Andy Cruz, Steelworker: Steel would always be needed in the United States so it sounded like a guaranteed job.

John Wiseman, Steelworker: We were much more than co-workers; we became very good friends. 

?Andy Cruz, Steelworker: We made parts for automotives, we made parts for nuclear plants, we made gel bars...

Joe Soptic, Steelworker: We had a reputation for quality products.  It was something that was American-made.  And we weren’t rich, but I was able to put my daughter through college.

John Wiseman, Steelworker: Having a good-paying job that you can support and raise a family on is hugely important.

Joe Soptic, Steelworker: That stopped with the sale of the plant to Bain Capital.

David Foster, Lead negotiator for workers at GST Steel: Bain Capital was the majority owner.  They hired the management, they picked the board of directors; they were responsible.  Mitt Romney was deeply involved in the influence that he exercised over these companies.

Joe Soptic, Steelworker: It was like going to war every single day.  They were starting to try to figure out ways to eliminate jobs, and so everyone had to pick up the slack.

John Wiseman, Steelworker: We started having quality issues at that plant.

Joe Soptic, Steelworker: They weren't concerned about your health; it was like working in the sweatshops of the '30s.

David Foster, Lead negotiator: Private equity is not per se bad but what Bain Capital did was not capitalism, it was bad management.  The decision-makers were governed by a different set of rules than the rest of us played by.

John Wiseman, Steelworker: Bain Capital was sucking money out of the company like there was no tomorrow.

David Foster, Lead negotiator: The business model of loading a company up with debt in order to extract immediate profits for yourself out of it and then ensuring the failure of the company later on seemed like exactly the wrong thing that we needed in America today.  They issued $125 million of bonds and out of that $125 million debt, they paid themselves almost $40 million.

Joe Cobb, Steelworker: It was like a vampire.  They came in an sucked the life out of us.

Joe Soptic, Steelworker: They made as much money off it as they could.  And they closed it down, they filed for bankruptcy without any concern for the families or the communities.

John Wiseman, Steelworker: Bain Capital went to the bankruptcy court and sought elimination of the pension plan and termination of employee and retiree life insurance and health insurance.

David Foster, Lead negotiator: And having to be the one that told them that they were not going to get health insurance any more, telling them that their pensions were going to be reduced by 50- and 60-percent in many cases, those are among some of the most painful experiences of my life—  standing in front of hundreds of people in their 50s, 60s, and many of the retired steelworkers came to those meetings so there were people in their 70s and 80s as well.

Joe Soptic, Steelworker:: I personally saw the last heated steel go through the furnaces.  It was like watching an old friend, you know watching an old friend bleed to death.

Video (April 2, 2004): This is what's left of the plant.  No rod mill.  No melt shop.  Not much of anything.  They came in; they destroyed.

Joe Soptic, Steelworker: You know you look at this and you just feel amazed that there's nothing--that the steel business is not here anymore.

I went out every day for six months and I looked for a job.  I had a friend that hired custodians, so I got a job through him with the independent school district at considerably less money, probably one-third what I was making at the steel mill.

We lost all of our health insurance.  I was devastated.

John Wiseman, Steelworker: When you take away all the good paying jobs such as we had here at GST Steel in Kansas City, the middle class is going to become extinct.

Joe Soptic, Steelworker: It makes me angry. Those guys were all rich, they all had more money than they’ll ever spend, they had more money than their families will ever spend.  Yet they didn’t have the money to take care of the very people that made the money for them.

John Wiseman, Steelworker: Bain Capital walked away with a lot of money that they made off of this plant because they took all of the money. We view Mitt Romney as a job destroyer.

Jack Cobb, Steelworker: To get up on national TV and brag about making jobs when he has destroyed thousands of people’s careers, lifetimes, just destroying people.

David Foster, Lead negotiator: When it is a business model and when it is deliberate and when it is a thought out strategy on how to take the value out of a company in a reckless way and hurt others, and you then become a proponent of that strategy and talk about it as if it's the soul of capitalism and literally the soul of America, I think nothing could be more offensive.

Joe Soptic, Steelworker: He’s running for president, and if he’s going to run the country the way he ran our business, I wouldn’t want him there because he would be so out of touch with the average person in this country, how could you care? How could you care for the average working person if you feel that way?