taste must have been fired also

[ArchieBunker]

Pretty much sll pre-packaged baked goods have a sweet chemical taste. It's technically food but everything is processed to hell.

Re:The Taste must have been fired also

[cyberzephyr]

Who cares when you're stoned out of your mind? And besides, they did taste good. I used to buy their stuff by the truckload. They only went broke because I left the country.

Hey, i thought that was me...

Re: The Taste must have been fired also

[nospam007]

"They used real cream back in the 1960's."

Hardly. I ate a few from the early sixties yesterday, and they tasted just like the 'new' ones.

Re:The Taste must have been fired also

[hairyfeet]

What is sad is the fruit pies are complete garbage now, in fact the cheap generic fruit pies actually have more fruit in them than a Hostess does. It used to be a Hostess fruit pie was the best you could get, you couldn't take a bite without just piles of fruit, now you are lucky if there is 3 pieces of fruit in the whole nasty thing, its just gross HFCS with artificial flavoring.

BTW before anybody brings up the fact that Wonder Bread is still good? A different company bought the Wonder Bread brand and they still make a quality product. I've tried all the "new Hostess" products and frankly the generic knock offs taste better, Hostess snacks now taste like overpriced cardboard and is one of those companies like Atari that lives solely to mine whatever nostalgia they can because their new products simply cannot compete with their old ones.

Re: The Taste must have been fired also

[HornWumpus]

Real cream never had the shelf life.

I was whipped sweetened lard, then it became whipped sweetened hydrogenated vegetable oil.

Re:The Taste must have been fired also

[RubberDogBone]

Assuming you don't have issues with Walmart, you may want to check out the fruit pies they are selling, two for a dollar I believe. They come in a little square box, each pie in a metal pan. Just enough for one serving. Usually multiple flavors of these things are stacked on a table somewhere in the bakery section.

The notable thing is a real award-winning pie bakery is the supplier for these things and they actually, astonishingly, taste like homemade pies. They're not frosted like the old Hostess pies but the pie itself is much better.

If you really need the Hostess style of pie, the ones made by Tastykake are good. Flowers Bakeries, the owners of Tastykake, also own Wonder Bread in the US. Flowers is known for being much more focused on quality than some other companies.

Re: The Taste must have been fired also

[ArmoredDragon]

They used real cream back in the 1960's.

Welcome to the modern era of cost-cutting, shortcuts and quick profits. Long-term strategies need not apply.

No they didn't, that was back in the 30's when the twinkie underwent a big change, and the reason they changed it was because the key ingredient of a twinkie no longer existed. They made twinkies out of actual bananas. The reason they stopped doing both bananas and cream was because both were rationed in WWII (partly due to the gross michel extinction, with the cavendish not making it to mass market quite yet, among other general supply problems that existed at the time caused them to switch to vanilla creme.) After that period, everybody's palate changed and they adapted to the new taste. Depressions tend to do that.

Even if they wanted to go back to the old taste, they couldn't. The gross michel banana is gone and it's not coming back; instead we have the cavendish now which is very bland in comparison, and even it is going to die soon because like their predecessor, all cavendish bananas are clones of one another. This MUST be the case though, because real bananas that can reproduce on their own don't have much actual fruit in them, and have seeds that are as hard as a rock and will break your teeth if you try to chew them. We might be able to resurrect the gross michel with GMO to make them more resilient to the fungus that killed them, but who knows because we can't even have golden rice because Greenpeace declared war on it.

At any rate, back in 2011 Hostess reintroduced the original twinkie (as best they could; remember, no more gross michel, so it's literally impossible for them to reproduce the original taste without adding sugar and other stuff) only nobody really bought it. People got used to the post-depression twinkie as its taste had already become so iconic over the years, and so that's what people want.

Re: The Taste must have been fired also

[avgjoe62]

Oh I think there was plenty of greed involved, just not on the part of the factory workers: Hostess Executives got Raises While Filing for Bankruptcy

Re: The Taste must have been fired also

[Jumunquo]

True, but there's a bit more to the story.

What drove Hostess into the bankruptcy in the first place was bad management, lack of investment into their plants, etc., you know the usual. That management squeezed what they could out of the company, took their bonuses, and left the sinking ship.

They then brought in a new CEO, and he put out plan to right the ship. That included pay freezes/cuts. Two of the unions agreed to the new contract, and one of them double-checked the numbers, and they agreed management was not lying about this being needed.

One union refused. The union leaders recommend to their members to let the company go bankrupt, go to auction, and then the new owners would give them a better contract. Now, it should have been obvious that the new owners are likely going to be company in the same business, and like any merger, a ton of jobs would be lost. Indeed, that was the first thing that happened, where 2/3 of the plants were closed. These were well-paying jobs too, not something you can find baking just anywhere.

In conclusion, irresponsible management drove Hostress to the brink, and that one stupid union put the final nail in the coffin.

I Know Where The 22,000 Went!

[moehoward]

They are all walking my neighborhood playing Pokenmon Go. Every freaking one of them.

But really, 22,000 humans making Twinkies and Ding Dongs is a major waste of humanity. I could justify having like 13,500 making Snowballs, cuzz those rocked.

I get really strange results in 2016 when I Google twinkie, snowball, ding dong, and cupcake. Mom!!!!!

Re:I Know Where The 22,000 Went!

[DarkOx]

Two ways to look at things.

1) Its a shame that we now have more unemployed people. While many of them are somewhat to blame in terms of not taking the initiative and updating their own skills having a post Hostess employment plan etc, I think we can agree there were challenges as well. Society has failed structurally to provide many with the opportunities and tools to keep a viable career path open for their working lifetime.

2) This is really pretty cool. There is a lot more competition in the packaged food space than when the twinkie first graced the scene. Its also true the relative cost of the goods twinkes were originally created as a substitute for have pretty well fallen to levels where twinkie does not make a lot of sense as a replacement good in economic terms. So what we have here is a very niche product, one that could not be offered economically using last centuries technology. Thanks to labor savings and efficiency though the die hard twinkie lovers can get them, and the rest of use vary occasional twinkie consumers can know there will be on on the shelf of our local grocery! The production, supply, and distribution chain is efficient enough to give us a crazy amount of choices!

Re: I Know Where The 22,000 Went!

[ShanghaiBill]

When Obama took office, 66+% of the US population worked.

Now, almost 8 years later, 62+% of the US population has a job.

So it is Obama's fault that the baby boomers are retiring?

Re:I Know Where The 22,000 Went!

[__aaclcg7560]

What 'skills' do you think a factory worker needs to keep up to date precisely?

Starting a business on the side that can eventually become a full-time business.

Re: I Know Where The 22,000 Went!

[SvnLyrBrto]

Yeah. And when you scope out the very chart you linked to, that same rate during the 1950s and 1960s shows that metric barely ever climbing over 60%, only starting to rise about halfway into the 1970s. It plateaued in the 1990s and has been on a gradual decline since 2002.

That big hump couldn't have anything at all to do with the baby boomer generation entering the workforce en-masse in the '70s, and now starting to retire. Nope. It's all Obama's fault. That's the ticket.

Re:I Know Where The 22,000 Went!

[DarkOx]

You'll will note I started by indicting the individuals before I suggested society has failed. You are assuming by society I mean government. Government might be part of it but it isn't the whole of it.

The new economic reality for most people is you won't just not spend your whole career at the same company, you also won't do it working the same type of job. So yes have to continue to learn to do well, you have to be willing to take appropriate risks and exercise opportunities that come along. So why did these people not do that, why were they still aboard the sinking ship that was a bankrupt company when the doors closed?

Was that 13 years of government education not effective? I think we have to start there actually, my feeling is despite the fact there are a number of good dedicated teachers out there our 19th century education model isn't a good fit for the education requirements of today. I am not an expert in education so I don't have solutions but I can see that its broken. I also don't think just more and longer education is the answer either otherwise many people with 4 year degrees would not have been hit so hard. Maybe in fact primary and secondary school should be shorter and it should be normal to go to work for a time before higher education?

Has society come a part to the point where people can't get additional education. Do people not know and trust anyone enough around them to watch their kids for the evening so they can take a class? Have we broken up families, family units and the idea of familiar responsibility to the point people have no resources to turn to? Has the risk become to great, do people not have enough savings to risk taking a job that might not work out and having to find another? Why don't we having savings as a nation? Could it be the central bank keeps rates to low for two long? Have wages been flat because of to much regulation sucking profitability out? Do we now mandate individuals divert to much of there income to things that might not be appropriate for them like certain forms of insurance? Are we asking young people who should be building wealth early and as fast as possible so they can benefit form compounding to shoulder crushing tax burdens and provide subsidies to previous generations?

I am a conservative small government guy, many would label me radically so in fact. I am also not naive government is already big, and therefore the policies it makes have real consequences. Yes I would love to sign on to a plan of starve it until its small enough to fit in a bath tub so we can than drown it but we need to take some steps along the way. We need to identify what statist policy of the the last 60 years has broken in our society and stitch some of that back to together. We need to identify policy that does work so we don't throw the baby out with the bath. We need to look at how the economy has changed and make sure we are designing and offering solutions for 2016 and not 1976.

Re:I Know Where The 22,000 Went!

[LWATCDR]

You left out the third option.
1,100 jobs where saved by automation. Hostess went out of business and several other companies bought up the rights to the products that Hostess made.

Re:I Know Where The 22,000 Went!

[ShooterNeo]

What the OP means is that if say, you learn to do something new but can't get a job because no one will hire you due to your age, that is in fact a structural problem...

Our society has a very elaborate system where you must have the right credentials from the right places - and earning those credentials typically is a very long and expensive process yet most of the knowledge taught you will not use - and be the right age, and these days you need an internship where you worked for free for a period of time for a job you had to be competitive for, and so on and so forth.

Then you do everything right and they hire an H1B by scamming the Federal government.

Re: I Know Where The 22,000 Went!

[Martin Blank]

It's 66% of the population age 16 and above, with some minor exceptions.

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics glossary:

Labor force participation rate
The labor force as a percent of the civilian noninstitutional population.

Civilian noninstitutional population (Current Population Survey)
Included are persons 16 years of age and older residing in the 50 states and the District of Columbia who do not live in institutions (for example, correctional facilities, long-term care hospitals, and nursing homes) and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.

It includes everyone who has retired and who lives on their own, and yes, the baby boomers have had a large effect on it. Ben Casselman at FiveThirtyEight discussed this a couple of years ago, noting that the LFPR began declining in the early 2000s. Short version: about half, maybe a little less, of the decline can be attributed to Baby Boomer retirement. Other factors, including more people in school and some people not returning to the workforce, account for the rest.

Headline is misleading and a little clickbaity

[jpostel]

They didn't fire everyone because of automation. They fired everyone because the business was grossly inefficient and bankrupt, and it happened over several years. They automated because it was the only way to compete in their market and survive as a company.

Re:Headline is misleading and a little clickbaity

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I came here to complain about the loaded headline. This isn't even the same company at all. The old one went into chapter 7 and got liquidated. There were no employees left. Those 1,170 jobs are essentially new jobs. Yeah, they likely pay less with fewer benefits than the old company, but they otherwise wouldn't exist without the current owners buying the assets, since nobody else was interested.

It could be that the submitter is trying to tank the IPO by spinning things this way so he can buy the stock cheaper.

Re:Headline is misleading and a little clickbaity

[MightyYar]

Management should have been thrown into the fire instead. They're the ones who ran the company into the ground, not the people who did the actual work every day. But guess who got fucked over?

Pretty much everyone got fucked over. The unions negotiated themselves out of a job, the owners lost most of their equity in the bankruptcy, and the debt holders had to take discounts. The people running the show now essentially just bought the brand and are justifiably proud that they aren't doing as shitty a job as the last group of people.

Re:Headline is misleading and a little clickbaity

[CastrTroy]

Let's assume you could cut 20 million out of executive salaries. Divide that by the 22,000 employees, and you end up with about $900 a piece. Realistically, you wouldn't be able to take that much from the executives. When the employees outnumber the executive by 10,000 to 1, it really doesn't matter how much you cut off executive pay, because the cost of the labour will vastly outweigh the cost of executive salaries.

Re:Headline is misleading and a little clickbaity

[Daemonik]

You are delusional. The company went through 10 CEO's in 10 years! Each outgoing manager taking with them larger severance packages even as the company crumbled around them. Management destroyed that company.

Re:Headline is misleading and a little clickbaity

[serviscope_minor]

Management destroyed that company.

Nuh uh.

Axiom: unions are evil.

Therefore unions destroyed the company.

See?

Re:Headline is misleading and a little clickbaity

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you might want to reread that.

The unions made plenty of concessions over the years until near the end only to have the management take them, raise their own wages and then ask for them to be lowered more.

The Unions didn't negotiate themselves out of a job, the management mismanaged the company into the ground and now they are making it out of it by throwing those whom actually did their jobs under the bus while those who threw the company away are getting away with it.

The fact they were about to automate that much away should tell more people the direction the world is going and the reality they must wake up to. Where they can't expect everyone to work the jobs that don't exist at wages too low to live on and must transition to one where not everyone has to work to live a decent life. Or we can go the Elysium route.

I mean look at it,

The farmers professions are nowhere near as prevalent as they used to be and no longer considered "Real Work" unless you are the ones running the place,
Manufacturing professions are nowhere near as prevalent as they used to be and no longer considered "Real Work" for many and a growing level of them,
The service sector is shrinking due to automation and such and they aren't considered "Real Work" for the majority of them and is growing.

At this rate, we won't any hardly any "Real Jobs" left which a bunch of old fucks wondering why their kids can't get the jobs they used to have and instead of accepting the reality of the situations, they will just continue to lie to themselves and call them "Lazy" rather than accept the fact that their generation collectively threw their children under the bus.

Re:Boycott All hostess produsts

[burtosis]

Thanks for the info, i will now boycott all hostess products. Twinkies suck anyways lol haven't eaten one in 20 years.

Go ahead and eat one of those still left in your pantry, 1996 was a good year for twinkies.

Re:Boycott All hostess produsts

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realise that the computer you're using is mostly made via automated processes, don't you? Are you going to boycott that as well?

If you're going to boycott everything that's made by a machine you're going to find yourself living in a cave and reverting to a hunter scavenger state.

Automation poses a lot of challenges for our society, but employing people just to give them something to do is not the answer. Personally I think we should reduce the standard working week by one hour per year until we reach a 20 hour standard week. That would allow society to adapt to the changes progressively over the period of a couple of decades while ensuring there are enough jobs for those who have been left unemployed due to automation.

Re:Boycott All hostess produsts

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, it's better to have 22,000 laid off because they went out of business than it is to have 1,170 employed directly at Hostess, and others indirectly employed at the robot manufacturers, ingredient suppliers, shipping companies, distributors, packaging suppliers, insurance companies, and all the other entities that support a running business.

Re:Union played hardball and lost

[JBMcB]

To be fair, the teamsters were making concessions, while the baker's union was playing hardball. IIRC it got to the point where the teamsters were actually complaining about the other union, which is pretty unusual.

Re:So will they be passing that savings onto us?

[John Jorsett]

What's passed along is the cost of supporting the thousands of unemployed.

The old company went belly up, so those jobs were gone anyway. This is a new company and new hires, so nobody is "passing along" anything.

Even if that weren't the case and this had been accomplished by restructuring the old company, that's still good. Productivity gains are achieved by getting the same or more output using fewer resources.

No, they "saved" corp profits by Union busting

[_KiTA_]

While the Automation kick is an interesting angle, lets not forget what actually killed Hostess -- vulture capitalists. These are Mitt Romney style assholes who swooped in, loaded the company up with debt, then pawned it off after leeching all the money out. Somehow though, it's not embezzlement when an investment company does it.

But it gets worse. The unions that took the blame? They were having their workers give upwards of a THIRD of their paychecks just to try and save the company they helped build. And that just caused the vultures to trade the company around more and more.

That leaves the unions in one corner and the hedge funds and Hostess management in the other. Management ordered the company to stop contributing to the union pension funds, ignoring their obligations under collective bargaining agreements. They have demanded a new round of concessions, which would have doubled insurance premiums, negated all pension obligations, and slashed pay by 27 to 32 percent. Again, the 14-year Hostess bakery veteran: “Remember how I said I made $48,000 in 2005 and $34,000 last year? I would make $25,000 in five years if I took their offer. It will be hard to replace the job I had, but it will be easy to replace the job they were trying to give me.”

So yeah, the automation is interesting, but lets not forget what brought us to this point. Vultures bought the company, embezzeled a shitload by loading on bad debt and pawning the company of as well as flat out stealing from the pension fund, and passing the buck to the next leech until they couldn't pass it any further. And now instead of having good quality Wonder Bread and tasty, if not exactly healthy, sweets like the Twinkie, we get mass produced automated crap.

The local Hostess bakery re-branded as a Franz, and the quality is really good. They also have a direct-from-the-baker storefront that you can go in and get bread at a huge discount. Oh, and they're union and pay their workers a good wage -- around $17 an hour starting.

As I said the last time this came up, no American should EVER support Union Busting. Hostess is dead to me, and besides You can clone a twinkie pretty easily, which lets you do stuff like a fresh baked chocolate twinkie with cherry filling.

Re:No, they "saved" corp profits by Union busting

[_KiTA_]

Do the math first. 400MM twinkies, 22,000 people. That is an output of about 9 twinkies per hour per employee. Even if back in the day they produced twice as many, the efficiency is abysmal and there is no way that a Twinkie has sufficient value to sustain all those people on a liveable wage.

Well, yeah? That's why the workers didn't just make Twinkies -- they also made a shitload of different types of pastries (chocodiles, ho hos, etc) and breads. Stuff like Wonder Bread, the Nature's Pride line, etc etc. And the 22,000 people probably weren't all making Twinkies to begin with.

Hostess -- under their name Interstate Bakeries Corporation -- was pretty damned huge before the Vultures got to them. Hell, before the health food kick of the past decade or so Wonder Bread was probably one of the most popular breads in the US.

Re:Union played hardball and lost

[Herkum01]

I don't get this attitude that Unions destroy everything, was management sitting on their hands. Looking into shenanigans of management.

• Leaving the original bankruptcy(in 2004) in greater debt than before
• Unable to fix operations after 8 years!
• Giving themselves raises before the bankruptcy(2011), While
• Offering to drastically cut pensions and benefits for unions

The raises management gave themselves right before the bankruptcy

Brian Driscoll, CEO, around $750,000 to $2,550,000
Gary Wandschneider, EVP, $500,000 to $900,000
John Stewart, EVP, $400,000 to $700,000
David Loeser, EVP, $375,000 to $656,256
Kent Magill, EVP, $375,000 to $656,256
Richard Seban, EVP, $375,000 to $656,256
John Akeson, SVP, $300,000 to $480,000
Steven Birgfeld, SVP, $240,000 to $360,000
Martha Ross, SVP, $240,000 to $360,000
Rob Kissick, SVP, $182,000 to $273,008

Re:Boycott All hostess produsts

[mrbester]

There'll be a new sub-niche: Vintage Twinkies. Magazines will recommend years to get and which soda to eat them with. New fashionable eateries will pop up with a Twinkie list instead of wine: "Do you have the '96?" "Sorry, sir, we've run out, however I recommend the '01" "How about the '92?" "I'll need a credit card before I can serve you that"

Re:Union played hardball and lost

[tomhath]

Let's assume they're all at the max. Total salary for that list is $6,351,508.

Now let's assume a "living wage" for factory workers of $35,000. That gives us $6,351,508 / $35,000 = 181 factory jobs.

You can complain about their salary, but where are you going to get the other $300,000,000 that was going to the 8500 workers who were laid off?

Re:Union played hardball and lost

[Kohath]

Shorter version: Management is bad and they get huge paychecks -- therefore, anything the union does is flawless and perfectly justified, regardless of the outcome. You can always justify anything by criticizing someone else.

Thanks for letting us know.

Re:So will they be passing that savings onto us?

[Kohath]

What would you prefer? Force the company to rehire 22000 people for 5 minutes before it goes bankrupt again? Force then to raise the price of Twinkees to $10 each so they can make money with 22000 workers? Force us all to buy these $10 Twinkees? Subsidize the company so they can afford to sell Twinkees at a huge loss?

Please let us know what the best choice is.

Re:So will they be passing that savings onto us?

[ShanghaiBill]

I do not suppose that the current employees earn 18 times what the old employees earned.

Of course not. Productivity gains don't stay concentrated in one company, they are spread through society. Overall, American productivity has improved by a factor of 20 since the late 1800s. So has the average worker seen their standard of living improved by that much? Yes, mostly they have. Improvements in productivity not only improve living standards, they are the ONLY thing that improves living standards.

If you really feel otherwise, then you can go live in a country that has not seen productivity improvements. Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo, and Afghanistan are good choices. None of those have greedy rich people suppressing the workers by investing in capital to make them more productive.

Nice bromide, but how about an actual answer?

[sethstorm]

So it's society's responsibility when it's a matter of deference to business friendliness, but it's the fault of individual when they can't second-guess the desires of employers?

Re:Union played hardball and lost

[ThosLives]

Less than that, even. You forgot the 7+% for employer's part of FICA and Medicare. You forgot whatever unemployment insurance costs in the states of operation. You forgot whatever the employer's portion of various health insurance or other benefits. Taking the general rule of thumb that employer costs are 1.25 to 1.5 times the salary, That $6.3M is only 120 to 144 jobs at $35k- so significantly fewer than your estimate even.

I think most of the complaints about executive salaries aren't really because that money could be used to pay employees more or pay more employees, because those numbers don't really add up; I think the complaint is more just in order of magnitude - 10 times might be palatable, but someone making 100 times the salary of another means that person earns effectively an entire lifetime of the lower salary in a single year.

Re:So will they be passing that savings onto us?

[grumling]

You can't say that for certain. Running machines requires skilled labor to maintain and program them. Pulling trays out of an oven all day doesn't. Programming and maintenance skills have a higher value, not to mention that the employee generates more revenue per hour than the manual laborer.

Re:Nice, but try answering the question.

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Perhaps the degree in Communications wasn't the best idea for them?

Not all University Grads are created equal. Some of them half-assed and partied their way to an easy degree, which is worth every bit of the effort they put into it.

Re:So will they be passing that savings onto us?

[ArmoredDragon]

They wouldn't have this problem if the baker's union didn't decide to be dickholes back in 2012. The management wasn't bluffing; there was a big consumer craze at the time for weight loss so their sales tanked. Other pastry makers ran into similar problems but they didn't have a union making unreasonable demands that they had no choice but to follow. (Krispy Kreme had to close a lot of their restaurants, Dunkin Donuts has turned more into a coffee shop than a donut shop.)

Remember, the teamster's union saw what was going on with the market in general and chose to accept the terms offered by the management, which was a wise decision because, remember, if you price yourself out of the market, then you won't be in it anymore. But the baker's union leadership really didn't give a fuck about the jobs of their employees, and Frank Hurt, a very rich union boss (with one of those "Cadillac" health insurance plans that Obama granted special exemptions to just because he wanted to favor unions) effectively spun it as "it's all the management's fault" while he could go home still having a job while the people he supposedly represents lost theirs, all because he refused to budge in light of an obviously changing consumer mindset, and the management doesn't have the ability to change that.

People just don't buy twinkies and donuts like they did in the 90's, and it's not likely they ever will again because now people have a lot more access to information than they once did, which means they're going to make different decisions than they once did as well.

Re:So will they be passing that savings onto us?

[bluefoxlucid]

It sucks to be in the path of progress; that's why we have welfare. Unemployment is transitional, and it sucks to lose your job and wonder if you're going to spend 5 months or 5 years trying to find a new one; at the same time, unemployment tends to stay in the 4%-8% range, and 5% unemployment means either you or someone else is that guy wondering about where you're getting your next paycheck.

The difference is whether you stay in your comfortable seat and we all stay as poor as we are, or you get moved out of your comfortable seat and the other 95% of society enjoys growing wealth. The middle-class get to buy more toys (e.g. computers, cell phones, the things that made your programming job worth $144k/year in the first place); the poor get to eat more frequently, and maybe get access to medical care; you get to look for a new job, and a highly-wealthy society can supply better welfare to keep you from ending up as a beggar on the street with no job and no food while you do that. Probably less-good for you than not losing your job, but a lot better for everyone else at that moment, and better for *everyone* over time.

You would be wearing a loincloth and hunting in the wilderness right now, probably ill, with no healthcare and the constant uncertainty of where your next meal is coming from, if we didn't progress in this way. Your comfortable life today is built on the cycle of technical unemployment.