Janesville Page 2

  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, because companies don’t reveal that they are about to cut jobs before they go public with their decisions, and, in particular, the assembly plant’s personnel director has zero interest in discussing with him any intervention that might keep the plant open. What Rapid Response really means, Bob can see, is Part Two—devising ways to cushion the blow. That is what he begins to do.

  The personnel director is, at least, willing to share employee rosters with the Job Center. And Bob knows exactly who else he needs to enlist in this blow-cushioning effort: the president of UAW Local 95, and the state bureaucrats from whom he is hoping to borrow a few caseworkers, since this is turning out to be a most inopportune time for the Job Center recently to have lost some of its staff.

  Bob anticipates that the Job Center will need to calm and inform autoworkers whose jobs have just been marked with a bull’s-eye. He anticipates that he will be able to bring to town a spigot of government aid for any laid-off worker who wants to go back to school.

  He does not anticipate the rains. By Wednesday, June 11, eight days after GM has unleashed the impending economic disaster, the National Weather Service predicts a natural disaster by the weekend: the worst flooding of the Rock River since the government began keeping track. Volunteers and jail inmates fill more than 260,000 sandbags. The sheriff calls in the Wisconsin National Guard.

  More than seven inches fall in Wisconsin and Iowa onto land still soaked from a harsh, snowy winter. The waters spill over the downtown river wall. They inundate the entire Mole-Sadler housing development. They submerge lovely Traxler Park, and they turn farms in neighboring counties into shallow lakes. Along Main Street, whose historic brick storefronts back onto the river’s banks, the waters fill shops and offices, slicking furniture with mud, soaking law firms’ files, triggering mold up to the light switches.

  The rains shatter records. At the measuring station closest to Janesville, the Rock River crests on a Saturday, two weeks and four days after General Motors’ announcement. The river reaches 13.51 feet—4.5 feet above flood stage—smashing the old record of 13.05 feet set in 1916. It exceeds a hundred-year flood. The county estimates the damage at $42 million.

  The damage, to farmland and to the sodden buildings of downtown, knocks people out of work for months. “Closed til God knows when,” says a hand-lettered sign taped in the window of a Main Street barber who has been cutting hair in town since the 1950s. The sign has his home number for customers in need of a trim.

  The abandoned Kmart that houses the Job Center is on high enough land to stay dry. But because the flood is stealing work, it becomes Bob’s problem, too. It may be the most rain to fall on Janesville in a century, but, compared with the elusive matter of how to prevent thousands of jobs from vanishing, this is a challenge that he and his industrious city know how to tackle. Bob pivots away from the scared autoworkers to focus on nailing down an emergency grant for flood-devastated communities. The federal grant will allow the Job Center to create, in an echo of the Great Depression’s Works Progress Administration, a brigade to tackle the slow, mucky work of repairs.

  Yet a grant for the Job Center can’t tame nature. The Rock River rushes so hard and so high that it washes fish off course. Carp
are now swimming on Main Street. Near the street’s northern end, in the flooded parking lot of the United Way of North Rock County, the carp find a favorite new spawning ground.

  Hearing about the misdirected fish, people in town regard it as a spectacle, not a disaster. On the first dry land above the flooded street, despite the damage all around, people of Janesville—and some tourists, too—gather for days, snapping photos and laughing and cheering as the hundreds of yellow carp swim by.

   3

  Craig

  General Motors did not come to Janesville by happenstance. It was brought to town one day near the end of World War I by the ingenuity of an astute manager of a local tractor manufacturer. A century later, he deserves some of the credit for Janesville’s can-do spirit—for its people’s optimism that they can map their own fate.

  A native of western Pennsylvania, Joseph Albert Craig had moved to Milwaukee as a young man and worked as a salesman for a farm implement manufacturer until he was hired away by the Janesville Machine Company, a rival. The Janesville Machine Company was a maker of plows, cultivators, seeders, and mowers that were sold across the Midwest. In 1897, at the age of thirty, Craig became its general manager. Within a decade, the company was the largest and most prosperous among Janesville’s many manufacturing enterprises, occupying a complex that stretched nearly three city blocks along South River and South Franklin Streets.

  In 1909, the earliest automobile manufacturer in town began to produce Owen Thomas automobiles in old railroad shops along South Pearl Street. The next year, the Wisconsin Carriage Company formed a motor car offshoot that made the short-lived Wisco. The Monitor Auto Works arrived from Chicago and used the site of old tobacco warehouses to manufacture the city’s first trucks for a few years.