Bain acquisition sent Holland jobs out of New York State

The workers at the Williamhouse envelope plant in the Town of Holland most likely never heard Mitt Romney's name. They just knew that an out-of-town owner bought the company and, within a few years, their jobs were shipped to Pennsylvania.

"The company was doing just fine," said Carolyn Gibbon, of West Seneca, who, with her husband, Thomas, worked at Niagara Envelope for 10 years that she now calls wasted. "Then, the following summer, we were being shut down."

Some 185 workers lost their jobs in that 1999 closing of a venerable local company previously known as Niagara Envelope. That happened two years after the company's new owner, American Pad and Paper, or "Ampad," closed the local firm's downtown Buffalo headquarters as well as the main office of a sister company in New York, eliminating 250 jobs.

To critics of Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee for president who will be in Buffalo on Friday for a fundraiser, all this matters in the context of the current campaign.

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