Janesville Page 3

  Craig, however, was more interested in another recent invention—gas-powered tractors—and, under his guidance, the Janesville Machine Company branched out into making them. The firm flourished. In 1918, months before World War I was over, Craig received an invitation to Detroit from William C. Durant, General Motors’ founder and president. Durant had been building GM for the past decade by cobbling together smaller automobile companies. Eager to capitalize on the growing market for mechanized farm machines—Ford Motor Co., had become the first manufacturer of mass-produced tractors the year before—Durant had purchased an ailing California firm, Samson Tractor. Durant was familiar with Craig’s reputation as a savvy businessman and, that March day in Detroit, offered him a job as Samson’s manager. This was when Craig executed his ingenious maneuver—and changed Janesville’s fate. He refused the offer. And, before their meeting ended many hours later, he had turned the tables: Durant agreed to purchase the Janesville Machine Company, merge it with Samson, and build a new factory in Janesville to house General Motors’ Samson Tractor Division. Craig would be in charge.

  GM turned out its first tractors in Janesville in 1919 and, the next year, built the expansive factory on fifty-four acres the company purchased along the river’s banks south of downtown. Within that first year, production swelled from ten tractors per day to 150. Craig persuaded city officials to improve streets, schools, and housing to accommodate a rapidly growing workforce. Durant himself wrote out a $100,000 check to the Janesville Improvement Association and sent it to the city’s Chamber of Commerce. “In my entire experience I have never seen in a city of modest size a better spirit or a more commendable accomplishment,” Durant wrote in his accompanying letter. “I predict for Janesville a splendid future.”

  But a farm depression and Durant’s overextended finances were ruinous for GM’s tractor division and, by the fall of 1921, tractor production in Janesville ceased. Then, in the first of many phoenix-like episodes over the decades, Craig persuaded the company to renovate the young factory to manufacture cars and trucks, with a Chevrolet assembly plant and a Fisher auto body division. The first Chevrolet rolled off the Janesville assembly line on February 14, 1923.

  Nine years later, in the depths of the Great Depression, the plant shut down. Nevertheless, when Chicago’s “Century of Progress” World’s Fair opened the next spring, two hundred laid-off Janesville autoworkers had been chosen by General Motors to operate a demonstration assembly line. “Wonders of science—works of art” was the motto for the exhibit. Each day, the Janesville men were given $7 and a fresh uniform to build Chevrolet Master Eagle four-door sedans beneath a catwalk that could hold one thousand onlookers. “Of all the brilliant spectacles in the drama of modern industry,” said a GM brochure for the fair, “none is so fascinating to watch as the making of a motor car.”

  On December 5, 1933, the Janesville plant reopened, with Wisconsin governor Albert Schmedeman on hand to buy the first truck off the resuscitated assembly line for the state.

  Few events typify Janesville’s calm, good-natured response to adversity as vividly as its role in one of the most important moments in U.S. labor history: the 1936–37 General Motors Sit-Down Strike. Sit-downs were a new form of strike. Instead of picketing outside factories, as the tradition had been, striking union members had discovered that they could gum up production by installing themselves inside and refusing to budge. The GM sit-down would become the most famous example of this new strike method, stopping work at seven plants in five states and, in the end, yielding a first national contract in which the United Auto Workers gained official recognition as GM workers’ union representative.

  In Flint, Michigan, the strike lasted forty-four days and sparked a riot one January night when company guards and police unleashed tear gas, clubs, and a few bullets on women trying to deliver dinner to the strikers, who retaliated by training fire hoses and hurling metal car hinges at the police out the plant windows.

  In Janesville, by contrast, the sit-down lasted nine hours and fifteen minutes. Janesville had, by then, a city manager form of government, a Progressive Era reform, and an adept city manager named Henry Traxler. Mere hours after the sit-down began in Janesville on that January 5, Traxler summoned the plant’s union leaders to his office and made a proposal: The plant managers would promise not to manufacture any cars in Janesville until the strike was settled nationally; in exchange, workers would leave the plant. At 9 p.m. that night, escorted by the county sheriff and the city’s police chief, Traxler accompanied the union leaders back into the plant to present his idea to the 2,700 striking workers, who accepted it by acclamation. At 10:15 p.m., the strikers walked out the plant’s main gate and formed a “gay, noisy and cheering aggregation,” as one later recalled, parading through the city’s business district until almost midnight. And for the next five weeks, as Flint rioted and U.S. labor secretary Frances Perkins personally stepped in to help broker a national agreement, a little committee—the sheriff, two businessmen, and the city manager—inspected the Janesville plant in peace and presented reports to the local UAW leaders that they saw no sign of any cars being made.

  The Janesville plant shut down, once again, weeks after the United States entered World War II, as the government forbade the manufacture of civilian cars and trucks. But within eight months it was back in business—this time, filled with women and older men producing artillery shells for the war effort. “Keep ’em firing” was their motto, and 16 million howitzer shells later, the War Department presented the plant with an “Army-Navy Production Award for outstanding accomplishment in the production of war materials” and a lapel pin for every man and woman at the plant to wear “as a symbol of leadership in the drive for victory.” In 1945, hundreds of Janesville residents gathered to celebrate the first truck off the assembly line when peacetime production resumed.

  The War Department was not alone in recognizing the quality of the work of Janesville’s GM’ers over the decades. The plant and the vehicles it made won awards from J. D. Power and Associates, with plant managers sometimes ordering jackets with award sleeve patches for every employee. In 1967, General Motors bestowed on Janesville the honor of building the company’s 100 millionth vehicle—a blue Chevrolet Caprice two-door hardtop, made as GM’s chairman looked on. The open house that day drew thirty thousand. People ordering GM cars sometimes specified that they wanted theirs to be manufactured in Janesville.

  The assembly plant went through scares. In 1986, General Motors transferred Janesville’s entire pickup truck line—one of the plant’s two assembly lines at the time. All at once, 1,800 jobs migrated to Fort Wayne, Indiana. Workers were told to move or, in all probability, lose their jobs. Their choice. More than 1,200 workers moved. And yet months later, General Motors announced that medium-duty trucks would soon be moving along the assembly line. Janesville was hiring again. Work was plentiful, and the pay was good, with a new union contract that created a four-day workweek with ten hours a day and the possibility of the ten hours of overtime on Fridays.

  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. Just three years before, General Motors—its market share eroded, its finances in disarray—announced that it would cut costs by eliminating thirty thousand jobs. As the company’s oldest operating plant, Janesville was especially vulnerable, and the months of waiting for GM to decide where the cuts would be were agonizing. But by Thanksgiving week of 2005, when Rick Wagoner—the very CEO who had now delivered the blow—finally revealed that a dozen North American facilities would be closed or decimated, Janesville was spared.

  That day, the front page of the Janesville Gazette had a banner headline: “Whew.”

   4

  A Retirement Party

  Marv Wopat is a man with a
lot of friends. And on the first Saturday afternoon in July, more than two hundred of them have come out to a pavilion in Schilberg Park that his family has rented to celebrate the rite of passage for which every GM’er longs. Marv has just retired.

  By his final day, Marv had put in forty years and four months at the assembly plant. At sixty-one, he is a boisterous, burly man with a shock of white hair—part of an old guard that, if this closing is real, will no longer exist. He has now claimed the good pension that has been almost a General Motors birthright. But all along, he reaped the advantages of being a union man and a company man.

  When he was young, through years of hard drinking that came before his sobriety, GM stood by him. It gave him the space to heal. Then it gave him the space to help heal others. For twenty-five of his forty years, until his final day, he stood at the border of the UAW and management as the plant’s Employee Assistance Program representative, helping people cope with addictions and other hard-to-handle life circumstances. This made him a fixture at the plant. Plus, three months ago, he was elected to the Rock County Board of Supervisors.

  Marv is a Harley rider. He is sentimental. He weeps easily. This afternoon, he is tickled that so many have come to this red-roofed pavilion in the park, an easy walk from his house in Milton, just beyond Janesville’s northern edge. Yet truth be told, he is feeling wistful, conscious that he is on the safe side of a crossroads between how life in Janesville has been and something less certain.

  Like many in town who are around his age, Marv had been a farm kid. He grew up on a dairy farm in Elroy, Wisconsin, and joined the navy two weeks after graduating from Royall High School, turning down college scholarships he’d been offered as a promising enough football tackle to have been chosen Most Valuable Player in the regional conference. The week between graduating and enlisting, he’d married his cheerleader girlfriend. Vietnam was raging, but he lucked out, driving fire trucks at a Texas airfield. So, when he arrived in Janesville in 1968, he was twenty-one and planning to join the city’s fire department until his brother-in-law, a GM’er, urged him to put in an application. In those days, young people were coming to Janesville from the farms and small towns up north. It was where good jobs were. General Motors was eager to hire big, strong farm boys like Marv. He never worked anywhere else.

  This afternoon, as his friends munch on brats and barbecue, Marv is moved to give a little speech. He has been blessed, he says, to be at the plant all those years. The best part, he says, was being able to work with people and try to help people. He does not say anything about the plant shutting down. He sidesteps this looming fact even though it is tingeing his afternoon with emotions he never imagined would show up at his retirement party. Emotions that are tipping from wistfulness into guilt. Because the reality is that, while Marv has just claimed his pension, two of his kids, right under the pavilion with him, work at the assembly plant, and they are about to lose their jobs.

  Who could have seen this coming? Only five months ago, on a bright February morning, Marv had listened to Barack Obama, an Illinois senator with White House dreams, when he arrived at the assembly plant with a familiar message of economic hope, of Janesville’s future mirroring its past.

  Marv had gotten off second shift at 2:30 a.m. as usual and slept for just over four hours so that he could go back down to the plant early. As he approached the south entrance, a bomb-sniffing dog was at the doorway. Secret Service officers were waving metal-detecting wands. But the plant security guys all knew Marv and just waved him through.

  Janesville is a small city, yet big enough that presidents, would-be presidents, and soon-to-be presidents have been coming through town since Abraham Lincoln stopped by during the fall of 1859. For Obama’s turn, his campaign had arranged for the assembly plant to be the prop for a major economic speech. Second-shift workers who wanted to attend had been chosen, like so much else at the plant, on the basis of their seniority. Marv simply got a call from a union guy asking whether he wanted to come. He sure did. Marv is a Democrat, and he has been detecting in Obama a concern for the working class.

  As Marv was waved through, the candidate already was in a first-floor conference room, huddling with GM managers and officers of UAW Local 95. By pure luck, Marv was standing alone for a moment in a hallway near the entrance when Obama came out the conference room door in a charcoal suit, crisp white shirt, and red print tie, walked right over to him, and started talking.

  “How long have you been here?” the candidate asked Marv.

  Marv, his wide shoulders filling out a purple UAW hoodie, told him about being about to hit forty years. When the senator asked what he did, Marv explained about being Employee Assistance rep and reached into his hoodie’s front pocket for a crumpled, recent article from the Janesville Gazette that had featured him among fifty people in Janesville who make a difference. Obama borrowed a pen to sign the newsprint before galloping up a staircase to the second floor.

  The candidate stepped over to a podium and began to speak. Wisconsin’s Democratic governor, Jim Doyle, sat in the first row with Local 95 leaders and GM executives, nearly six hundred workers on folding chairs and bleachers around them. Attached to the podium was a plaque with the same Janesville Assembly Plant logo that is over the main entrance, with the words arching across the top, “People Working Together.”

  Work, as it happens, was the theme that Obama had come to town to talk about. The country was two months into a bad recession. Autoworkers were scared. Just the day before, General Motors had announced a $39 billion loss for 2007, the largest loss in the corporation’s history, accompanied by an offer of buyouts to all 74,000 of its unionized, hourly workers. Many in the folding chairs and the bleachers were debating whether to take the offer. Marv had made his decision to retire months ago. The auto industry was shrinking, he could see; it was time for him to make room for someone younger.

  Shaky though the economy and the auto industry were this morning, Obama was buoyant—fresh off primary victories in seven states and, with the Wisconsin primary next, trying to keep the momentum.

  “Prosperity hasn’t always come easily,” he said. “But through hard times and good, great challenge and great change, the promise of Janesville has been the promise of America—that our prosperity can and must be the tide that lifts every boat; that we rise or fall as one nation; that our economy is strongest when our middle-class grows and opportunity is spread as widely as possible.”

  Then Obama slowed the cadence. He laid out his agenda “to claim our dream and restore our prosperity.” Marv took in the candidate’s words: “I believe that, if our government is there to support you and give you the assistance you need to retool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years.”

  The governor and the labor leaders and the GM executives and the hundreds of workers around them were clapping, their applause swelling until it muffled the senator’s hopeful words. And as they clapped, the governor and labor leaders and executives and workers, Marv among them with his four decades of plant history and retirement around the corner, were rising to their feet.

  The morning of the closing announcement, Marv awoke to a call from a friend making sure that he’d heard. As soon as he hung up, Marv phoned his GM’er kids, his son, Matt, and his daughter, Janice, right away. He did not want them to find out from anyone else. He was the one, after all, who had taught them while they were growing up that the assembly plant was the best place for a steady job with good pay. And even though the situation was scary now, no doubt, Marv began in those very first calls to his kids to impart his conviction. Just because the company says it is closing Janesville, no reason to think that the plant won’t end up getting a new product instead. Even if the plant shuts down for a while, he figured, it will reopen. It always has.

  Now, under the Schilberg pavilion, Marv wants to believe that everything will work out okay. So he does not say out loud a thought burning inside him: Matt and Janice may not have the oppo
rtunity to work at the plant long enough to retire.

   5

  Change in August

  At the end of his shift, Marv Wopat’s son, Matt, walks alone to his locker, unlatches it, and reaches for the extra backpack that, as a careful man, a planner, he has brought for this day. It is two months and five days since the plant-closing announcement. To some, a lucky date—8/8/08. Brides and grooms around the globe are marrying so that this will be their anniversary. The Olympics are opening in Beijing. But for Matt, the date has a surreal quality that feels anything but lucky. This day is his last at the assembly plant and, when he walks out into the parking lot in a few minutes, his locker must be empty.

  At thirty-seven, Matt remembers growing up with the feeling he was being raised to become an autoworker. He watched his father, Marv, go down to the plant. When Matt was little, his dad worked on the line, but he was barely a teenager when his father began his twenty-five years as Employee Assistance rep, which meant that, for most of Matt’s life, his dad had been a person to whom fellow alcoholics and others with various personal troubles confided their secrets. So Matt grew up understanding GM as the best place to get good pay, good benefits, a stable work life, and—if you needed one—a sympathetic ear. As a high school junior in 1986, Matt was frustrated when the plant had a hiring spurt and he was sixteen—two years too young to be hired in. When he turned eighteen, the plant wasn’t hiring. So he tried general studies at “U-Rock,” a two-year arm of the University of Wisconsin in Rock County. Not finding anything he really wanted to study, he left after a year to become a manager at Fast Forward, a roller rink that his old boss from a high school job had opened in Madison. Four years later, GM still not hiring, he took a job at Lear Seating, the Janesville factory that manufactures seats for the plant.