Bain Capital to outsource 170 jobs from a US company. They ask Romney to step in and save their jobs.

Freeport Jobs To Be Outsourced At Bain Capital Company, Employees Want Romney To Step In.

In response to more than 170 impending layoffs at Sensata Technologies, a Bain Capital-owned plant slated to be outsourced, a collection of community, religious, and labor leaders have promised to ban together and fight back to save the Freeport jobs.

“When I found out that my job was going to be shipped overseas to China ... at first I was angry, now just five or six months away from unemployment, I’m scared,” said Cheryl Randecker, a Sensata employee who has worked at the plant for 33 years. “As a single mother, I don’t just worry about myself, I actually worry about my daughter."

In early 2011, Sensata, a maker of sensors and controls that are used in aircraft, automobiles, and electric motors, announced it would be relocating the jobs in Freeport to China and closing the local plant. Normal operations have continued following the announcement, but hundreds of jobs are being phased out gradually and final layoffs are set to occur just before the holidays in December.

On a conference call Thursday, Randecker was joined by more than 10 community leaders and activists in a pledge to fight the impending layoffs.

“When I found out that I was losing my job I realized I couldn’t support my daughter’s education,” said Randecker on the conference call. “After working hard for so many years and giving so much to my job, I should be able to give my daughter a good education ... I don’t even know how I’m going to make my house payments and pay my bills.”

Randecker and her fellow employees are currently training their Chinese replacements, who have been flown to Illinois by the company, a process she says is “challenging.”

“We know now from a couple decades of experience how fully destructive outsourcing is, it’s creating a race to the bottom, it’s driving out wages and working conditions for workers all over this country, it’s leaving communities absolutely devastated and that’s what’s going to happen here if this proceeds,” said Carl Rosen, president of District 11 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, on the conference all. “We frankly don’t know what Bain Capital is thinking.”

With a population less than 30,000, Freeport’s unemployment rate, at 10.4 percent in March, is more than the national average of 8.2 percent in May, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“When a company like Sensata chooses to lay off workers and put profits over people, it’s inexcusable,” said Katelyn Johnson, executive director of Action Now, on the conference call. “Now more than ever we need good jobs in our communities, if Sensata follows through with it’s plan to lay off more than 170 workers it would devastate not just the families of the laid off workers, but the entire community of Freeport.”

In 1984 former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, presumptive nominee in 2012’s presidential election, helped found Bain Capital, and for nearly 15 years he was actively involved in running the private equity firm that owns Sensata Technologies.

Many of the people supporting Sensata workers have directed their fight to Romney. On Thursday’s conference call, Randecker asked the community leaders and organizations to sign a letter that will be sent to Romney, asking him to help save Illinois’ jobs. On June 18, while Romney was campaigning in Wisconsin, Randecker and more than a dozen of her fellow Sensata employees staged a protest urging Romney to visit Freeport to see firsthand the effects of outsourcing.

“If candidate Romney’s campaign promise is ‘creating jobs first,’ then let’s see if he can walk that talk. Part of creating good jobs in America is keeping the good jobs we already have,” said William McNary co-director of Citizen Action/Illinois, on the conference call. “Citizen Action joins the Sensata workers in calling on candidate Romney to step in and save the jobs of our sisters and brothers in Freeport and stop these good jobs from being shipped overseas to China.”

In addition to targeting Romney, this month’s Sensata rally also saw a petition being passed around, urging Congress to pass the Bring Jobs Home Act, which offers incentives for businesses to stay in the U.S. Randecker said the next rally for Sensata employees will occur on July 8 in Freeport.

Sensata Technologies’ officials were unavailable for comment.

Image: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

What Gov Walker Didn't Want To See, Wisconsin's Austerity Plan Has Failed, Big Time!

By Giles Goat Boy in the Daily Kos:

Last week I posted a simple chart from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showing that between March, 2011 and March, 2012, Wisconsin was the only state in the nation to have a statistically significant decline in the total number of jobs. Here it is…



I didn’t make up the numbers. I just copied the image and posted it here on DailyKos, on bluecheddar.net, and on facebook. Please share it with others. I'll explain why below the croissant d'orange.

The chart didn’t get a lot of attention on the blogs, but the facebook reactions were fascinating. Before I discuss those reactions, here is my understanding of the table. It counts jobs in the state, not the number of people working. It is an estimate based mostly on surveys that measure non-farm payroll.  Every instance of someone on somebody’s payroll in that month is counted as a job. If someone in Milwaukee works at a Milwaukee McDonalds during the day and a Milwaukee Burger King at night, two jobs are counted for Wisconsin. If a person lives in Racine, Wisconsin but commutes to Chicago to work, that is not counted as a Wisconsin job. Again, the report measures jobs, not people.

There is another report put out monthly by the BLS at the same time that estimates the unemployment rate by state. It is based on different surveys from the ones described above. It is a ratio of the number of residents in a state who are working compared to the size of the state’s workforce. Those numbers are not related one to one. If the number of people working stays the same in a month but the size of the labor force goes down because people moved, died, or retired, the unemployment rate can go down even though the same number of people are working. If our imaginary worker from the previous paragraph is laid off from his night job at Burger King, he is not considered unemployed because he still works at McDonalds during the day. If the Racine worker loses her job in Chicago, she counts as one of Wisconsin’s unemployed because she lives in Wisconsin. The report measures people, not jobs.

In summary, the two reports are significantly different. Among other differences, one report is based on where the jobs are, the other is based on where the person resides. Neither is inherently better than the other, but they are not two ways of measuring the same thing, which is the way many lazy journalists describe them.

I’m not a statistician or an economist, but if you are either of those, please correct me in the comments if my understanding of these reports is way off base.

The numbers come from a reputable source with a long track record. The job loss in Wisconsin is a cold, hard fact that anyone can see in this chart that is devastatingly simple.  That’s why it causes brain cramps and cognitive dissonance among the Walker faithful. Scott Walker promised that Wisconsin would create 250,000 private sector jobs by 2015 if he were elected. He is taking Wisconsin backward while every other state in the nation is gaining jobs or staying statistically even.

Please copy this image and share it wherever you think it might catch the eye of a Walker backer or any other Tea Party zombie. It’s very effective. You don’t even have to comment much about it. It speaks for itself.

ORIGINALLY POSTED TO GILES GOAT BOY ON MON APR 23, 2012 AT 07:08 PM PDT.

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MY THOUGHTS:

This is another example of how Austerity policy has failed.  Gov. Scott Walker passed a very radical and deep cutting budget that has caused the termination of thousands of public employees, privatizing some of the services and busting most of the public labor unions. The result of his austerity plan is clearly indicated in the graph shown above. Why so many losses?  Well when you remove the money generated by government and government employees, you reduce demand for services from the private sector that this money pays for, and in turn, these companies terminate employees because they don't need them with the loss of demand, now these fired employees don't have money to purchase what they need, so other companies see a drop in demand so they fire some of their employees, and the cycle continues.

The only way to change this cycle is for the only entity that has the ability to infuse money into the market is Government. Based on most economic textbooks, the way you do this is to borrow or print more money by the federal government, because they own the money, and give the money to state and local governments to retain their employee and services as well as to hire more companies to build infrastructure that is needed or rebuild that which is decaying. Yes, you increase debt doing this in the short term, BUT as you increase demand for good and services, thus companies hiring more workers, these workers purchase stuff, which in turn increases demand from other companies, so they hire more employees.  All these newly hired employees pay taxes on that income, so tax revenue increases without having to raise the tax rate on these workers, with this increased tax revenue, you hold expense flat and use the surplus to pay down the debt.

This is exactly what Bill Clinton did to create the huge surplus we had when G. W. Bush assumed the office and reversed this trend to pay off the national debt within a decade. Instead he spent us into bankruptcy.

Now the USA is not broke in that we don't have net worth in the country to pay its debts. It is still the riches country on earth at this time, we just need to invest in infrastructure and get people working, the rest will come along by following the Clinton doctrine. We also must shift our economy away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. The sooner we can do this, the sooner we will have more revenue to pay off our debt, both government and personal. It is doable, it just need politicians with forethought and courage to do what is best for the nation and not what's best for corporations.

Mitt manipulates math: a case study

By Steve Benen  -  Thu Apr 12, 2012 8:00 AM EDT

Yesterday, Mitt Romney and his campaign were eager, almost desperate, to work on narrowing the gender gap. The strategy was simple: argue that President Obama, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, is really the one waging a "war on women."

Their efforts failed rather spectacularly, thanks in large part to the clumsy unpreparedness of Romney's own aides. The day offered a reminder of an often-overlooked detail: the presumptive Republican nominee is accustomed to facing weak, bumbling competitors, and Team Romney is going to have to learn quickly the differences between the minor leagues and the Big Show.

But before moving on, it's worth pausing to take a closer look at the Romney campaign's underlying argument: 92.3% of the jobs lost in the Obama era have belonged to women. The claim was debunked yesterday over and over and over and over again yesterday, but my personal favorite was Kevin Drum's takedown, because he included a chart that helped drive the point home.

Kevin Drum, Mother Jones

In case the image isn't self-explanatory, Team Romney took a look at all the job losses and gains in the American economy, starting on Jan. 1, 2009 (three weeks before President Obama was inaugurated). The Republican campaign then got creative: because male workers saw a more sudden increase in job losses at the beginning of that calendar year, Romney carefully chose the starting date for his analysis that exaggerates the results.

If he'd started on Feb. 1, 2009, to reflect Obama's first full month in office, the number for women would have been 300%, instead of 92%. The Romney campaign knows no one would believe such an absurd figure, so they manipulated the figures accordingly.

The scope of its creativity and dishonesty is almost impressive, in a shameful sort of way.

As Kevin explained, "There was a steep job loss among men right at the beginning of the recession and a slower job loss among women. So what happens if you just lop off that bit of the recession and count only the strength of the recovery since January 1, 2009? Well, men have recovered steeply and women have recovered more slowly.... Men have made up ground faster then women since January 2009, so technically that means that women have sustained the bulk of the job losses since then."

Romney's talking point is the kind of argument Americans would expect from a candidate who simply doesn't respect voters enough to be straight with them. The "92%" argument is a con masquerading as political rhetoric. That this is what Romney has been reduced to in April -- on the first day of the general-election phase of the race -- does not bode well for the kind of honesty we can expect from the GOP campaign in the fall.

There's a larger point to keep in mind -- when should the clock start when it comes to evaluating the economy under Obama? -- and I'll have more on that a little later this morning.