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NY Times, April 20 2017
In ‘Janesville,’ When the G.M. Plant Closed, Havoc Followed
By JENNIFER SENIOR
JANESVILLE
An American Story
By Amy Goldstein
351 pages. Simon & Schuster. $27.
Over the course of his career, Paul D. Ryan, the House speaker, has been
described as a policy nerd, a lightweight, a canny tactician, a dreadful
tactician, a man of principle and a man whose vertebrae have
mysteriously gone missing.
But in the opening pages of “Janesville: An American Story,” Amy
Goldstein’s moving and magnificently well-researched ethnography of a
small Wisconsin factory city on economic life support, Ryan is just
another congressman, pleading on behalf of his hometown, population 63,000.
It’s 2008, and Ryan has just received a phone call from Rick Wagoner,
then the chairman and chief executive of General Motors, to alert him
that the company will shortly be stopping all production in Janesville.
The news is too improbable to register. Janesville has a storied place
in labor history, changing and repurposing itself as the times required.
Barack Obama used its plant as a backdrop for a speech about the economy
early on in his 2008 campaign. Most presidential candidates eventually
buzz through. The place has been manufacturing Chevrolets for 85 years.
The congressman is stunned.
“Give us Cavaliers,” he begs. “Give us pickups.” Any model other than
the unpopular SUVs the plant is currently churning out, he means. “You
know you’ll destroy this town if you do this!” he yells into the phone.
Whether the closure of this fabled 4.8-million-square-foot facility does
or does not destroy Janesville is for the reader to decide. Goldstein, a
longtime staff writer for The Washington Post who was part of a
reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002, opts for complexity
over facile explanations and easy polemics. (Neither Obama nor Ryan
comes off looking particularly good; and no, she does not conclude that
these layoffs put Donald J. Trump in the White House.) Her book follows
a clutch of characters over the course of five years, from 2008 to 2013,
and concludes with an epilogue in the present, when unemployment in
Janesville is less than 4 percent.
Terrific news, you might say. But that number belies some harsh
realities on the ground, as we learn throughout the book. Real wages in
the town have fallen. Marriages have collapsed. And Janesville, a town
with an unusual level of civic commitment, unity and native spirit — the
Ryan family has been there for five generations — has capitulated to the
same partisan rancor that afflicts the rest of the nation.
It was not the sort of place, for instance, where a beloved local
politician might find someone unfurling his middle finger at him during
Labor Fest — until 2011, which happened to be the year that Scott
Walker, a flamboyantly anti-union and polarizing figure, took up
residence in the governor’s mansion. 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.
“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.
The characters are especially memorable. This may be the first time
since I began this job that I’ve wanted to send notes of admiration to
three people in a work of nonfiction.
Readers will also finish “Janesville” with an extremely sobering
takeaway: 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. (Goldstein arrives at this
conclusion, outlined in detail, by enlisting the help of local labor
economists and poring over multiple data sets.) 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,” Goldstein writes.
It makes you realize how challenging — and humiliating — it can be to
reinvent oneself in midlife. To do so requires a kind of bravery for
which no one gets a medal.
But perhaps the most powerful aspect of “Janesville” is its simple
chronological structure, which allows Goldstein to show the chain
reaction that something so calamitous as a plant closing can effect.
Each falling domino becomes a headstone, signifying the death of the
next thing.
Because the G.M. plant closes, so does the plant at the Lear
Corporation, which supplied it 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 starts the “Parker Closet,”
which provides them with food and supplies. (Deri Wahlert: She’s one of
the people to whom I’d like to write a fan note.)
The fabric of hundreds of families unravels, as an itinerant class of
fathers — “Janesville Gypsies,” they call themselves — start commuting
to G.M. factories in Texas, Indiana and Kansas, just so they can
maintain their wage of $28 an hour. Those who stay home invariably see
their paychecks shrink drastically. One of the men Goldstein follows,
Jerad Whiteaker, cycles through a series of unsatisfying, low-paying
jobs, finally settling in one that pays less than half his former wage
and offers no health insurance. His twin teenage girls — to whom I’d
also like to send awed notes — share five jobs between them, earning so
much money for their family that they compromise their eligibility for
student loans.
You will learn a lot about the arbitrary rules and idiosyncrasies of our
government programs from this book. They have as many treacherous cracks
and crevices as a glacier — and offer about as much warmth.
“Janesville” is not without shortcomings. It can be overwhelming at
first, with many characters raining down on the reader at once — it’s a
bit like getting caught in a hailstorm of pickup sticks. (Though there’s
a cheat sheet in the front of the book, which helps.) There’s almost no
discussion of globalization and outsourcing jobs to Mexico, which seems
a strange omission. Surely, the residents of Janesville must have an
opinion about this?
But these are minor objections, ultimately. “Janesville” is eye-opening,
important, a diligent work of reportage. I am sure Paul Ryan will read
it. I wonder what he will say.
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