Thursday, September 27, 2012

'Bainport' workers seek Romney-Obama debate on outsourcing

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/27/bainport-workers-romney-obama-debate-outsourcing

Amy Goodman
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 27 September 2012

Today, as the African-American president of the United States prepares to debate the candidate from the party of Lincoln, workers in Freeport are staging a protest, hoping to put their plight into the center of the national debate this election season.

"Bainport" is the name the workers have given their protest encampment. A group of workers from Sensata Technologies have set up their tents across the road from the plant where many of them have spent their adult lives working. Sensata makes high-tech sensors for automobiles, including the sensors that help automatic transmissions run safely. Sensata Technologies recently bought the plant from Honeywell, and promptly told the more than 170 workers there that their jobs and all the plant's equipment would be shipped to China.

You may never have heard of Sensata Technologies, but in this election season, you've probably heard the name of its owner, Bain Capital, the company co-founded and formerly run by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. When they learned this, close to a dozen Sensata employees decided to put up a fight, to challenge Romney to put into practice his very campaign slogans to save American jobs. They traveled to Tampa, Florida, joining in a poor people's campaign at a temporary camp called Romneyville (after the Hoovervilles of the Great Depression). They organized a petition drive, getting 35,000 people to join their demand to Romney to call on his former colleagues, to save their jobs.

Since Freeport is close to two swing states, Iowa and Wisconsin, they traveled to a Romney rally and appealed directly to him there. Ironically, for appealing to Romney to save their jobs from being sent to China, the Sensata workers were jeered as "communists" at the rally, and removed by US secret service.

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