Your Daily Bain

WASHINGTON -- When Dade Behring started cutting employees under Bain Capital's management in the late '90s, Cindy Hewitt was on the front lines. As a human resources manager for the Dade East plant in Miami, Hewitt had to decide which employees had needed skills and whose jobs were expendable.

News of the latest layoffs trickled down to the Dade company cafeteria. The room could seat more than 1,000, and it had been enough of a draw that it even offered breakfast.

But as the layoffs hit, the mood in the cafeteria could be as somber as a funeral, Hewitt recalled. Multiple members of the same family might be gathered to commiserate over being laid off one by one by one. Some of them had worked for the medical diagnostics company for more than a decade.

Hewitt saw her colleagues crying on a daily basis and loudly celebrating on the rare occasion that someone found a comparable new job. "There was a tremendous sense of loss and this kind of outpouring of grief and mourning as every day they waited for the announcement of who was going next," she said. "People were on pins and needles. Who's going next? They're worried for themselves, worried for their co-workers, worried for their families. They'd talk about how they were going to send their kids to college. It was an incredibly depressing and demoralizing environment."

Since the Republican presidential primary, Dade Behring, which made blood-testing machines and conducted animal tests at its Miami plant, has become something of a focus. Bain Capital, GOP presidential hope Mitt Romney's firm, had bought Dade and shuttered its factory in Puerto Rico in 1998. The closings continued under Bain's management.

It's become a familiar tale about Romney and Bain's business dealings. The New York Times reported that Bain pushed the profitable company into bankruptcy. The Miami Herald followed with its own chronicle of the mass layoffs and mass profits for Romney and company. The Tampa Bay Times reported that Dade had received millions in tax breaks to promote job creation in Puerto Rico one year before it closed the factory there.

Bain, of course, walked away with a huge profit. In 1999, the private equity firm grabbed $242 million after it pressured Dade to borrow more millions to buy up Bain's shares in the company.

So many Dade workers lost their jobs -- 1,700 in the United States, 850 in Miami alone -- that the Bain-Dade dealings have become a symbol of corporate bloodletting and a painful memory to those who witnessed the layoffs.

Fred Gregory, an information technology consultant, said he was brought in to assist the plant closing in Miami. The cafeteria scene also stuck with him. At a certain point, he told HuffPost, he stopped eating lunch there. "I didn't want to see the women crying," he explained.

"You could walk in there and hear a pin drop," Gregory said. "You could see the emptiness. It was just huddled-up sheep. It was pathetic. It was heartbreaking, heartwrenching. You just want to hug them."

The layoffs continued for months and months. Gregory saw people fired and workers running out of the Dade offices in tears. "These people were scared to death," he said. "This was their livelihood. Some people couldn't bear it. It was a horrible place to work." Some would get an hour's notice before being shown the door.

The plant added higher fencing and concertina wire, Gregory said. Each day, a pair of security guards would check his back seat and trunk on the way out to make sure he wasn't stealing any office supplies. "It was all so well orchestrated," he said. "And so evil."

The Romney campaign, Bain Capital, and Siemens, which bought Dade Behring's operations in 2007, did not respond to requests for comment.

Michael Rumbin had been a Dade vice president. "No one ever came up to me to ask if we could create more jobs," he told HuffPost. "There was very little in the way of job creation. It was a business undertaking in which the Bain Capital people created a tremendous amount of wealth for themselves and their investors."

Hewitt has an idea of what the corporate bigwigs were doing at the time. One incident still sticks with her.

In the summer of 1998, amid mass layoffs and mandatory overtime at the Dade East plant, she saw workers crowded around a glass executive suite. Some shook their heads and walked away, and others just stood there staring, she recalled. She walked over to check out what was going on and found several department heads putting golf balls in the office.

"Here are these people whose lives are upside down, doing mandatory overtime, and the executives are playing golf where all the employees can see," Hewitt said. "I was so upset that I walked in and picked up a golf ball and said, 'Get out and go to the golf course if you don't have anything to do.' It was the most callous, insensitive thing I had ever witnessed. I was completely dumbfounded."

Hewitt said the golf putting incident was so traumatizing for her that she quit her job the following month and began a career in animal advocacy. She never took another job in human resources again, despite having a master's degree in the field.

"There's a part of me that tries very, very hard to not think about that experience," she said. "I felt I had been a part of treating people very poorly, and I could not in good conscience put myself in that kind of position again."

Full story
 
But the class war is just a demoncrat thing?

I don't know why we have to be afraid to say class war. I think it's amazing how the big business thugs have bullied Americans, via the media, into being afraid of calling a class war a class war. Watch how the bullies will run onto this thread now.
 
I don't know if the workers interviewed who said such damaging things about Bain's business practices were always Dems...but you are probably right they probably are now! You would be too.

LMAO... so the fact that the company today still has over 6000 employees vs. the 6400 at its peak... let me guess... we should ignore that?

The fact that Baxter was struggling to get that division to be profitable... we should ignore that

The fact that Bain turned the division into a successful venture... we should ignore that

We should only focus on the fact that Bain made money: 'OMG OMG OMG they wanted to make money'
 
I see the Bain apologists are out in force....

yes, correcting lies from your kind is 'apologizing' for Bain. Doesn't it bother your conscience to support those that continually lie and distort?

It is not a surprise that Obama resorts to this given his abysmal economic record. If I were him, I would want to focus on anything other than my job performance too.

The sad part is, you keep apologizing for him.
 
LMAO... so the fact that the company today still has over 6000 employees vs. the 6400 at its peak... let me guess... we should ignore that?

The fact that Baxter was struggling to get that division to be profitable... we should ignore that

The fact that Bain turned the division into a successful venture... we should ignore that

We should only focus on the fact that Bain made money: 'OMG OMG OMG they wanted to make money'

Well, wanting to make money is bad, mmm'kay? It isn't like jobs are created by companies that actually can stay in business rather than losing money... Oh... wait...
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/u...-profits-and-then-layoffs.html?pagewanted=all

In recent years Mr. Romney has regretted some of the decisions he made...

oh wow... you mean someone actually regrets some of their past decisions? Here I was thinking that every single decision we each make was always like awesome and stuff in hindsight. I can't believe someone would actually regret a decision they made in the past. Wow... riveting Rana... just riveting.

I do like how your link ends though...

Bain’s strategy, as painful as it was with plant closings and layoffs, had ultimately worked, executives said. The bankruptcy “does muddy the story,” said Mr. Wolsey-Paige, the former Dade executive. “Over all,” he said, “it was very positive.”

and lets not overlook this one either...

Something even worse would have happened if they had remained as they were before Bain bought them. It would have been a steady stream of cuts and layoffs.”
 
I see the Bain apologists are out in force....

I like to give em a little something to scurry about googling every day. It's less time they have to spend in their MRA circle-jerks. Someone's got to keep these clowns busy. I'll have something new tomorrow, don't worry.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/u...-profits-and-then-layoffs.html?pagewanted=all

In recent years Mr. Romney has regretted some of the decisions he made...

LOL...

It seems you miss things like this:

“Something even worse would have happened if they had remained as they were before Bain bought them. It would have been a steady stream of cuts and layoffs.”

Anyway, saving 6000 jobs that one can actually point to is a good thing. Some day you should count all the Staples employees, their jobs were saved by Romney as well, in fact most of the Staples you see today exist because Romney helped to save that company. Most of those jobs were "created" not "or saved"...
 
LOL...

It seems you miss things like this:

“Something even worse would have happened if they had remained as they were before Bain bought them. It would have been a steady stream of cuts and layoffs.”

Anyway, saving 6000 jobs that one can actually point to is a good thing. Some day you should count all the Staples employees, their jobs were saved by Romney as well, in fact most of the Staples you see today exist because Romney helped to save that company. Most of those jobs were "created" not "or saved"...

The disparaging way you continually refer to the latter is pretty weird.

As though saving jobs isn't a worthwhile endeavor....
 
The disparaging way you continually refer to the latter is pretty weird.

As though saving jobs isn't a worthwhile endeavor....

I usually do that because they simply say they've "orsaved" whatever number they like without something like this company to point to... It's a silly measure... We need him to stop "orsaving" and start doing some of the creating.
 
The disparaging way you continually refer to the latter is pretty weird.

As though saving jobs isn't a worthwhile endeavor....

Onceler yurt has gotten free from his cage and is flinging poo all over the place like a monkey with a spastic colon. I know you need a break here and there, but when you're off yurt duty it really shows.
 
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