When the General Motors plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, closed, in 2008, Matt Wopat had been working there for thirteen years. He was thirty-seven years old, with a wife and three children. Outside of G.M., the world of work was a little mysterious to him. His father had worked at the plant for forty years; his sister worked there, too. In Janesville, a middle-class city of sixty-three thousand, G.M. employed forty-eight hundred people, and second- and even third-generation “G.M.ers” were not uncommon. He wasn’t sure what he should do.
Because job training is one of the few expenditures upon which Democrats and Republicans can agree, a lot of aid money is earmarked for it in places like Janesville. At the Rock County Job Center, Matt took a test called JobFit. The test assessed his manual dexterity, math skills, and sociability, and concluded that he should become a database developer, a podiatrist, or a nurse. Matt carried these findings to Blackhawk Technical College, down the road. In “Janesville,” a bracingly concrete account of the city’s decline, Amy Goldstein, a Pulitzer-winning Washington Post reporter, describes the college’s scramble to accommodate newly laid-off autoworkers. The parking lot was so full that cars were on the lawn. Many of the new students were bewildered. To the professors at Blackhawk, Goldstein writes, “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.” When the students learned that handwritten papers wouldn’t be accepted, some of them dropped out. Many seemed to be choosing their future careers more or less at random.
Matt thought that he might find work at the power company, Alliant Energy, where many older linemen were getting ready to retire. He signed up for the program in electric-power distribution. He was an intelligent, deliberate, and responsible student, and his professor thought he’d make an excellent lineman. But seven months into his nine-month program, he learned that the workers at Alliant, eyeing their diminished 401(k)s, had delayed their retirements. Matt had never officially left G.M., and his contract gave him “transfer rights,” which allowed him to apply for jobs at other G.M. plants. He now commutes to Fort Wayne, Indiana, two hundred and seventy miles away, where he works at a G.M. plant assembling Chevy Silverados. During the week, he shares an apartment there with other “G.M. gypsies.” G.M. pays twenty-eight dollars an hour; many of the jobs in Janesville pay just fourteen. The commute, which he has done for the past seven years, allows him to preserve—barely—his family’s middle-class life.
“Janesville” is the newest addition to our growing literature of post-industrial decline. Last year, J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Strangers in Their Own Land” painted distressing portraits of fallen Rust Belt towns in Ohio, Kentucky, and Louisiana. In those places, the jobs left decades ago. In “Janesville”—which begins in 2008, when the last Chevy Tahoe rolls off the line, and ends in 2013—the wound is fresh. The book is less of an elegy than a field report—a snapshot of the moment when thousands of once-prosperous people do everything they can to resist sliding into poverty. “Janesville” isn’t about a failed community but a successful one, a city at the height of its powers, trying to survive. Driving past Gary, Indiana, on his commute, Matt thinks that it is “a perfect specimen of what the Rust Belt looks like and what Janesville is striving not to become.”
It takes a long time to build a middle-class city like Janesville. In 1888, George Safford Parker, a telegraphy instructor, founded the Parker Pen Company there; General Motors opened its plant in 1919. The big factories created a network of suppliers, warehouses, and shipping companies. Janesville became a union town known for a climate of fair-minded sociability. In 1937, when sit-in strikes led to riots in G.M. factories across America, labor and management in Janesville agreed that, instead of sitting in the plant, workers could stay home while the negotiations continued. In Parker’s pen factory, a coffee cart made the rounds each afternoon bearing hard rolls and cheese; at Christmas, G.M. workers mounted a food drive from the factory floor, bagging groceries with assembly-line efficiency.
In 1993, Parker Pen was purchased by Gillette, which sold it to Newell Rubbermaid, the owner of Sharpie, PaperMate, and other stationery brands; its production was globalized, and its Janesville workforce downsized. Residents of Janesville are familiar with the dynamics of late capitalism. Even so, the closure of the G.M. plant came as a shock. The book’s ensemble cast—autoworkers, union organizers, teachers, bankers—happens to include Paul Ryan, whose family has lived in Janesville for five generations. On June 2, 2008, Ryan receives a phone call from Rick Wagoner, the C.E.O. of General Motors, who says that the plant will be closing. “For an instant, Paul is stunned,” Goldstein writes. “Then, suddenly, he is furious.” He tells Wagoner, “You know you’ll destroy this town if you do this!” Ryan works with other Wisconsin lawmakers to craft an incentives package for G.M.—a collection of tax breaks and grants that might convince it to keep the Janesville plant open and close another one instead. The package is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but it’s not enough. The Janesville plant is never coming back.
“People cling to Janesville’s can-do spirit,” Goldstein writes. Barb Vaughn and Kristi Beyer worked at Lear, a subcontractor that made car seats; like Matt, they decide to retrain. Kristi is thirty-five, without a college education; Barb is forty-seven and never finished high school. They enjoy cop shows on television and so enroll in a criminal-justice program at Blackhawk. They are eager, Goldstein writes, “to molt, to shed old factory habits, factory ways of defining themselves, and pick up new ways.”
After graduating at the top of their class, Barb and Kristi become prison guards at the county jail, earning $16.47 an hour. Their new jobs—scary, claustrophobic, and poorly paid—are not what they envisioned when they started at Blackhawk. They sink into anxiety and depression. Barb quits the jail, goes back to school, gets a bachelor’s degree in social work, and finds a satisfying job working with disabled people. Kristi stays on but enters a downward spiral. She embarks on an illegal affair with a prisoner; when she is caught, and an investigation begins, she commits suicide. (The suicide rate in Rock County doubles after the plant closes, Goldstein writes.)
With the help of two Wisconsin-based economists, Goldstein undertakes a study of job-training programs in the counties around Janesville. She discovers that workers who retrain are actually less likely to get jobs than those who don’t; even when they do find work, most retrained workers earn less than their untutored peers. In general, she finds, job-training programs are not well studied. In Janesville, they seem to channel, rather than abate, the chaos of mass unemployment. They are appealing mainly because they let politicians tell a hopeful story during a dark time.
Mystified by one another, we’ve grown hungry for stories that make our fellow-citizens comprehensible. In “Hillbilly Elegy,” J. D. Vance explains the estrangement between “hillbillies” and “élites” in terms of snobbery and contempt; in “Strangers in Their Own Land,” Arlie Russell Hochschild blames our inability to communicate about our shared concerns, such as the environment and inequality, on divergent emotional and political vocabularies. To this catalogue of national dysfunction, “Janesville” adds our addiction to narratives of hope and redemption. The book shows how our hopefulness about intractable problems makes them harder to confront.
Hope can be a valuable commodity, of course, with practical uses. Mary Willmer, the community manager at a local bank, forms a business association called Forward Janesville, which aims to reimagine Janesville as a hub of high-tech manufacturing. It publishes a magazine, which includes articles like “Thirty-three Reasons to Be Optimistic About the Future of Janesville, Rock County and Wisconsin.” Its strategy of self-fulfilling positivity works, in part, because of inequality: Mary and the business leaders she recruits are largely insulated from the consequences of the plant closure. Their optimism annoys many people who are suffering. Still, in the end, they bring a Dollar General distribution center to town and convince a manufacturer of medical isotopes to locate its headquarters in Janesville. These jobs can’t make up for the loss of G.M.—there are fewer of them, and they pay less—but their creation is a legitimate victory.
Laid-off autoworkers want to tell a story of hope, too. Many find, however, that they have no choice but to confront a grim new reality that they’d prefer to wish away. One of the hardest parts of poverty is accepting it. Deri Wahlert, a social-studies teacher at Parker High School, notices that many of her students look stressed and hungry; they are newly poor and trying to hide it. She stocks an empty supply closet with donated food, toiletries, and clothing, sharing it out, discreetly, to kids in need. The Parker Closet, as it comes to be called, becomes a stealth charity for kids who have never thought of themselves as poor, and resist doing so. One teacher thinks that, by showing kids the Parker Closet, she is “wrenching their understanding of their lives into a new and different meaning: as needy.”
The same politicians who tell hopeful stories about hardworking Americans find it hard to talk about helping the needy, even when those two apparently disparate groups of people are, in fact, the same. They seem to float above Janesville, adrift in the big picture. Paul Ryan is evidently moved by the plight of workers in his home town, but, once the plant in Janesville closes for good, he spends most of his time thinking about the federal budget; Governor Scott Walker, obsessed with his anti-union crusade, actually cuts funding for programs that provide aid to Janesville’s poor and unemployed. In 2007, Barack Obama gave a stirring speech about the auto industry at the Janesville plant. (“This plant will be here for another hundred years,” he said.) After the plant closes, the chairman of Obama’s White House Council on Auto Communities and Workers visits Janesville just once, on a “listening tour,” before leaving the White House to become the dean of Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. His office never provides the city with any meaningful help. In 2012, at a campaign rally in Madison, Obama tells a jubilant crowd that “the auto industry is back on top.” “Words that would be hard to say in Janesville,“ Goldstein observes.
Today, there is a new normal in Janesville. Unemployment is low—just four per cent—but the jobs that are available don’t pay well, and the standard of living has declined. Thousands of families have fallen into working poverty. This year, Goldstein reports, two hundred students out of eighteen hundred are frequenting the Parker Closet. Socially, there is a void where factories and unions once created a sense of common life. “Janesville has been left to rely to a considerable extent on its own resources,” Goldstein concludes. Luckily, “those resources include more generosity and ingenuity—and less bitterness—than in many communities that have been economically injured.” Paul Ryan was wrong—Janesville hasn’t been destroyed. For this, however, its citizens have no one but themselves to thank.
“Janesville” is haunting in part because it’s a success story. In the face of vast forces—globalization, automation, political dysfunction, the Great Recession—the people of Janesville do nearly everything right. Reading “Janesville,” one is awed by the dignity and levelheadedness of its protagonists, who seem to represent the best of America. At the same time, the narrative of “Janesville” unfolds within a larger, more fatalistic context. Matt Wopat’s efforts at retraining are inspiring but, from the beginning, doubtful: if it were that easy, there wouldn’t be books like “Janesville.” The steel industry in Gary, Indiana, began its decline forty years ago; how likely is it that, forty years from now, Janesville will have escaped Gary’s fate? Goldstein is a talented storyteller, and we root for her characters as, moment by moment, they try their hardest. In truth, we’re inspired by the same narrative of hope that politicians draw upon when they talk about job training, and which Forward Janesville uses to attract new businesses to town. It’s sobering to think that the autoworkers, too, are caught up in this story.
From time to time, “Janesville” pauses to acknowledge the mostly immovable reality in which its characters are enmeshed. When Matt realizes that there are no jobs at the power company, Goldstein writes, “his mind churns on this jam he is in.” The government is paying to retrain him; G.M. is honoring its union contract; he is trying his best to find better work. When he asks himself “the exceedingly hard question of whether he missed a clue, whether he overlooked some narrow passageway that would have led him out of the maze,” he concludes that he has not. There is no way out of the maze. This is a hard fact for Matt to acknowledge. If we’re to confront the full scale of the problems he faces, we need to acknowledge it, too.
