Fired Factory Worker Calls Romney A Job Killer

[bigtree]

Dec. 28, 2011

Labor organizer Randy Johnson was among the hundreds of blue-collar workers who lost their jobs at an American Pad and Paper (Ampad) factory in Marion, Indiana after Romney's private equity firm acquired the company in 1992 . . .

"It was really one of the worst things I think I've had to deal with, because people … were at my desk crying, 'What do I do? I don't have a good college education… I just wanted to get to retirement,'" Johnson recalled in an interview with ABC News. "Families were devastated. In some cases, the husband and the wife both worked there. They lost all their income. It doesn't get much worse than that."

Bain Capital purchased Ampad in 1992, and Ampad purchased the factory where Johnson worked two years later. The new owners began cutting staff and wages at the plant, and raising the cost of health benefits. The unionized workers went on strike. Ultimately, the plant was shuttered and all the employees lost their jobs.

Johnson's powerful story from the dark days at Ampad became a political weapon that Democrats wielded against Romney in potent television ads. They aired during the closing days of Romney's bitter 1994 challenge to the then-incumbent Sen. Edward Kennedy. Johnson also traveled at his own expense to Massachusetts to participate in rallies against Romney's candidacy, in part with the hope that his efforts would pressure Bain Capital to preserve jobs at the struggling paper plant.

The one-time factory worker has long since moved out of Indiana and is now employed by the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh. He believes that with unemployment as the focus of the 2012 presidential race, Romney's tenure at the helm of Bain Capital will again become grist for his political adversaries. And Johnson says he is preparing to assist again. (Johnson was approached directly by ABC News, and did not speak at the urging of any of Romney's political rivals, Democratic or Republican.)


read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/romney-critic-resurfaces/story?id=15244767&singlePage=true

watch interview with Randy Johnson: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/video/romney-critic-resurfaces-15245071

[HughBeaumont]

1. Workers who support predatory capitalists amaze me.

Romney thinks of firing a worker the same way he thinks of brushing his teeth or taking a piss. He doesn't see the human or economic cost because he simply does not care.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/04/12/173892/romney-job-killer/

Romney is right to be talking about job creation considering the unemployment rate, but his record in the private sector is one of job destruction. As Politico detailed, Romney’s company, Bain Capital, was in the business of buying up distressed companies, slashing them to bits, and then selling them off, resulting in lots of job losses:

– In 1992, the firm acquired American Pad & Paper. By 1999, the year Romney left Bain, two American plants were closed, 385 jobs had been cut and the company was $392 million in debt. The next year, Ampad was forced into bankruptcy.

– Bain Capital and Goldman Sachs bought Dade International for about $450 million in 1994. The firm quickly fired or relocated at least 900 workers. Over the next several years, it sunk increasingly into debt and laid off 1,000 workers. In 2002 — after Romney had left Bain — it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

– A 1997 buyout of LIVE Entertainment for $150 million resulted in 40 layoffs, roughly one in four of the company’s 166 workers. The job cuts affected all aspects of the company, from production and acquisition to legal and public relations.

– In 1997, Bain bought a stake in DDI Corp., a maker of electronic circuit boards. Three years later, Bain took the company public and collected a $36 million payout. But by August 2003, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, laying off more than 2,100 workers.

22 percent of the money Bain Capital raised from 1987 to 1995 was invested in five businesses — Stage Stores, American Pad & Paper, GS Indusries, Dade, and Details. These five made Bain $578 million in profit, even as all five eventually went bankrupt.

Oh, and his comments about the workers losing their jobs?

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/12/romney-if-you-dont-like-bain-layoffs-go-back-to-moscow.php?ref=skyboxes

Mitt Romney, under fire from his Republican rivals for laying off workers as CEO of Bain Capital, says critics of his jobs record are flirting with communism.

“If someone thinks they can find a way that every enterprise that one invests in becomes… all are successful, why they’re not living in a free enterprise system, they’re living in a system like the old Soviet Union where the government insists that everybody adds employment every year and ultimately the economy suggests that the people become poorer,” Romney said on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday. “I believe that free enterprise works and that the other models have been proven to be failures time and time again, and I was surprised to have Newt Gingrich pick up the story line that came from Barack Obama and the DNC and go on the attack against free enterprise.”

"Free Enterprise" Yeah. You want THIS predatory vampire CEO running America?

[SunsetDreams]

2. The Republicans are Job Killers for the 99%.

[UTUSN]

3. I'll R(#3) to that!1 n/t