Mitt Romney recounting experience visiting Chinese sweatshop operated by Bain Capital

Below is a recording of Mitt Romney recounting his experiences visiting a Chinese sweatshop owned and operated by Bain Capital. In the video he speaks of dormitories with 12 women per room enclosed by barbed wire fencing – not to keep them in, but to keep other workers out.

The video includes subtitles to assist in following the conversation, but the intro to the video itself is a bit misleading as they claim Romney was using “child labor” but he speaks of 18 to 22 or 23 year olds.

You can watch the video below followed by the transcript.

“95% of life is set up for you if you were born in this country. And I remember going to uh, uh, sorry – just to bore you with stories but when I was back in my private equity days, we went to China to buy a factory there. It employed about 20,000 people and they were almost all young women between the ages of about 18 and 22 or 23.

They were saving for potentially becoming married and they worked in these huge factories. They made various small appliances and as we were walking through this facility, seeing them work, the number of hours they worked per day, the pittance they earned, living in dormitories with little bathrooms at the end of maybe 10, 10 rooms. And the rooms, they have 12 girls per room. Three bunk beds on top of each other. You’ve seen, you’ve seen them?

AUDIENCE: Oh yeah, yeah.

And, and, and around this factory was a fence, a huge fence with barbed wire and guard towers and, and we said ‘Gosh! I can’t believe that you, you know – keep these girls in’ and they said: ‘no, no, no. This is to keep other people from coming in because people want so badly to come work in this factory that we have to keep them out, or they will just come in here and start working and, and try and get compensated. So we, this is to keep people out’.

And they said ‘actually Chinese New Year all the girls go hom, sometimes they decide they’ve saved enough money and they don’t come back to the factory’.

And he said, so on the weekend after Chinese New Year there will be a line of people hundreds long outside the factory, hoping that some of the girls haven’t come back and they can come to the factory’.

And so as we were experiencing this for the first time, going to see a factory like this in China some years ago the Bain partner I was with turned to me and said ‘you know, 95% of life is settled if you are born in America’.

This is, this is an amazing land and what we have is unique and fortunately it is so special we are sharing it with the world.”

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