Janesville

An American Story

Amy Goldstein

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781501102288
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

* Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year * Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize? * 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year * A New York Times Notable Book * A Washington Post Notable Book * An NPR Best Book of 2017 * A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2017 * An Economist Best Book of 2017 * A Business Insider Best Book of 2017 * "A gripping story of psychological defeat and resilience" (Bob Woodward, The Washington Post )—an intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class. This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its main factory shuts down—but it's not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay around long enough to notice what happens next when a community with a can-do spirit tries to pick itself up.Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Amy Goldstein spent years immersed in Janesville, Wisconsin, where the nation's oldest operating General Motors assembly plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession. Now, with intelligence, sympathy, and insight into what connects and divides people in an era of economic upheaval, Goldstein shows the consequences of one of America's biggest political issues. Her reporting takes the reader deep into the lives of autoworkers, educators, bankers, politicians, and job re-trainers to show why it's so hard in the twenty-first century to recreate a healthy, prosperous working class."Moving and magnificently well-researched... Janesville joins a growing family of books about the evisceration of the working class in the United States. What sets it apart is the sophistication of its storytelling and analysis" (Jennifer Senior, The New York Times )."Anyone tempted to generalize about the American working class ought to meet the people in Janesville. The reporting behind this book is extraordinary and the story—a stark, heartbreaking reminder that political ideologies have real consequences—is told with rare sympathy and insight" (Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Soul of a New Machine ).

Part One

2008

1

A Ringing Phone

Paul Ryan was standing in his kitchen when the cell phone clipped to his belt began to ring. If the phone were ringing on a different weeknight, Paul would have been in Washington, working late and, likely as not, sleeping on a cot in his office in the marbled Longworth House Office Building across from the U.S. Capitol. But this was a Monday night, and he was not due back in Washington until the next afternoon.

It has been just months shy of a decade since Paul, then all of twenty-eight, was first elected to Congress and began this split existence, shuttling the eight hundred miles between Janesville and Capitol Hill. Throughout this decade, he has clung to the singular comfort of coming home. By this particular Monday, June 2, 2008, he has been home for more than the usual weekend. A dozen days ago, he issued a plan with the august title “A Roadmap for America’s Future,” a new peak in his climb to become the Republican Party’s foremost budget wonk. Then came nearly two weeks’ recess over Memorial Day to decompress with Janna and the kids—which is why, on this night of the call, Paul was in the kitchen of their home on Courthouse Hill. It is a stately redbrick house—a Georgian Revival that lies within an entire neighborhood on the National Register of Historic Landmarks and is separated by nothing more than a small patch of woods from the backyard of the house where Paul grew up.

The Janesville to which Paul comes home is recognizable to him as the place where he never bothered to lock his bike as a kid. Where he was elected junior class president and, as a perk, was “Rhett,” the king of the “Gone with the Wind”–themed prom. Where, when he stops at the hardware store, he runs into guys who were the boys with whom he played varsity soccer, or their brothers or sisters or parents or kids.

The continuity in the Janesville portion of his life is so pervasive, so ingrained that it has left him ill-equipped to grasp the enormity of the change that a ringing cell phone can bring.

When he unclips the phone from his belt and answers the call, Paul is startled to hear that the voice on the other end belongs to Rick Wagoner, General Motors’ chairman and chief executive. Paul may have faith in free markets, but with GM the largest employer in his hometown, as well as the entire 1st Congressional District of Wisconsin, he has made a point of nurturing relationships with the company’s top brass. When Rick is in D.C., Paul meets him for breakfast. Nearly every week, he talks with Troy Clarke, president of GM North America. So he certainly is not oblivious to the facts that GM has been faltering since before the recession, gasoline prices just past $4 a gallon are on the brink of an all-time high, and the Janesville Assembly Plant is churning out full-size, gas-guzzling SUVs whose popularity has fallen off a cliff.

Paul is aware of these facts, and yet, lately, as General Motors’ fortunes have been falling and falling, his private conversations with Rick and the rest of the brass have yielded no whiff of concern that the assembly plant’s future is in peril.

So it is hard for him to absorb what Rick is telling him: Tomorrow, General Motors will announce that it is stopping production in Janesville.

For an instant, Paul is stunned.

Then, suddenly, he is furious. Straight out his kitchen windows, he can see the houses of a couple both working at GM, of a family living on wages from the seat-making factory that is the assembly plant’s largest supplier with hundreds of jobs that will surely vanish if the plant goes down.

“You know you’ll destroy this town if you do this,” Paul yells into his phone. “These are the best workers you’ve got, and this town has been loyal to you. Why don’t you shut down a plant in a big city where it won’t have that much of a devastating impact?”

And yet, even as these words, so contrary to his usual genial persona, surge from Paul, another sensation is rushing up alongside his anger: confidence that he can change the CEO’s mind. It’s simple, he realizes. If the public no longer wants to buy the gas-guzzling SUVs that Janesville is producing, then GM must give the plant’s workers another, more popular kind of vehicle to make.

The congressman starts rattling off GM models. “Give us Cavaliers,” he tells Rick. “Give us pickups.”

After he hangs up, Paul calls his congressional chief of staff—a Janesville guy, like him. First thing in the morning, Paul tells him, they will need to start working the phones to coordinate a response.

Paul has a sleepless night. Lying awake, he thinks about the GM payroll, about the economic shock. He thinks about the guys he grew up with who work down at the plant, or whose parents are still down at the plant. A gut punch.

Still, he is solid in the belief that, by pulling together—no Republicans, no Democrats, just a community fighting for its future—the city will prevail with General Motors.

’Cause we’ve never had a plant shut down, Paul tells himself. It’s Janesville!

“Breaking news!” The voice coming over WCLO 1230 AM talk radio is crackling with adrenaline. It is just before 5:30 a.m., and Stan Milam, veteran Janesville journalist and now host of a midday radio show, has been up all night. Yesterday, Stan had sensed the rumors getting thicker, that something big was going to happen when General Motors convened its annual shareholders meeting this morning in Delaware. And if it took staying up all night to break the biggest story of his life, he was going to stay up all night. Hour after hour, he peered at his computer screen in his cramped study until he spotted a teaser about a wire story coming soon that General Motors was closing four North American plants, Janesville among them. He woke up a GM public relations guy and weaseled out of him that a press conference is scheduled for this morning. Stan wasn’t going to wait around for any press conference. He raced to the radio station, whizzed by the general manager, ran into the control room, and yelled to the startled board operator, “Give me the mike.”

First shift begins at 5:48 a.m., after the news bulletin is already out. But talk radio isn’t popular that early in the day, so the GM’ers don’t seem to have heard by the time they file into the assembly plant. And so the morning begins like any other for Jerad Whiteaker.

By this morning, Jerad has been a GM’er for thirteen years and six days. During this time, he has worked all over the plant—the medium-duty truck line while it lasted and, since then, on the SUV. And the truth is, each of the stations he has worked along the assembly line has bored him. Yet no other jobs in town match $28 an hour, and most of the years, until SUV sales slowed, have come with ten sweet hours a week of time-and-a-half overtime. His father and his father-in-law hated their thirty years at the plant before they retired on good GM pensions, so, as he approaches his own middle age, Jerad figures that, if they could stick it out, he can, too. At least, working first shift, he is home for dinner with Tammy and their three kids. Family is everything.

Jerad clocks in. He is about to head to his spot on the fuel line in final assembly when a strange thing happens. He is handed a flyer, as all 1,250 first-shift workers are being handed, saying that, at 6:30 a.m., the assembly line will be halted, and everyone is to report to the plant’s second floor. So, after barely a half hour of injecting gas and oil and transmission fluid into almost finished SUVs, Jerad stops. He becomes part of a mass of workers going up the staircases. In an open area on the second floor, where the truck cab line used to be, an executive from Detroit, Bill Boggs, is standing on a stage with a couple of grim-looking leaders from United Auto Workers Local 95.

Boggs’s announcement is terse. The news doesn’t take long to deliver.

The Janesville Assembly Plant will cease production by 2010. It has two more years, if that. General Motors will not give Janesville a new product to build.

That is it. Boggs takes no questions.

A few people around Jerad begin to cry. Most are silent. Somber. They all troop back downstairs. The assembly line starts up again.

As Jerad injects the SUVs with their fluids, his main reaction to this news surprises him. Some around him are talking about being worried, but he is feeling relief. The assembly line has never suited him. Within two years, the assembly line will stop. As a GM’er, unemployment benefits and union layoff pay will nearly equal his wages. They will carry his family through, he expects, until he finds work that he enjoys more. Much as he has disliked this job, he does not doubt that it will protect him after it is gone.

Three days to go. This morning is Tuesday, and Thursday will be the last day of her second year teaching social studies at Parker High. Deri Wahlert is dressed for work, sitting on the end of her unmade bed. Rob, a Parker science teacher, is in the bathroom with the door open, shaving. Avery, their nine-month-old, is in her arms, taking his bottle. The television in the bedroom is on, tuned to the NBC affiliate in Madison. And all of a sudden, the TV is saying that a major announcement is coming about General Motors.

“Shit. Oh shit,” Deri says.

She knows what this means, and she knows something about jobs that end.

Deri grew up in Fort Atkinson, a half hour north of Janesville, and her father worked as a manager at a nearby Friskies pet food plant. When she was in seventh grade, her father got sick with a virus that settled in his spine and paralyzed him from the waist down, forcing him to retire a couple of years later. Having a father in a wheelchair while she was a teenager imprinted on Deri a sensitivity to people who are hurting.

So, by reflex, her thoughts are jolted now to who will be hurting at General Motors. She thinks of Rob’s best friend, Brad, an engineer at the assembly plant. Brad is Avery’s godfather and has two little girls of his own. What, Deri wonders, is he going to do? And from worrying about Brad, Deri sees a wider question. She and Rob try to remember the latest number they’ve heard of how many people are working at the assembly plant. Three thousand, they think. What will all these people do?

Deri wants to watch the announcement but turns the TV off. Avery needs to be dropped off at day care. Rob needs to get to school early. By the time Deri walks into Parker, teachers are asking each other if they’ve heard the news. Deri makes a decision not to discuss the closing today with her social studies students. Too little is known.

But already, Deri can sense that life in Janesville is going to change. She may be an idealist, but she also is clear-eyed. And if some people in town might need to be rescued, she is going to be there for them. She just needs to watch and to figure out how.

Bob Borremans is cruising south toward Janesville along Interstate 39, his little runabout boat hitched to the back of his GMC Sonoma. He thought he’d be spending the afternoon on Lake Camelot, skimming across the tranquil water in the runabout, or paddling his raft to a spot where he could tie anchor and float on his back until he drifted asleep. Instead, three days into this annual respite, a call arrived from one of his staffers at the Rock County Job Center, informing him that General Motors’ CEO had just announced that the company will close the Janesville Assembly Plant. As the guy in charge of the Southwest Wisconsin Workforce Development Board, based at the Job Center, Bob knows well that the greatest hovering fear has always been massive layoffs at GM. His vacation, he realizes in a heartbeat, is over. It is his obligation to forge the image and reality of responding to this long-feared calamity. This is no time to be floating on a raft on a lake named Camelot.

2

The Carp Swimming on Main Street

Bob Borremans pulls into the broad parking lot of the Rock County Job Center and dashes into the warren of offices and cubicles in a former Kmart on Janesville’s south side. It is here, from a small office in the center of the abandoned store, that Bob is in charge of dispensing help to the people in a six-county region who could use a job and use a hand in finding one. He runs one among hundreds of workforce development boards spread across the country, each one a conduit for a dedication by the government—engrained in federal law since the 1960s—to giving money and expertise to train Americans in need of work. The dedication includes retraining workers whose jobs go away and aren’t coming back.

His role plops Bob at the epicenter of anxieties that are shooting up around town now that the head of General Motors has pronounced the worst-possible fate for the assembly plant. Bob is not a guy prone to panic. After decades of rumors and false alarms, he figures, who knows whether the closing is real? Even if it is, the GM’ers might have two more years of work—plenty of time to be ready for what happens next. No matter. Even if just as a soothing presence, he has no time to waste on getting out ahead of the situation, because, if thousands of jobs at the core of Rock County’s economy are going to vanish, this will be a cataclysm dwarfing any challenge he has ever faced.

Bob has been the Job Center’s director for five years. For almost a quarter century before, he was an administrator at Blackhawk Technical College, the two-year school that provides most of the job training in town. As a young man, he had been a mild, back-of-the-room kind of guy until the president of the college noticed in him a spark of creativity, promoted him to be a vice president, and helped him find his voice, which over the years grew more and more outspoken. Sometimes even now, months past sixty, his trim beard gone white, Bob thinks that people who knew him when he was young wouldn’t recognize the person he has become.

Call it arrogance, call it what you want, Bob sees himself as a fix-it guy—the adult in the room, the one with a doctorate who can take on a project and do it better than anyone else. Bob is, in particular, an ace at a skill most necessary when a plant shuts down—applying for government grants.

Bob is a bureaucrat impatient with the bureaucrats in Madison and Washington who oversee the flow of job-hunting and job-training money that is the workforce agency’s lifeblood. Back in his office from his cut-short vacation, Bob immediately starts to set in motion the steps the government says that people in positions such as his are to do in situations such as this. The first step is a protocol prescribed by the U.S. Department of Labor, known as Rapid Response, and Bob soon becomes a skeptic. Part One of Rapid Response calls for workforce agencies to find out in advance that a company is contemplating a big layoff and do whatever it takes to prevent contemplation from becoming eventuality. It’s plain to Bob that the idea is flawed, becau...