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  Even when GM had openings, getting hired was a clubby thing, a matter of who you knew. Applicants needed a referral, and each GM employee was given one referral that could be bestowed upon a relative or a friend. Matt got his referral from his dad, even though his sister also wanted one, and then the plant held a hiring lottery and, on May 17, 1995, Matt finally started working where he’d felt all along that he belonged.

  At six feet, Matt is just an inch shorter than his dad. Yet while Marv is broad and exuberant, Matt is slim and reserved. He is a responsible man. Once he married Darcy, four months after he became a GM’er, he adopted her little girl, Brittany. They had two more daughters, Brooke and Bria. His life felt comfortable and complete, and he liked that his General Motors wages made him a good provider.

  Hiring dates have always been a big deal at the plant. Everyone carries theirs around in their head. These anniversary dates determine seniority when opportunities inside the plant come up, and they determine when a worker has put in thirty years and so is eligible to retire. This summer, they have had a crucial added significance, determining which half of the workers would lose their jobs when one shift went down, even before the whole plant is to close. Matt’s anniversary date—May 17, 1995—put him just on the cusp. If he had been hired a few days earlier, his job would have been spared for now. Of course, hired a few days later, he would have been out of work already. Being on the cusp has allowed him to eke out two extra weeks at $28 an hour, and for this small fact he is grateful.

  But Matt is a man of routines, and the two weeks have been topsy-turvy. He always worked second shift, but second shift has just gone away. So for these precious, on-the-cusp weeks, he has gotten up before dawn to go to a fill-in job—quality control on the torque of one hundred critical SUV components—on first shift, the only shift that remains.

  Because his extra weeks have been on first shift, it is mid-afternoon when his workday ends and he unlatches his locker. He carefully places into the extra backpack the murder mysteries and old copies of Gun Dog magazine that he read on breaks long ago. Matt punches the time clock one last time and—after thirteen years, three months, and twenty-two days—walks the familiar path out of the plant, into the oddity at a shift’s end of sunlight on a pleasant, 80-degree day.

  He is now a man of routines without any guarantee of what will come next. But Matt has listened to Marv, with his forty years of plant wisdom. And even though his dad is safe, on his pension after his retirement and the shindig in the park a few weeks ago, Matt finds his words hopeful, calming. Matt is not a betting man. Still, he would bet money that it is only a matter of time before the assembly plant roars back to full strength.

  Jerad Whiteaker’s twins, Alyssa and Kayzia, have a way of feeling as if they are one person when they are trying to figure stuff out. They are fraternal twins, with Alyssa blonder and, at five-foot-five, four inches taller than Kayzia, who always thought she should have gotten a jump start by being born five minutes sooner. Though they are not identical twins, the mind meld comes naturally, and it’s especially handy now because they have never faced a riddle like the one that’s cropped up this summer before eighth grade: All of a sudden, even though they can sleep in a little during these lazy August days, their dad is home for breakfast.

  Most of their lives and definitely the last few years, their father, Jerad, has been out of the house before they wake up. At first last month, when they found him at the round table at the end of the kitchen, the two of them discussed it and remembered that every summer the plant has its two-week shutdown. No big deal. But now that the school year is about to begin a week before Labor Day, and he’s still showing up at breakfast, they sit and talk over the situation on their twin beds—Alyssa’s with its wild, ’70s retro green, blue, and purple bedspread, Kayzia’s bedspread gray and orange with a surfboard in the middle—in the basement room that they share. They feed each other random words they have overheard their parents say when their parents think that Alyssa and Kayzia and their little brother, Noah, are not listening.

  Some words—buyout, SUB pay (for the union’s supplemental unemployment benefits)—make no sense. But there is one fully understandable word—move—that terrifies them. No way are they going to let that happen. They already had to make new friends in fourth grade, when their parents moved all five of them from Footville—a farming village just nine miles west, but far enough that they had to change schools. Switching to Janesville’s schools was the whole reason for the move because they have always done well in their classes, and Footville doesn’t have the AP courses that their mom, Tammy, wants them to be able to take when they get to high school. Their mom has always been doing things like that, focusing on their potential. She’s been determined to prove that the doctors were wrong when the twins were born six weeks premature, and the doctors told her that her babies were so tiny that they might have trouble learning. It wasn’t true, but the prediction has always given their mother extra satisfaction in their intelligence and accomplishments.

  Alyssa and Kayzia conclude during their bedroom mind-meld sessions that, if they are going to ask a parent what’s going on, it had better not be their dad because, whatever is happening, it must be touchy, and if he wanted them to know, he’d have told them. So they take turns asking their mom little questions. “We’re trying to figure this out” is the kind of answer she gives. Not much help.

  So it is from the news and from a couple of friends that they piece together that their dad must have had a bad enough anniversary date that he’s part of the GM shift that’s already been laid off. What they deduce is correct. He was hired on May 29, 1995, handed a referral by his father. Both their dad and mom grew up in the security of GM wages, in the same way that Alyssa and Kayzia and their brother, until this summer, have been doing.

  Having solved the home-for-breakfast riddle, Alyssa and Kayzia now worry more than ever that they might be yanked somewhere else, like they were when they left Footville. Pulling on this skein of worry, they realize that Alyssa’s biggest specific fear is that she might have to give up the basketball team; Kayzia fears most losing her friends.

  As they work together to unravel these specific worries, the most curious thing, they notice, is their dad’s mood. As long as they can remember, he has been sulky and quiet sometimes, but now he is cracking his jokes the way they love. If they watch closely, they can see that their mom is more nervous than usual—a little on edge. But their dad loves his extra sleep and, apart from a little work around the yard, is acting like the whole thing is a vacation he deserves.

  The air is balmy, but August’s mugginess lingers as Kristi Beyer arrives a few minutes before 9 a.m. at a low-slung brick building and steps inside. She wanders through a maze of intersecting hallways and finally finds room #2606. She takes a seat in a row of desks about halfway back, and looking around sees that the people are so much younger than her. She hopes she is managing to hide her jitters.

  This is the first day of her first class at Blackhawk Technical College. Kristi is thirty-five, a stocky woman with sandy hair in a sensible short cut. She is on a second marriage and has a son old enough to be starting college himself if he hadn’t, instead, gone straight from high school into boot camp in the Wisconsin National Guard.

  By this morning in the fourth week in August, not quite two months have passed since Kristi lost her job at Lear Corp., the factory just east of the Interstate that since 1990 has been doing just-in-time production. Just-in-time has meant making car seats and delivering them to the assembly plant precisely three hours before they are bolted into GM vehicles. The same day in late June that one shift went down at General Motors, her shift went down at Lear. Now that the fall semester is starting at Blackhawk Tech, only a small trickle of the laid-off factory workers are arriving on campus. Most are Lear refugees like her. Even though they belonged to UAW Local 95, same as the GM’ers, their labor contract did not promise union SUB pay if they were ever laid off, as they have been now, so th
ey don’t have the same cushion that would have given them a while to figure out their futures.

  Kristi worked on the Lear assembly line for thirteen years. If she was known for anything inside the factory, it was for designing a better version of the bib aprons they had to wear on the job. Her version had ergonomic pockets and a pull-away feature if it ever got caught in machinery. She sold her design to a local company, Lab Safety Supply, which paid her a little fee each time someone bought one of her aprons. Once Lear closed, she decided it was better to take the lump sum Lab Safety offered, because who knew if there would be workers needing aprons like hers anymore? If the apron hinted at an entrepreneurial spirit lurking inside Kristi, it never peeked out again.

  Now, beyond the immediate problems that she is unemployed and her husband, Bob, will soon be losing his Lear job, too, her son going into the National Guard is raising her anxieties, because some of its companies these days go to the Middle East. She had Josh when she was sixteen. Been in a hurry your whole life, her mother likes to tease her. Kristi has always had a special bond with her mother, growing up the only girl in her extended family with two older brothers and four boy cousins. The day Kristi learned that her shift at Lear was being laid off, the first call she made was to her mother to say, “We’re going down.”

  Being in a hurry her whole life meant that Kristi wasn’t going to sit around watching TV without a job. There was government money to go back to school. Which is why she is now sitting, trying to hide her nervousness, in the first session of “The Criminal Justice System.”

  Sitting in a middle row near her is a woman, a little taller than her with fine brown hair and big, deep-set eyes, who is definitely not a kid. Barb Vaughn worked on the Lear assembly line, too—for fifteen years, two more than Kristi. They were on different shifts and, with eight hundred workers at the factory, their paths had not crossed.

  Barb also became a mother early. A drinking, partying teenager in Whitewater, she dropped out of high school as a sophomore and was pregnant at eighteen. For a while, she was a single mom with three girls and two jobs until she got hired at Lear. With the better pay and benefits, life got easier, and she met a nice guy at the factory, Mike Vaughn, who was divorced. Yet, as life otherwise improved, being a high school dropout stayed a silent, poking shame that she carted around. She’d known Mike more than five years before she told him. Before Lear, during Lear, before telling Mike, after telling him, she kept trying to get a GED, but life always interrupted—little kids, too much work. She felt like a GED failure, too.

  So, when it became clear that the closing rumors at Lear were true this time, Barb knew what she needed to do. Mike is still at Lear. He is the leader of UAW Local 95 for the factory, which means he can hang on to his job for now. But Mike hasn’t been on the assembly line in years. Her body was tired of factory work. The years at Lear had torn her right rotator cuff and damaged a wrist. Two surgeries were plenty. She promised herself she was done with factory life.

  As soon as she could, she signed up for a program to get Wisconsin’s high school equivalency diploma. She worked harder at studying than she had at anything in her life, and took tests, and studied some more and took more tests, whipping through the whole thing with speed that shocked even her, until now, at the age of forty-seven, she is finally, finally a high school graduate. And with unfamiliar success-momentum pumping inside her, Blackhawk had the surprising appearance of the next logical thing to do.

  This morning, Kristi and Barb do not yet know that the other is also trying to conceal her fear. As part of a first, early trickle of autoworkers at Blackhawk who have been recession-smacked out of a job, they do not know that they will need to molt, to shed old factory habits, factory ways of defining themselves, and pick up new ways.

  Little in either Kristi’s or Barb’s pasts make them seem especially likely people among Janesville’s out-of-a-job workers to be on this leading edge of personal reinvention. And yet, here they are, sitting in a middle-row desk on this first day of “The Criminal Justice System,” with an instructor named Kevin Purcell explaining something called a syllabus and attendance requirements and books to buy. And it seems so alien to Kristi and to Barb, too, on this morning when neither knows yet that she is about to discover a fierce, competitive spirit inside herself and a new best friend.

   6

  To the Renaissance Center

  As the end of this recession-wrecked summer nears, Paul Ryan wishes he could be in two places at once. On the second Friday in September, a delegation from Janesville will arrive in Detroit to try to rescue the assembly plant. The same day, General Motors’ chief executive will arrive on Capitol Hill to try to rescue the auto industry. Where, Paul must figure out, is it more important for him to be?

  The summer, he knows, has been brutal for General Motors. Sales plunging midyear by nearly 20 percent. Stocks plunging to their lowest value in a half century. Gas prices so high that the big SUVs coming off Janesville’s assembly line are especially unpopular. CEO Rick Wagoner, who gave Paul the heads-up call three months ago, has been invited to a Senate energy summit as the sole voice of U.S. automakers. Wagoner, however, has a more urgent goal in mind: In a prelude to what will become an auto industry bailout, he wants Congress to free up $25 billion in federal loans to help the industry make fuel-efficient cars. While in Washington, Wagoner has agreed to meet with members of Wisconsin’s congressional delegation, who have been leaning on him to keep the assembly plant open. None is as close to Wagoner as Paul.

  The timing is terrible, the confab with Wagoner in D.C. coming the day of the plant-rescue mission in Detroit. That mission will require presenting General Motors with a compelling case and great sums of money. It will also, Paul understands, require an all-hands-on-deck display of solidarity. A congressional representative should show up, and a Republican at that, and that means him.

  The jobs at stake belong to his constituents, his neighbors. And like almost every family in his hometown, his has a connection to the plant. Paul is fifth-generation Janesville, part of the Ryan clan that makes up one of three sprawling families in town known collectively as the “Irish mafia” because of an outsized role in construction that made many of the Ryans wealthy. Going back to his grandfather, his branch of the family chose the law. Still, his father spent his law school summers on the GM assembly line, losing a tip of a thumb on a piece of machinery in exchange for the wages that covered his tuition and books.

  On this Friday morning, Paul leaves Capitol Hill to catch a flight to Detroit.

  When he lands, he meets up with Wisconsin’s governor, Jim Doyle, and a small posse of civic, union, and business leaders that has come along. The posse includes the two men the governor picked over the summer to lead a GM Retention Task Force for the purpose of trying like hell to save the plant. One is a UAW leader, the other a former Democratic state senator, Tim Cullen. He and Paul have always gotten along because this is, after all, Janesville and not Congress. Moderate and unassuming, Tim had risen to become the Wisconsin Senate’s majority leader, then traded politics for two decades as a Blue Cross/Blue Shield executive. He retired not long ago and won a spot on the Janesville school board. Like Paul, Tim has family roots at the assembly plant, in his case reaching back to his grandfather, who had started in the Janesville Machine Company days. His father quit high school for a job at the assembly plant and stayed the rest of his life. When Tim graduated from high school in 1962, GM was hiring workers’ sons, so he paid his way through college with the wages of assembly line summers. Unlike most in town, Tim has long wondered about the plant’s fate. He was on the Janesville City Council in 1971 when it commissioned a consultant to study how the city could best protect its economic future. The study’s core recommendation—to diversify—came as the plant was nearing its all-time peak workforce of 7,100, and few besides Tim saw any reason to take the advice seriously. He sensed that Janesville someday would pay the cost of shortsightedness, though he had not foreseen that he would
be plucked out of retirement to try to save his city from a dreadful recession.

  This, then, is the plant-rescue team. Republican congressman and Democratic governor. Union leader and business owner. Federal, state, county, and local officials. A united, committed front as they approach downtown Detroit’s grand cluster of curtain-wall glass towers that bears such a hopeful name: Renaissance Center.

  The rescue team members ascend in a glass elevator with a commanding view of the Detroit River that glides up the side of the thirty-nine-story tower containing General Motors’ corporate headquarters. At the top, they step into the marbled reception area of the executive offices and are escorted into a conference room. Troy Clarke is there to greet them. A pleasant-looking man with a trim brown mustache, Clarke joined General Motors as a co-op college student at Pontiac and has never worked anywhere else, rising over thirty-four years to become president of GM’s North American operations.

  In this conference room, each team member presents, in a tidy mosaic, the case they have rehearsed for why GM should continue production in Janesville. Paul knows Clarke well, speaks to him on a weekly basis. Paul’s mosaic piece is a reminder to Clarke that he has fought on Capitol Hill for General Motors’ concerns about its pension costs. Tim’s pitch is the compelling fact that, at Janesville, the cost of producing each vehicle is lower than at a plant making the same SUVs in Arlington, Texas—a newer plant that no one is talking about closing.

  Finally, the governor sums up the case: Wisconsin stands committed to preserving its relationship with General Motors. And, to fortify the seriousness of that commitment, the state and Rock County and Janesville and the local business community are honing a large package of economic incentives to induce GM to stay. General Motors is, everyone in the room knows, planning an inexpensive subcompact car model as a corporate coping mechanism in this awful recession. Wisconsin will, the governor says, make it worthwhile for the company to trust its oldest assembly plant to manufacture its newest little car.