By Randy Johnson



During the last few weeks, lots of folks have been talking about Mitt Romney and his experience as a corporate buyout specialist when at the helm of Bain Capital. Romney claims that running Bain gives him the experience to run the country. But I saw firsthand the impact of Romney's decisions, and I can tell you that Romney and his partners cared more about making millions for themselves even as they crippled companies and laid off thousands of workers.



In 1992, Bain Capital bought a company, Ampad, for $40 million. The investors put up just $5 million while borrowing an additional $35 million with the company as collateral.

Soon afterward, Ampad bought the Marion, Ind.-based company, SCM, where I worked.

It was the first in a series of acquisitions that were paid for by loading up my employer with millions in debt.

I worked the night shift making file folders. When we showed up after the July 4 holiday, we found a one-page note that said all 250 of my co-workers and I were fired, accompanied by security guards that Romney’s company had brought in to prevent us from entering our place of employment. It’s like Mitt Romney and his partners kicked us in the stomach.

Eventually, they let some of us return to work, but only after they cut our wages, slashed our health care benefits and threw out our retirement plan. Then — just a year later — it started all over again. Without negotiating with us, Romney and his partners closed the factory and laid all of us off. It turned out that Romney and his colleagues had been loading Ampad up with debt by borrowing more and more against the company.

At the same time, they were demanding millions in management fees every year to ensure they and their investors got paid first while cutting the wages and benefits that my co-workers and our families depended on. By 2000, Ampad couldn’t even pay the interest on the debt they had dumped on it.

In seven years, the debt had grown by 35 times — or more than $400 million. So it had to declare bankruptcy. That’s the business philosophy Romney is pledging to bring to the White House.

When it was all over, Romney and his company had squeezed more than $100 million out of the company, 20 times the amount they first put in. They closed Ampad factories nationwide from Georgia to Texas to California to New York, producing countless stories just like mine.

Romney and his fellow investors got into the game to grow their own wealth, not to create jobs or grow the company for everyone. To them, Ampad must have been a resounding success. Having your salary cut and then being fired is humiliating. When it’s through no fault of our own, it’s a tragedy. Twenty years later, Romney still doesn’t get it. His campaign even calls the story of my hardship “performance art gibberish.”

This election is about who can get the economy moving again by building an economy where hard work pays, responsibility is rewarded and everyone plays by the same set of rules. It’s clear to me that Romney thinks that there are two sets of rules: one for him and his friends and another for the rest of middle-class Americans.

This election is a choice, and voters deserve an honest discussion about the consequences of each. My story is just one example of thousands of the consequences of Romney’s economic values — values that middle-class families in this country cannot afford.

Randy Johnson of Pittsburgh worked for SCM from 1986 until 1994. He now works for United Steelworkers. This op-ed ran in The Patriot-News print edition along side a column by conservative writer Jonah Goldberg.