Demonstrators Deliver Petitions To Bain Captial Offices In Evanston

By aaroncynic in News on Aug 23, 2012 8:30PM

Employees of Sensata Technologies delivered more than 35,000 petitions to the doors of Evanston’s Bain Captial office, demanding it step in to prevent the outsourcing of 165 jobs from its subsidiary. Bain Captial purchased the company from Texas Instruments in 2006, and last year announced it would phase out jobs at its plant in Freeport. The company plans to close the plant after final layoffs occur in November and jobs will be outsourced to China.

Bonnie Borman, a 23-year employee, told Progress Illinois “This is going to devastate our community. Freeport is losing $7.7 million in income, and for a population of about 30,000 that’s a lot of money.” Workers being laid off trained their Chinese replacements over the past few months.

The petition, which began with employee Cheryl Randecker, calls on Bain Capital executives and Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who said he retired from the firm in 1999 but may have continued in a leadership role until at least 2002, to stand against the outsourcing plan. Randecker told the Huffington Post “With so many hardworking Americans still out of work, the last thing our country or our state needs is another corporation shipping good, American jobs to China.”

Sensata employees were joined by members of Stand Up Chicago, Arise Chicago and Chicago Jobs with Justice. Like many employees, their supporters also believe much of the blame rests on Mitt Romney. In an interview with Progress Illinois, Elizabeth Parisian, a policy analyst with Stand Up Chicago, said “Romney founded and ran Bain Capital for many years, this is the company that was founded on his vision, run under his leadership and he continues to make a profit from it to the tune of millions of dollars.”

A representative for Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky joined the demonstrators. Schakowsky said in a statement read at the rally “I applaud all the workers at the Sensata plant who have had the courage to stand up against this epidemic of outsourcing. I join these workers to call on Bain and the company’s former CEO Mitt Romney to save these jobs.”

Some Sensata workers plan to head to the RNC in Tampa at the end of the month to keep putting pressure on Romney. The Rockford Register Star reports organizers said in a statement “Since Gov. Romney hasn’t responded, we are taking our campaign directly to him.”