New Mexico Got Bain’d, too: Romney took $2.5M in NM Taxpayer Funds to Outsource 1,100 NM Jobs

From ProgressNow New Mexico:

Mitt Romney's Bain Capital duped New Mexico more than a decade ago when it set up a Silver City call center, promising more than 1,000 local jobs, only to have it close just two and half years later in a wave of off-shore outsourcing, laying off almost 800 middle-class workers and taking New Mexico taxpayers for more than $2.5 million in the process.

ProgressNow New Mexico recently reviewed the record of Bain Capital in New Mexico and discovered that Romney’s Bain Capital bought Stream International, a Chicago business services company, just as the company was in the midst of a large US-based expansion. One of those expansion sites was Silver City where Stream promised to create more than 1,100 full-benefits career track local jobs in Grant County.

Among the findings:

• New Mexico taxpayers provided Bain with more than $2.5 million in free rent and job training to lure the company to Silver City
• The company promised to create more than 1,100 career track jobs for Silver City
• As Bain was telling New Mexico it was creating long-term jobs, it simultaneously stopped US expansion and rapidly expanded overseas with new facilities in Spain, Canada, Ireland and France.
• When Bain sold Stream and its Silver City facility just over two years later, the company was positioned for the new buyer to transfer all of its jobs overseas.
• Just two years later, the new buyer suddenly closed Streams two large US call centers, laying off more than 800 in New Mexico, and told a newspaper the jobs were likely going overseas.

In their short tenure in New Mexico, Bain Capital took more than $2.5M in free rent and taxpayer-funded subsidies to fund the building of foreign call centers which would house the jobs those funds were supposed to create in New Mexico.

“In Silver City, Bain created almost a thousand American jobs just to siphon the profits from that work to build overseas facilities where our jobs would go to die,” says Pat Davis of ProgressNow New Mexico.

“What Mitt Romney and Bain did to Grant County is unconscionable. They told those people that they were building life-long careers, all the while knowing they were taking their taxpayer-subsidized profits to move our jobs overseas.”