It’s about to get a little intense here at Bainport.
This morning, we filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board against our Bain Capital-owned employer, Sensata Technologies.
Yesterday, we heard that they’re threatening to shut down our Freeport plant immediately—and for good—if we continue to organize against the outsourcing of our jobs to China.
It sounds to me like someone wants this story to go away.
And why not? Sensata has emerged as a huge controversy over Mitt Romney’s ties to China. Not only does Romney stand to profit from the outsourcing of these jobs through the stock he still owns in the company, but his 2011 tax returns show that he got a huge tax break by moving Sensata stock to a foundation that he controls—and that he continues to profit from Bain’s offshore holdings and tax avoidance strategies.
Time and time again, we’ve asked Mitt to prove his job creation claims by helping save our jobs from being outsourced to China.
But despite these threats, we’re not slowing down. In fact, any minute, Rev. Jesse Jackson is arriving back in “Bainport”—the county fairgrounds across the street from Sensata that we’ve been calling home for the last month—and he’ll be joined by religious and labor leaders for another huge event today.
We filed two charges with the NLRB today. The first charge was for “increasing security and announcing a new policy, or a previously unenforced policy, prohibiting off-duty employees from entering work areas at non-work times, in response to and in retaliation for employees engaging in protected concerted activity,” while the second charge was for threatening to shut the plant down.
This wouldn’t be the first time they shut the plant down. They did so this past weekend in the face of some major national attention. MSNBC’s The Ed Show broadcasted live from the Bainport camp across from the plant on Friday night in front of a crowd of hundreds, while CNN reported live from the camp three times last week.
My co-worker and good friend Joanne Penniston—whose teenage daughter was one of three community supporters who were arrested earlier this month for blocking trucks from removing equipment that was on its way to China—said this, and I couldn’t agree with her more:
“Not only are they shipping our jobs to China, they are also trying to take away our rights as American workers. We are not going to be intimidated. We are going to stand up for our rights and our jobs.”