Fact check: Steve Daines worked for P&G in China, but wasn't responsible for its US cuts

Camille Caldera, USA TODAY
·6 min read

The claim: Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., started factories for a company in China while the company shut down plants and slashed jobs in the United States

A video posted to Facebook by the page Steve Daines: China's Cheerleader — whose confirmed owner is the Montana Democratic Party, according to page transparency information provided by Facebook — questions the time Daines worked in China.

"Where was Steve Daines when companies were slashing thousands of jobs in the 1990s?" text on the video reads. "He was in China, starting factories for a multinational corporation ... while that same corporation eliminated thousands of jobs back home."

The caption of the video also claims the corporation "shut down plants in America, eliminated jobs, and raked in record profits."

"No wonder he’s been called 'China’s ambassador in Congress,'" the caption alsoreads.

Daines is running for reelection. He is facing Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock in a race that has been labeled a "toss up" by the Cook Political Report.

Contacted by USA TODAY, the Montana Democratic Party stood by the video. "“Public records show Steve Daines worked for Procter and Gamble in China helping start Chinese factories while the company eliminated American jobs,” said party spokesperson Christina Wilkes.

Daines worked for P&G in Hong Kong and China from 1991 to 1997

Daines worked in management for Procter & Gamble from 1984-97 — a total of 13 years, the final six of which he spent in Hong Kong and China.

While in China from 1991-97, Daines helped start factories and worked in "production, marketing and sales," according to the Missoulian.

In 1993, P&G announced it would close 30 plants — including four in the United States — and eliminate 13,000 jobs worldwide in a major corporate restructuring, according to CNN Money. At the time, the company also said 60% of cuts to administrative jobs, equivalent to 4,000 positions, would be in the United States, per the Los Angeles Times.

Julia Doyle, the communications director for Daines' reelection campaign, told USA TODAY the claims in the video about the nature of his work in China are "false."

"Steve was growing an American company, selling American products to compete against Chinese companies — and he won," she wrote in an emailed statement.

In an interview with Roll Call in 2013, Daines said the role was "not to outsource in any way," but "to take an American company and market it to China."

Doyle also wrote that Daines has a "proven record of being a job creator."

There was no link between operations in China and job cuts in the United States, and Daines was not a decision-maker

Similar attacks were launched against Daines in 2014, when he first ran for Senate.

At the time, FactCheck.org investigated the claims.

Officials from P&G told FactCheck.org that Daines was not making corporate-level decisions about the company’s strategic worldwide operations when he worked there.

Jeff LeRoy, senior manager of corporate communications for P&G, wrote in an email to FactCheck.org that, "Mr. Daines was employed in China but his duties did not involve the siting or strategic operations of any manufacturing center in China or elsewhere."

FactCheck.org also concluded that the claim the company's operations in China came at the expense of jobs in America was unsupported.

The company, in fact, has repeatedly said the opposite.

“During his time in China, all products made in China were for that domestic market. None of the investment made in China has come at the expense of American jobs," LeRoy wrote. "To the contrary, China and our other international businesses support many high skilled jobs in the US in engineering, R&D, marketing, finance and logistics.”

In 2010, former P&G CEO Robert McDonald wrote in Business Insider that one in five of the company's 40,000 U.S.-based employees "supports businesses outside the U.S."

"The simple fact is that success in fast-developing markets like China leads to secure, high-wage jobs here at home," McDonald wrote.

In his first term, Daines has been criticized for partnership with China

Daines has, however, partnered with China multiple times since he joined the Senate in 2015.

In 2017, he brokered a deal to lift a 14-year ban on imports of American beef into China, and secured an agreement with a major Chinese retailer to purchase $200 million in Montana-sourced beef, per a press release at the time.

Cui TianKai, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, called Daines "China's ambassador in Congress" on a trip to Montana, according to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle.

He has been criticized — including in an opinion piece in the Washington Post, "How China got a U.S. senator to do its political bidding" — for returning "favors" for the Chinese government.

For example, Daines hosted a delegation of Chinese Communist Party officials who oversee Tibet at a dinner at the Chinese Embassy just a day before the exiled president of Tibet visited Washington, D.C., according to the Post.

He also openly discussed his opposition to a bill that would rename the street in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington after Liu Xiaobo, the human rights activist who died in Chinese custody, also according to the Post.

At the time, a spokesperson said Daines has long fought for human rights in China but believed the renaming was the "wrong strategy." She added that Daines avoids criticizing China in public because "focus is on making change with tact and wisdom, not flashy headlines."

Our ruling: Partly false

Based on our research, the claims in the video about Daines are PARTLY FALSE. It's true that Daines worked for Procter & Gamble in Hong Kong and China in the 1990s and that the company slashed American jobs during that time. But there's no evidence that P&G's expansion into China was linked to cuts in the United States, and Daines was not part of the corporate decision-making process that led to the cuts.

It's also true that the Daines has been called "China's ambassador in Congress" — one time, in 2017, by the Chinese ambassador to the U.S. But that stems from his work as a senator and is unrelated to his work for P&G in China in the 1990s, as the video's caption presents.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: GOP Sen. Steve Daines' track record on China