Bain Never Left Romney
There’s a plant in Freeport that makes sensors and controls for cars and airplanes. It’s owned by Sensata Technologies, a company that Bain bought in 2006, somewhere between four and seven years after Mr. Romney left the company. Last year, Sensata announced that it was moving the plant to China at the end of 2012 and laying off all 170 workers, and now those workers are asking Mr. Romney to intervene with his colleagues to save their jobs.
“If he wanted to, all he needs to do is call up the management of Bain Capital and say, ‘Look, don’t do this,’ ” one worker, Tom Gaulrapp, told Reuters.
Mr. Romney had nothing to do with that decision. It would be troubling to learn that the candidate still had such power over the company and was willing to exercise it. The workers, obviously desperate, are hoping that the campaign’s need to avoid bad publicity might help them.
Nonetheless, Mr. Romney remains deeply tied to business decisions like this. As Bain’s founder, he established its business model, which is to wring the maximum efficiency from a company for the benefit of Bain’s investors, even if that means closing plants, shipping jobs to China, and laying off American workers. That’s how private equity often works, and Bain has done it many times before, sometimes to the benefit of a company’s workers, and sometimes to their detriment.
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/bain-never-left-romney/
