Turbo Coil to the Rescue of Sensata Workers?

Employ­ees at the Sen­sa­ta fac­to­ry, which is owned by Bain Cap­i­tal, are cur­rent­ly train­ing their Chi­nese replace­ments at the com­pa­ny’s behest. Many have also been pick­et­ing and demon­strat­ing to protest the lay­offs.Sen­sa­ta work­ers have called repeat­ed­ly for for­mer Bain CEO and cur­rent pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Mitt Rom­ney to help them, but to no avail—Romney has refused to meet. The work­ers even set up a protest camp, apt­ly named Bain­port, in the coun­ty fair­grounds across the street from Sen­sa­ta. Last week the com­pa­ny threat­ened to shut down ear­ly if work­ers did not cease their ral­ly­ing. In response 14 pro­test­ers, includ­ing allies such as the Rev. Jesse Jack­son, marched from Bain­port to the plant and were arrest­ed (and lat­er released.)The nation­al atten­tion gar­nered by the protests is start­ing to pay off. On Thurs­day, rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Cal­i­for­nia com­pa­ny Tur­bo Coil took a tour of Freeport to look at pos­si­ble facil­i­ties for a new plant.The company’s CEO indi­cat­ed that his inter­est in the Sen­sa­ta-out­sourc­ing sit­u­a­tion was sparked when he saw cov­er­age of the work­ers’ protests on MSNBC. He had been plan­ning to build a new fac­to­ry in Las Vegas, but began think­ing about chang­ing the loca­tion to Freeport. Tur­bo Coil would ini­tial­ly hire 25 employ­ees, giv­ing first con­sid­er­a­tion to for­mer Sen­sa­ta work­ers, and even­tu­al­ly bring on as many as 100 work­ers. All of Tur­bo Coil’s parts are made in America.