Janesville

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• By the time the plant closed, the United States was in a crushing financial crisis that left a nation strewn with discarded jobs and deteriorated wages. Still, Janesville’s people believed that their future would be like their past, that they could shape their own destiny. They had reason for this faith.
• Without its assembly plant, Janesville goes on, its surface looking uncannily intact for a place that has been through an economic earthquake. Keeping up appearances, trying to hide the ways that pain is seeping in, is one thing that happens when good jobs go away and middle-class people tumble out of the middle class.
• And the citizens of Janesville? They set out to reinvent their town and themselves. Over a few years, it became evident that no one outside—not the Democrats nor the Republicans, not the bureaucrats in Madison or in Washington, not the fading unions nor the struggling corporations—had the key to create the middle class anew. The people of Janesville do not give up. And not just the autoworkers. From the leading banker to the social worker devoted to sheltering homeless kids, people take risks for one another, their affection for their town keeping them here.
• 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.
• By that day in 2008 when General Motors handed the assembly plant its death sentence, the rumors that the plant would shut down had been hovering over town so long that they had become a familiar backdrop to life in Janesville—unsettling but so frequent that people stopped believing that it would happen.
• As part of a first, early trickle of autoworkers at Blackhawk who have been recession-smacked out of a job, they do not know that they will need to molt, to shed old factory habits, factory ways of defining themselves, and pick up new ways.
• He was on the Janesville City Council in 1971 when it commissioned a consultant to study how the city could best protect its economic future. The study’s core recommendation—to diversify—came as the plant was nearing its all-time peak workforce of 7,100, and few besides Tim saw any reason to take the advice seriously.
• As she watches her smart, sensitive daughter in tears, Mary knows that Chelsea cannot see the scared farm girl who discovered that, without food stamps, there wouldn’t be enough to eat. She knows that Chelsea is seeing the banker and leading citizen who can always be depended upon to come up with a solution for the community. “Mom,” Chelsea implores her. “What are you going to do?”
• This aide puts forth the idea of bringing in a team from the University of Michigan, which has worked as consultants to two dozen other Midwestern places knocked off their moorings by disappearing jobs.
• Larry Molnar, a researcher and economy-building coach at the University of Michigan’s Community Economic Adjustment Program.
• Their core question is as daunting as it is obvious: How to get the local economy out of its free fall? One obstacle, they quickly recognize, is that no one—not Forward Janesville; not Rock County; not the Janesville city government; not Beloit, the county’s second-largest city—has any real money to devote to a muscular economic development campaign.
• Janesville has become a damaged brand, known now for being down on its economic luck. Fixing the brand—raising money from the local business community, marketing, keeping companies and winning new ones—will require a strong leader.
• When Mary and Diane get talking, Mary is delighted to discover how much they agree. One of their central points of agreement is that, whatever this campaign will be, local businesses need to invest in it. “We are not going to wait for the government to come in and rescue us,” Diane is fond of saying. “We are not going to wait for GM to rescue us. We are on our own. Let’s get this job done.”
• As he struggled with what to do, he watched Barb in astonishment, her head deep into her schoolwork, turning crisis into opportunity.
• If you don’t change with the times, you’ll be left behind.
• Training people out of unemployment is a big, popular idea. In fact, it may be the only economic idea on which Republicans such as Paul Ryan and Democrats such as President Obama agree, anchored, as it is, in an abiding cultural myth, going back to America’s founding, of this as a land that offers its people a chance at personal reinvention. The evidence is thin that job training in the United States is an effective way to lead laid-off workers back into solid employment.
• Rock County 5.0 has not yet reached the goal of $1 million in private support. But it is $400,000 along the path. Respectable. And the project now has five well-defined, five-year strategies to buttress its 5.0 name: persuading local companies to stay and expand, attracting new businesses, offering special help to small businesses and start-ups, preparing real estate for commercial uses, and forging a workforce that employers will want to hire.
• These foreclosures, and an understanding in the pit of her stomach that people who lose their jobs in America shouldn’t have to lose their homes, too, give Mary another idea. Her idea is to invite all the bank presidents and credit union leaders in the area to her office for a conversation about what they are seeing and what they might do about it. It becomes a hard conversation.
• This is the human side of responding to the recession, Mary thinks, with the banks taking some of the hit and not loading the full burden onto their customers.
• She is ready to leave, because she does not want to do what some of her co-workers will do during the next few months. Like them, she has been offered an opportunity to be paid longer if she were willing to fly to Mexico and train workers there. Linda has given training over the years, and she knows that she has a knack for it. If she were being asked to train someone in Janesville, she would, naturally, say yes. But to train someone in Mexico—Mexico!—to take over her job? After her forty-four years, she doesn’t have the heart for that.
• Matt is a deliberate man, and deliberate men do not let their mortgage payments slip behind, but there it was. He and Darcy had lived near the edge of what General Motors’ $28 an hour could buy, as so many GM’ers did, paying $270 a month on their camper, trading in cars for newer models, even dipping into their 401(k) once in a while to take the girls on trips. So even though, as a GM’er, Matt was lucky to get his union SUB pay on top of his unemployment checks, and the federal government was covering his tuition and textbooks and gas mileage to campus and even the right clothes for climbing utility poles, it didn’t add up to anywhere near $28 an hour. The reality was that he and Darcy didn’t have much cushion, and his SUB pay was about to be cut in half, and his GM health benefits were going to run out.
• Listening to this straight shooting, one thing the instructor says, in particular, burns into Matt’s mind: “If I were you guys and had an opportunity to get GM wages, I would run and not look back.” That is when Matt understands that the option he’d rejected is the only choice he has left. He couldn’t even call it a choice, because he feels that it has all come down to either Fort Wayne or maybe even bankruptcy sometime soon, and responsible men don’t file for bankruptcy.
• It is so plain: He can’t let his kids feel that kind of money shame. Plan A, Plan B, or whatever plan it takes, he will at least be the man he’s always understood himself to be. Who would rather put himself out than his family. Who always keeps his word when he says he’ll do a job. Who understands that, in order to protect his family, he has to leave them.
• Tammy and Jerad can see that their family is not the only one cutting back. Around town, “For Sale” signs have been cropping up on boats and campers and other grown-up toys that were trophies of middle-class lives.
• “Many people complained, many people cried, many people gave up. Some waited for things to go back to the way they were… . But there were a vital few that decided to create a new future for themselves and this area. They decided to use the economic obstacles as an economic opportunity. Those people were all of you.”
• Still, the point unspoken in the Dream Center today is that, even when people desperate for a job try to retrain, as the Job Center has been encouraging, they don’t always succeed.
• Because to Sharon and Blackhawk’s instructors, the most surprising fact about these arriving factory workers was how many of them didn’t know how to use a computer—didn’t even know how to turn one on.
• During his wrap-up, Bob begins in Janesville’s old-time, can-do way, telling Montgomery: “At no time do I feel that anyone in this room has felt defeated or unwilling to step forward to try and make a difference.” Then Bob’s words turn darker, more pointed. “At times,” he admits, “we have felt overwhelmed by the challenges. We have felt isolated and overlooked. We have been frustrated by government regulations and bogged down by the rules and red tape. “The one thing we are asking for most,” he tells Montgomery, “is recognition that best solutions to local problems come from the creativity and ingenuity of communities.”
• Janesville always has made a big thing of Labor Day, magnifying it into a three-day celebration of the well-performed work and well-mannered labor relations in which the community has long taken pride.
• The days are gone, Barrett says from the stage, when all it took to make a decent living were “a good back and a good alarm clock.” Fighting for good jobs, he pledges, will be his top priority in Madison.
• So, as middle-class families have been tumbling downhill, working-class families have been tumbling into poverty. And as this down-into-poverty domino effect happens, some parents are turning to drinking or drugs. Some are leaving their kids behind while they go looking for work out of town. Some are just unable to keep up the rent. So with a parent or on their own, a growing crop of teenagers is surfing the couches at friends’ and relatives’ places—or spending nights in out-of-the-way spots in cars or on the street.
• Deep inside, Barb understands what is going on. But the solid lineup of A grades that she earned at Blackhawk never came with a lesson in this. What are you supposed to do when the job for which you’ve invested two years of your life studying, the job for which you beat out four hundred people as desperate as you were for $16.47 an hour and state benefits—what are you supposed to do when that job is pressing you down into a depression?
• A dream, though, is no substitute for a paycheck. Miserable as she is, she cannot believe that Mike is right. Then one day, with Christmas coming soon, she suddenly sees her life in a new way. She sees that she spent fifteen years at Lear playing the game, staying somewhere she wasn’t happy, just because the money was too good to leave. Maybe she is too intelligent, too educated now, to play the same game again. Maybe toughness is recognizing what isn’t working in your life and fixing it.
• She is reminded that you never know when one unexpected event will transform you into “the person on the other side.”
• It’s not that Mike doesn’t think about the times and the people of his past. But those times are gone, and no point dwelling on them.
• Nationally, nearly half the trainees who got this help last year, and about one third this year in which he is graduating, will not quickly find a job.
• By this summer, the laid-off workers who went to Blackhawk will be faring less well than their laid-off neighbors who did not.
• Besides, the people who went to Blackhawk are not earning as much money. Before the recession, their wages had been about the same as for other local workers. By this summer, the people who have found a new job without retraining are being paid, on average, about 8 percent less than they were paid before. But those who went to Blackhawk are being paid, on average, one third less than before.
• Whatever the reasons, Bob is becoming aware that the retraining gospel that the federal government and the Job Center’s own caseworkers have been spreading is based on a rock-bottom premise that hasn’t turned out to be true—at least, not yet.
• Yes, he will be making less money than before. But that is part, he believes, of accepting that the old times are gone. Part of not dwelling on what you can’t change. Part of being grateful for what you have. In these new times, what Mike sees when he looks over the sweep of his life is, not the loss of his union office, but a gamble on human resources management that has paid off. He has a job. It is in his field. It is in Janesville.
• Hard as it is to imagine, in Janesville where thousands of people have lost jobs and some are still out of work and some, like her dad, are job hopping and not earning enough money, it has never occurred to Kayzia before that what is going on in her family is going on all over town. That is what happens when she and Alyssa have decided that this is not a subject to discuss with friends, and other kids, who used to be middle-class, too, have decided the same thing. So, now, Kayzia is overwhelmed by this thought that is hitting her, all of a sudden. “There’s more kids like me!”
• When she gets home from work, Alyssa asks, as Kayzia knew she would, where the stuff has come from. Kayzia knows that her sister won’t like the answer. If they need something, they have been taught, they work harder for it. Or they do without.
• “Want to go grocery shopping?” Kayzia asks, gently as she can, trying to make it sound like it’s no big deal, like it’s the most ordinary thing in the world for a sixteen-year-old kid to offer to take her mom to Woodman’s and pay. She realizes, as she asks, that her childhood is slipping away. This is what growing up too fast looks like, and it has been creeping up on her for a while.
• And then they come to an aisle so tempting but unnecessary that Kayzia lets herself walk down it only because it is, after all, her own money: the aisle with chocolate chip cookie dough Pop-Tarts.
• When they get to the house, and she puts away the groceries with her mom, Kayzia is feeling something besides happiness over the Cocoa Puffs: relief that her dad is asleep. All this time after his General Motors job went away, with him bumping in and out of other work that doesn’t pay enough, she knows that he still isn’t over the idea that he’s supposed to provide for his family. He’s so hard on himself, she thinks, not giving himself credit for trying as hard as he can, looking online all the time for better jobs. In the morning, she knows, he will not be happy to find the refrigerator filled by this midnight shopping adventure fueled by his daughters’ checking accounts.
• Paul has learned that there is not a good pool of businesses to call because, even two and a half years after the recession officially ended, not many companies are looking to move or to expand. “In this economy? I’m not taking a risk,” is the reply that Paul has heard from CEOs more times than he cares to remember.
• In Rock County, Kate Flanagan manages a shrinking supply of public mental health services. She can see that, when a community is under stress, some people have less hope. People who were barely managing their addictions, their depression—their fragilities, no matter the form—sometimes lose their grip when they lose a job.
• She notices that her Closet kids who have grown up poor, always been poor, tend to be tougher, better at coping with it. The fragile ones are new to being poor, with parents fighting about how to live without the money they used to have.
• It isn’t simple to take someone with a high school degree and a factory job and to help lead them into new work.
• “For the last thirty years, I’ve been writing music about the distance between the American Dream and the American reality,” Springsteen said, punctuating the end of that thought with a guitar strum. “I am troubled by thirty years of increasing disparity in the wealth between our best-off citizens and everyday Americans. That is a disparity that threatens to divide us into two distinct and separate nations. We have to be better than that.”
• Janesville, even missing so many of its union jobs, is still a Democratic union town at heart. A native son on the GOP ticket, Jay muses, was not enough. The other side, he has to admit, spoke more to the middle class.
• He and Barb always have tried to save, but he is aware that putting money aside seems more crucial than in the past. Having lost a job once, it’s always in the back of his head; he can’t rule out its happening again.
• To her surprise, Barb believes that Lear’s closing was the best thing that could have happened. Its closing taught her that she is a survivor. It taught her that work exists that is worth doing, not for the wages, but because you feel good doing it.
• When the speeches end, he wanders into a hallway linking the banquet room with the hotel lobby, and settles into a wingback chair. After this weekend, he will go back to his latest project, trying to launch an innovative way to teach out-of-a-job people new skills by leaning on local companies for help. Bob knows that the upbeat talk of John Beckord and Mary and Paul and their fellow optimists packed into the banquet room doesn’t match what he sees, still sees, coming through the Job Center’s doors.
• The Forward Janesville crowd, as Bob sees it, believes that sugarcoating reality might make Janesville more appealing to new businesses. And yet, as he thinks about the situation, the truth is that a lot of people are still hurting, still can’t afford their mortgage or their rent. “To sit and say things are back to normal is bogus,” he muses. “I have a problem with people not accepting reality.”
• One July day, after she takes out an $8,000 private loan that she will need to repay with 11 percent interest, Alyssa will post on her Facebook page: “That moment when you feel like the people who are in charge of education don’t want you to receive one. I hate working my butt off to have to figure out a way to get the education I deserve.”
• As the girls’ names are called, the slanting evening sunlight throws a golden glow on the vacant assembly plant across the river. Neither their grandfathers, with their good pensions after thirty years, nor their dad, cast out after thirteen years, look over to notice.
• Even a small city wrenched by the worst of what a mighty recession metes out does not have a single fate. With broad outside forces—the federal government and the state, industry and labor—unable to lift back up its once prosperous middle class, Janesville has been left to rely to a considerable extent on its own resources. Fortunately, those resources include more generosity and ingenuity—and less bitterness—than in many communities that have been economically injured. Still, over time, some people prosper. Some grieve. Some get by.
• General Motors has begun trying to sell the 250-acre site. GM has identified as potential buyers four companies that specialize in the redevelopment of obsolete industrial property.
• Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where Lizabeth Cohen, Judy Vichniac, and the late Lindy Hess were unfailingly supportive. Elsewhere on campus, economist Lawrence Katz and sociologists Robert Sampson and Bruce Western lent good ideas and encouragement early on. And across the country, David Grusky, director of Stanford University’s Center on Poverty and Inequality, provided a first tutorial on recession effects.
• Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. And I am grateful to Timothy Smeeding for inviting me to the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty,
• Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, with special thanks to labor historian Joseph McCartin,
• Workforce; and economist Harry Holzer, an expert in the low-wage labor market and a good lunch companion.
• For the job-retraining analysis, I am grateful for the support of the Joyce Foundation, where Whitney Smith gave expert advice and was graceful when our findings didn’t show the benefit for which she’d hoped from retraining around Janesville.
• John Russo and Sherry Linkon, the real experts on the working class,
• Paul Steiger, the founding editor-in-chief of ProPublica, took an interest in Janesville and what I was discovering about job retraining and made a home for an early article.
• Gary Green, professor of community and environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was most centrally involved in developing the questionnaire with me and analyzing the findings.
• The findings also displayed a decline in labor union membership and sharply divided attitudes toward unions.
• Overall, about one third said the government should be doing more to help people who had lost a job. Among those with a layoff at home, more wanted greater government help, but still not a majority.
• Even among people who disagree over almost everything else about the economy, the common wisdom is that workers who lose a job, without much likelihood of finding another in the same field, should go back to school to train for a different one. The federal government spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year for the retraining of such dislocated workers. However, research into whether this policy is useful is not extensive.
• The findings were surprising: Job retraining, it turned out, was not a path to more work or better pay in and around Janesville, at least not during this time when jobs were so scarce.
• Retraining did not translate into greater success at finding a job. Among those who went back to school, the proportion who ended up with steady work was smaller than among the laid-off workers who did not. Worse still, more of those who retrained were not earning any money at all.
• Based on the predictions of Blackhawk staff and local business leaders about which fields of study would be the most promising paths to available jobs, some of these students were channeled into associate’s degree programs in information technology and clinical laboratory technicians work. And others were enrolled in shorter certificate programs in certified nursing assistance, welding, and business. We looked at whether all the laid-off students who selected these promising programs fared better at finding work than those studying in other programs. They did not.