Janesville: An American Story

Amy Goldstein, “Janesville: An American Story,”  Simon & Schuster, 2017, 316 pp.

If you are from the middle of Wisconsin, like me, many of the young men from your community went to Janesville and other nearby auto manufacturers to work as soon as they graduated from High School.  I personally know many of these people who migrated to this industry—in fact, I am one of them, albeit my employment was in the now-shuttered A.O. Smith plant in Milwaukee, which I went to after the closing and shuttering of Caterpillar Tractor in Milwaukee: I have twice experienced what this book describes.  

This is a depressing story and is happening in many communities other than Janesville.  “Janesville” joins a growing family of books about the evisceration of the working class in the United States.

My Notes:

Pg. 1f: On December 23, 2008, the last vehicle came off the Janesville assembly line.  Janesville, south of Madison WI, is a county seat of 63,000 and for eight and a half decades this factory produced GM vehicles in what became a 4.8 million square foot plant.  When that work vanished—as many as nine thousand people lost their jobs in and near Janesville in 2008-09.  This loss was part of the 8.8 million jobs washed away in the US by what came to be known as the Great Recession. 

Pg. 17:  Two weeks after GM announced the closing of the Janesville facility, the Rock River flooded, smashing the old record and causing damage estimated to the community of approximately  $42 million.

Pg. 21:  The first Chevrolet rolled off the Janesville assembly line on February 14, 1923.  In 1932 the plant shut down in the depths of the depression but opened again in 1933.  In contrast to Flint Michigan, Janesville labor protests were peaceful and their sit-down strike had only lasted nine hours.

Pg. 25:  Marv Wopat joined the Navy after graduating from Royall High School in 1965 and joined the workforce at Janesville in 1968.  He never worked anywhere else.  It was where good jobs were.  General Motors was eager to hire big, strong farm boys like Marv.  (Marv, unlike his kids who followed him, was able to claim his pension just before the shut down).

Pg. 69:  Janesville lost out in the competition to produce the GM Sonic vehicle.  It went to Orion Michigan.  When production of the Sonic began in Michigan, 40 percent of the workers were paid $14 an hour.  Many parts were shipped in from South Korea.  The engines came from Mexico.  And in another innovation, some parts suppliers began working right inside the Orion plant.  Their average wage: $10 an hour.

Pg. 167:  About 100,000 out-of-a-job factory workers nationwide were provided job training through the Trade Adjustment Act at a cost of $575 million to  US taxpayers—543 of these trained are from Rock County.  Most disturbing is that of those in Rock County who did not receive retraining are now paid on average about 8 percent less than they were paid before.  But those who were retrained are making one-third less than before.  (Also: the trainers were surprised how computer-illiterate most students were, especially as we are talking about 2009!).

Pg. 262:  Five years after the shutdown, there is some progress in Rock County.  Leaving aside GM’s 4.8 million square feet of emptiness, the vacancy rate for the county’s industrial space has fallen from 13 percent to just over 7 percent.  On the other hand, homeless kids are a real problem: the Janesville school system has counted 968 students who do not have a fixed place to sleep at night.  Of those students, 170 are on their own, without an adult.  Kids end up couch-surfing (p. 276)

Other factoids:

*Jobs at GM factories now average $14 versus the $28 at Janesville prior to the shutdown.

*This book follows a clutch of characters over the course of five years, from 2008 to 2013, and concludes with an epilog in the present, when unemployment in Janesville is reported to be less than 4 percent; however, the misery left behind belies this figure.   I found the group that kept their jobs, for the past eight years, by commuting weekly to Fort Wayne, Indiana rather puzzling: why don’t they just move there?  Could it be that they are underwater regarding their houses?  Highly likely when 15%, or more, of the community have lost their jobs.

*Teachers at Blackhawk Technical College were amazed at how many of the unemployed that came for instructions had no familiarity with computers, we're talking 2009 here.

*We learn throughout the book that real wages in Janesville have fallen. Marriages have collapsed. And Janesville, a town with an unusual level of civic commitment, unity and native spirit has capitulated to the same partisan rancor that afflicts the rest of the nation. The town is now riven by “an optimism gap,” as Goldstein calls it, with dispossessed workers on one side and bullish businesspeople on the other.

*There’s scant evidence that job retraining, possibly the sole item on the menu of policy options upon which Democrats and Republicans can agree, is at all effective.  In the case of the many laid-off workers in the Janesville area, the outcomes are decidedly worse for those who have attended the local technical college to learn a new trade. A striking number of dislocated G.M. employees don’t even know how to use a computer when they first show up for classes at Blackhawk Technical College. “Some students dropped out as soon as they found out that their instructors would not accept course papers written out longhand,”

*Because the G.M. plant closed, so did others, like the plant at the Lear Corporation, which supplied the GM plant with car seats and interiors. Because so many in Janesville are now out of work, nonprofits lose board members, and contributions to local charities shrivel. Because their parents are out of work, students at Parker High start showing up for school both hungry and dirty. A social studies teacher started the “Parker Closet,” which provides these students with food and supplies.