Is Mitt Romney really a job creator? What his Bain Capital record shows.

He is less positive about Romney and Bain, his union having dealt with them at least three times. “They take out ... fees [for themselves], flip the company, and away the company goes,” he says. They also fire the senior workers, says Mr. Gerard. “There is a reason the vulture capitalists do that: If they keep the older workers, they have higher pension obligations, obviously, with more years of service, and their health-care costs are probably higher because as you get older you need more medical care.”

He would get no argument from Loris Huffman. She had worked 40 years at the AmPad factory in Marion and was 59 when the plant closed. 

“I was on the negotiating committee for the union, and we had to give up and give up until we could give no more,” Ms. Huffman recalls. “They tried to make the working conditions not very good.” AmPad began moving automated machinery out of the factory soon after acquiring it. “I think they were planning on shutting the plant down,” she says. “We were union, and they did not want that.” 

Bain Capital bought AmPad in 1992 for $5.1 million. It borrowed heavily, boosting AmPad’s debt from $19.8 million in 1994 to $443.7 million in 1995, and Bain charged it tens of millions in fees. Bain took the firm public in 1996, making tens of millions more. AmPad, still saddled with debt, filed for bankruptcy in 2000. It has since reemerged as a private firm, based in Dallas. 

Former Bain executive Marc Wolpow, defending Romney’s and Bain Capital’s decisions in a New York magazine article in October, said some of the Marion work could be done more cheaply in China or Indonesia. It was only a matter of time, he said, until those jobs were destroyed by international competition. “That plant was going to go out of business, and there was nothing Mitt should have done, or could have done to prevent it,” he said. Mr. Wolpow, now an executive at Boston-based Audax Group, a private investor organization, said in an e-mail that he stands by his statement.

That’s no consolation to Huffman, who returned to school but never to work. She did, however, fly to Romney events as part of a "truth squad" during his US Senate campaign against incumbent Ted Kennedy back in 1994. “It is a story that needs to get out,” she says, “not just for us but for other plants.” [Editor's note: This paragraph has been changed to clarify Loris Huffman's involvement with an anti-Romney "truth squad," which the Democratic National Committee was not a part of.]

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