Who would have thought that the demise of the famous creamy confection called “Twinkie” would provide such an instructive example of union/business relations at their worst?

When one looks into it, it is no wonder that Hostess Brands Inc. has been in and out of bankruptcy proceedings several times since 2004. The company was finally strangled to death this month after thousands of bakers union members went on strike, protesting wage, health-care and pension cuts imposed by a bankruptcy court.

But it was a slow strangulation, and the issues of wages and benefits really weren’t the underlying problem for Hostess.

Consider that Hostess, a nationwide company with 36 plants, had 372 collective bargaining agreements that maintained 80 different health and benefit plans and 40 pension plans. The agreements obligated the company to “a $31 million increase in wages and health care and other benefits for 2012,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Cake and bread products had to be delivered to stores in separate trucks, and drivers weren’t allowed to load their own vehicles — because there were some workers who were allowed to load bread and others who were allowed to load cake. Oh fudge!

We suspect there were many other profit-killing provisions in place that led Hostess in 2011 to have sales of $2.5 billion but an overall loss of $341 million.

Still, the Bakers, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union maintained their strike even though the company’s leadership insisted it didn’t have the cash flow to withstand the strike.

Despite the lame protestations of the union leadership about company executives getting raises, there is strong reason to believe the company was genuinely boxed in. Never mind all the bankruptcy stuff; it says a lot that the famous Teamsters Union could smell failure in the future. The Teamsters favored a compromise and crossed the bakers union picket lines in an effort to keep Hostess running.

But that wasn’t enough to stop the company from liquidating assets and 18,500 jobs with the approval of the bankruptcy court.

The good news for consumers, of course, is that the popular brands like Twinkies will survive to be eaten another day when the bankruptcy court sells off these valuable assets. The irony is that the next company that makes money off them will probably operate without unions, or in a right-to-work state, so that profits can be restored to the recipe. Imagine that!

Yep, there are lessons to be learned here, particularly for the taxpayers who end up supporting unsustainable demands of public-sector unions. In some states, the situation has reached a Twinkie-like tipping point where it should be obvious that business as usual will eventually put the state “out of business.”

California, for instance, has a $16 billion deficit and the highest debt load of any state, a startling $618 billion that includes $500 billion in unfunded pension liabilities. Here in Montana, the state has public employee pension liabilities of at least $3.9 billion.

Unions have purposes that are justifiable, as long as they don’t strangle the entities that support them. For Hostess workers, however, it was an exercise in collective employment suicide.