Broken GZIP/pickle on Python 3.3

When enabling pickle as the result serializer and enabling gzip as the message compression, I get a consistent UnicodeDecodeError on this line since it is trying to decode bytes into UTF-8, which cannot be done.  Removing this line makes everything work like a charm.  It also works fine with JSON and JSON+GZIP.

Why was it inserted?  What did it fix?  Was there a change in python 3.3 that maybe makes it no longer necessary?