It's election day, and Mitt Romney has never had a word to say to the workers at Bain-owned and Romney-invested Sensata Technologies who have been fighting to keep their jobs from being sent to China and the plant closed. He's suggested that voters should blame the situation on President Barack Obama and his
pension. He's told
Chrysler and General Motors workers to fear having their jobs sent to China.
He's said that as president he would stand up to China and work to keep jobs in the United States. But for these workers, whose firing he will personally profit from as good, mortgage-paying, tuition-paying American jobs are turned into 99 cent an hour jobs in China? Mitt Romney has nothing.
The Sensata workers have now turned their fight from saving their jobs to getting a fair severance. Their severance packages were cut immediately in advance of the notice that their jobs would be cut. Instead of getting a week of severance for every year they'd worked at the plant, with a 13-week bonus for those who had worked there for more than 20 years, severance is now capped at 26 weeks. So, for instance, Tom Gaulrapp has worked at the plant for 33 years. Instead of getting 56 weeks of severance, he'll get 26.
Monday night, the Freeport, Illinois, aldermen voted 6-2 to support a resolution calling on Sensata to pay the workers a full year of severance. That would be $7.7 million from a company that made $106 million in profit in the first three quarters of the year, and it would not only support the 170 workers, but the community of Freeport, which is losing one of its major employers and the wages that these workers would normally spend in local businesses.
It being election day, Mitt Romney gets to stop pretending to care about American jobs going to China. But he never even pretended to care about these workers.
It's time to dash Romney's dreams of being president and getting to hurt more workers than his personal checkbook allows. Go vote.
11:30 AM PT: Tom Gaulrapp talks about filing for unemployment benefits and voting on the same day after 33 years in the same job.