How Many Jobs Did Romney Create At Bain Capital?

One hell of a lot, by any measure. It's certainly better than the millions destroyed by Barack Hussein Obama.

There are two ways to look at job creation. The first is to look at jobs created and lost in Bain Capital’s companies at the time Romney left Bain Capital at the beginning of 1999. The second is to look at jobs created and lost in those same companies today. This gives Romney and Bain Capital credit for having invested in those companies when they were young. It is inappropriate to include companies that Bain Capital invested in after Romney left because he did not have any impact on those investments.

While it is difficult, if not impossible, to get employment data on all of Bain Capital’s investments, and not all of the data are perfect, it is possible to look at some of the successes and failures to get a sense of magnitudes.
Among Bain Capital’s investments under Romney, the large job creators are clearly Staples and Sports Authority. Both of these were small, young companies when Bain Capital invested in them. Bain invested in Staples when it had only one store, so there were likely fewer than 200 employees at the time. Bain appears to have invested in the Sports Authority when it had fewer than ten stores. 

Unfortunately, there are no public data to say how many people were employed at that time. At the end of 1998, Staples had more than 42,000 employees, Sports Authority had almost 14,000, Gartner Group had almost 3,000, and Steel Dynamics had over 500. So at the beginning of 1999, when Romney left Bain Capital, these four companies alone employed almost 60,000 total employees. While some of the job growth at Sports Authority came from acquisitions, there is no doubt that these four companies created tens of thousands of jobs over the period.

Fast forward to today. By the end of 2011, Staples had about 89,000 employees. Sports Authority is now a private company. The last time it reported employee numbers, in 2006, it had 14,300 employees. In addition, Gartner Group had over 4,400 and Steel Dynamics had over 6,000 employees. Using the most recently available data, these four companies alone employed almost 125,000 total employees.

Bain Capital also successfully turned around several existing businesses during Romney’s tenure. For example, Bain Capital bought Wesley Jessen Vision Care for $6 million in 1994. It had been a division of Schering Plough and was not profitable. Bain Capital and a new CEO turned it around and sold it to Ciba Geigy for over $300 million in 2001. When it was sold, it appears to have had 2,600 employees. Today, the company is part of Ciba Vision.