Janesville

by Amy Goldstein

  Walker and his staff are growing impatient. No more talk of compromise. On Day No. 23, the Senate Republicans employ a parliamentary trick, stripping out the fiscal parts of the bill so that a quorum no longer requires twenty senators—just seventeen. Early in the evening, without a single Democratic senator in the state, the Senate passes the sections of the bill that cripple public employee unions. The Assembly approves this version the next day. And, on Day No. 25 of what is, by now, the longest protest in Wisconsin history, as well as the largest, Governor Walker is jubilant as he signs the bill into law.

  Many people in Janesville have always regarded Madison as a place of nutty activism. The protesters’ yoga and drum circles were no surprise. In other circumstances, the white-hot political events there might not have threatened Janesville’s proud tradition of good-natured calm in the face of adversity. Yet as winter yielded to spring, the boiling acrimony spilled down the Interstate, melting some of Janesville’s trademark civility.

  The night of the State Senate vote, the union to which Deri belongs, the Janesville Education Association, told its members to wear black the following day. Soon, the teachers’ union became one of the organizations around the state agitating for a special election—a recall election to try to pry the new governor from office.

  As for Tim, true to type, he tried to make peace. With the protests over and the Democrats back from Illinois in defeat, he proposed amending the state constitution to make it illegal for senators to repeat such state-fleeing tactics ever again. Still, in mid-March, Tim attended a rally in the Rock County Courthouse parking lot at which union members and their supporters denounced the governor. Tim spoke out against Republicans’ moneyed interests.

  And where was Paul Ryan all this time? The day that the Democratic senators left for Illinois, Paul gave an interview to MSNBC in Washington, where he was working on his ideas for reining in federal spending. These budget-cutting ideas meant that he and the governor were ideological allies. With the marble pillars of the U.S. Capitol towering behind him, Paul told the MSNBC interviewer that he and Walker were good friends and had even traded emails since the protests broke out. Paul’s disdain for the protesters was palpable, his sympathy for public union members absent. Public workers, he said, already get such generous benefits that, even with the cuts the governor had in mind, they would still be better off than most Wisconsin workers.

  “And he’s getting, you know, riots,” Paul said of the governor. “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison these days.” It was a reference to the mass protests in Egypt—part of a broad movement known as the Arab Spring—that days before had toppled Egypt’s president of thirty years.

  The argument that Paul set forth, that public employees were getting more than their fair share, was at the core of Walker’s political calculation in going after organized labor his first winter as governor. Among certain people in Janesville, this argument, that government employees were overpaid and overindulged at taxpayer expense, held appeal. In a community in which so many had lost so much, some people were starting to regard public workers, including the city’s teachers, as fat cats in comparison.

  Janesville may be an old union town. But with the shuttered assembly plant and the supplier companies having destroyed so many UAW jobs, the ground was shifting. Twice as many people in Rock County were former union members as current union members. And opinion was split in the county on the question of whether unions help the U.S. economy or hurt it.

  The timing of this swelling resentment against public workers was curious, coming just as state budget cuts and an overall drop in local tax revenue forced the Janesville school system to announce the first major layoff of teachers in its history. And yet the anti-teacher hostility kept coming. While so many in town had crummy jobs or no jobs, most teachers, after all, still had their jobs and their summers off and their pensions, even if Deri and Rob and all the rest would soon have to pay more for them.

  The hostility has welled up in the most ordinary places. One morning this summer, the teacher who is president of the Janesville Education Association, Dave Parr, is confronted in the twenty-four-hour Walmart at 4 a.m., with his family waiting in the car. They are getting an early start on the three-hour drive for a weekend at his father’s in La Crosse, and he has stopped to pick up earbuds for one of his kids. And because it is before dawn, just one cashier’s line is open, so Dave cannot escape the guy in front of him, who apparently recognizes Dave, who has appeared now and then in the Gazette. “I told you, you were gonna get yours,” the guy yells at Dave. “I knew you were gonna get yours.” The guy does not stop, even when the cashier suggests that maybe he should calm down. The night manager comes over and eases him out of the store.

  A Parker High colleague of Deri’s, Julie Bouton, who has taught business classes for thirty-one years—and sponsors a business co-op program that is helping students whose families need an extra paycheck—didn’t go up to the protests. Still, people she has known for years are coming up to her in Woodman’s grocery and complaining about “that teacher thing” in Madison. She is tired of hearing that teachers have it better than everyone else—hearing it from people including some GM retirees with pensions of their own. Julie hates this bad-mouthing. She has begun to wait sometimes to go to Woodman’s at night, when the grocery aisles are emptier.

  And one night, Deri gets a call from her mother, who sounds upset. Her mother, Judy, lives a half hour away in Fort Atkinson, where Deri grew up, but her doctor is in Janesville. And during an appointment that day, the doctor made small talk by asking how Deri and her younger sister, Devin, were doing. Her mother reminded him that Deri was teaching. He rolled his eyes. Her mother asked him why. And the doctor told her that he didn’t have anything nice to say so probably shouldn’t say it. He finished examining her quickly, and she was out the door. But the sting lasted. The doctor barely knows Deri, her mother is now telling her on the phone. Who is he to criticize her choice of profession?

  Deri is sad that her mother has been seared by this quiet hostility.

   31

  On Janesville Time

  At the end of every shift, just before he rushes out of the Fort Wayne Assembly Plant into the Indiana night air, Matt Wopat stops for a heartbeat at one of the time clocks, mounted on poles in the terra-cotta-tiled lobby. He slides his ID badge through the card reader, so that General Motors will know when his eight hours have ended. Each night, unless he’s had a lucky, extra-long shift with overtime, the clock punches Matt out moments after 10:45 p.m.

  Now that eastern Indiana’s winter is melting into spring, Matt has been punching out in the Fort Wayne lobby for a year. Long enough that he has gotten mortgage payments straightened out and otherwise propped his family back up into the middle class by working almost three hundred miles from Darcy and the girls. Long enough that he no longer is aware of the oddity that, when he hustles through the vast parking lot, hops into the fourteen-year-old car he keeps down here, and starts the engine, the digital clock glowing red on the dashboard says just after 9:45 p.m.—the Janesville time.

  Keeping his clocks and his watch on Central Time—Janesville time—springs from the same impulse inside Matt that leads him, each night when he turns left out of the plant parking lot, to be careful to tell himself that he is going back to the apartment and not to tell himself that he is going home. He is conscious of thinking “the apartment,” because, in Matt’s mind, even though he is in Fort Wayne five days a week and four nights, he has only one home, and it certainly is not the rented unit in the Willows of Coventry that he shares with a guy named Kip, another GM gypsy who wishes that he were still working in Janesville.

  It is almost a taunt every time Matt drives into the apartment complex, with its entrance sign that says: “Willows of Coventry. Welcome Home.” Still, he and Kip have a nice apartment with two bedrooms, two baths, and a fireplace that they have used only once—at Christmastime, when Matt came up with the idea that maybe they could cheer thems
elves up during the first Christmas season away from their families by decorating an old fake tree that Kip had been planning to throw out and, while they were at it, putting on some music and lighting a fire. Making the best of a bad situation. For the most part, though, the apartment is a shrine to Wisconsin.

  When Matt unlocks the door and steps inside, his first sight, high on the wall directly across, is a stuffed buck’s head with an impressive rack of antlers. He shot the buck on a hunting trip near his grandfather’s farm in Hillsboro, up north. Mounting it in the apartment works out well because Darcy does not want the large head hanging in their house, and also because it gives Matt a quick jolt of home feeling whenever he opens the door. In Matt’s bathroom are neatly folded Green Bay Packers towels—in the same dark green as the Packers blanket that, on the other side of the apartment, is smoothed across Kip’s bed. In Matt’s room are a single daybed and a dresser whose surface is covered with photos of everyone in the family.

  For this apartment that Matt wishes he didn’t need, he and Kip split the $704-a-month rent. Matt thinks it is unfortunate that, even though Fort Wayne has gotten him back to $28 an hour, plus a $30,000 transfer bonus if he stays for at least three years, money is tighter than if he were still living at home full-time. Without the rent. Without needing a car here, even though the black 1997 Saturn was about as cheap as he could find. Without the gas money to get home to Janesville after the Friday night shift and back to Fort Wayne before Monday’s shift, even though he carpools with other Janesville guys to save on the gas, chipping in $20 each way. He and Darcy seem to be arguing more about money than when he was living at home.

  Matt knows that he and Kip probably could have found a lower-rent place, but he figures it’s already hard enough, sleeping away from Darcy and their bed more nights than not. So sleeping in some dump would only have made things worse. Besides, the Willows of Coventry has a number of units occupied by GM gypsies, including others from Janesville, and he likes the familiar faces.

  Matt is part of what turns out to be a large tribe of GM gypsies who have converged on Fort Wayne. Since it opened in 1986, when it inherited the assembly of pickups that had been made in Janesville, Fort Wayne has been a truck plant. And after the General Motors bankruptcy nearly two years ago now, the company decided to move to Fort Wayne, too, the heavy-duty pickups from a plant in Pontiac, Michigan, which closed as part of GM’s restructuring. So, Fort Wayne added a third shift last year and, to keep trucks moving along the assembly line around the clock, imported nine hundred workers who had been laid off, just like Matt and the other Janesville GM’ers. The imported workers came from twenty-five GM facilities in eleven states and, while some arrived with their families, many are gypsies, like Matt. In fact, the plant manager goes home on weekends to Dayton, two hours away. The personnel director goes home on weekends to Chicago, a three-hour drive. Gypsy or not, many of the imported workers arrived with their all-important anniversary dates earlier than those of some workers who already were in Fort Wayne, which meant that their greater seniority let them claim better shifts and better jobs in the plant. Matt is a second-shift team leader on the trim line, coordinating a small group of workers just after the truck bodies have emerged from the paint shop. On this part of the assembly line, they install the weatherstrip, the insulating mat that goes under the carpet, the seatbelt bracket, the sunroof. Second shift is what Matt thought was best, because it means that his workweek doesn’t start until Monday afternoon, so he can sleep at home Sunday nights.

  The gypsies from all these plants and states work side by side, yet their loyalties stand apart. Until he came here, Matt never really thought about the fact that some autoworkers might be Republicans. And sports allegiances are serious and in plain view on the factory floor, with baseball caps and T-shirts making clear who roots for the Indianapolis Colts or the Chicago Bears or the New York Jets or, of course, the Packers. Matt likes wearing his Packers cap, but in general he is not one of the gypsies who are having a good time while away from home. His roommate, Kip, plays cards at a guy’s house on Tuesday nights and sometimes goes to Wednesday game nights at the local UAW hall. Matt isn’t in Fort Wayne to have fun. He lives as cheaply as he can. Lives pretty much on cereal, Campbell’s soup, and ramen.

  And lives with guilt, because Darcy is dealing alone with the house and three kids, and he can’t cook for them, or load the dishwasher or help the girls with their homework, or take them to their doctor’s appointments. He feels useless. Yet he has to kill his nonworking hours somehow, so, when the weather is decent, he and a couple of other gypsies go mid-mornings over to the Donald Ross Golf Club, since the golfing comes free with his rent at the Willows of Coventry. And when the weather is hot, he sometimes sits at the Willows of Coventry’s pool before it’s time to get ready for his shift. And that is when the guilt is strongest, sitting by the pool, a few hundred miles from the chores he wishes he were doing at home.

  He knows that Darcy understands this helplessness that he feels and doesn’t resent his time by the pool, since his afternoons and nights at the Fort Wayne Assembly Plant are keeping them all afloat. But the guilt lingers, along with the loneliness for his family. He and Darcy have come up with ways to help feel close, as best they can. On Monday mornings, just before the drive back here, he sometimes leaves “miss you” greeting cards under her pillow, but not so often that she’ll come to expect them, and the surprise will be ruined. And through the week, they play games together on their smartphones. Darcy beats him almost every time at word games. It’s okay with Matt, because the point isn’t winning. It’s the connection, so the best part is getting text messages from Darcy at unexpected moments during the day. The text, “YOUR TURN,” has become curiously heartwarming.

  And every night, as Matt is taking the left turn out of the plant parking lot and heading north along the highway for the short drive to the apartment, he calls home. Except that, even though it is just before 10 p.m. on his car clock and in Janesville, an hour earlier than it is around him in Fort Wayne, the time is late enough even in Janesville that, if he talks with his girls for more than a few minutes, he will make them late for bed.

   32

  Pride and Fear

  The backpack slung over his shoulder is light as Mike Vaughn walks out of Blackhawk’s classroom building and crosses the asphalt expanse toward his Chevy pickup. It is mid-May, and Mike isn’t toting any books tonight. Just an attendance slip he needs to turn in to the Workforce Development agency that has paid for all his classes, and a few sheets of notes he’d brought along in case he wanted to study just before his final exam. Mike has always gotten to his classes and his exams a half hour early, as he did for shifts in his factory days. Now, as he walks toward his white truck, it is near 9 p.m., and the exam for his business law course, his last final exam, is over.

  By this night, twenty-six months have gone by since Mike took the brief, nostalgic glance back at the empty Lear factory floor. In that time, he has stayed in touch less and less with the hundreds of union brothers and sisters he represented at Lear, easing each round through their layoffs as best he could. Just a few friends and people he runs into now and then around town. It’s not that Mike doesn’t think about the times and the people of his past. But those times are gone, and no point dwelling on them.

  His father, Dave, the middle generation of the union Vaughns, is still active in the union. Nearly a decade after he retired from General Motors, he is still volunteering as vice president of UAW Local 95, as he was when Mike broke the news that he was going into HR. The local’s membership has shriveled, the number of units whose workers it represents dwindled from sixteen companies to five, given the suppliers that closed along with GM. And the workers who remain cannot claim paid “release time” from their jobs to help run the union—as Mike did at Lear and Dave before him at General Motors—which is why the local’s officers these days are retirees like Dave.

  While his father is helping to lead what remains of t
he union, Mike has found that it’s best to stay focused on what lies ahead. On this Wednesday night, what is immediately ahead is his graduation on Saturday at the Dream Center, just like Barb’s a year ago. So, with graduation three days away, Mike is walking to his truck with pride and fear.

  The pride is easy to understand. Mike is excited that he did it—twenty-three courses in all, pulling twenty-one As, an A-minus, and one B. Like Barb before him, he will be wearing with his cap and gown a golden sash and honor cord. He will tell a Gazette reporter: “I got decked out. At 43, I’m proud of my accomplishments.”

  The fear that runs alongside is because Mike cannot avoid the sense that a moment of truth has arrived. When he handed in his exam a few minutes ago, he completed a gamble, to which he has devoted two years of his life, that the Job Center’s retraining gospel was worth believing. Certainly, the gospel has been spread wide. Last year, when he started at Blackhawk, 543 other out-of-a-job factory workers in Rock County—and about 100,000 nationwide at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of $575 million—got the kind of Trade Adjustment training subsidies that Mike helped to negotiate for Lear’s workers as it was shutting down. Nationally, nearly half the trainees who got this help last year, and about one third this year in which he is graduating, will not quickly find a job.

  Two months ago, Mike began to apply for jobs. Dozens of jobs. He figured that his résumé might get noticed, with his near-perfect grades and his decade on the union side of human resources work, including five years as the shop chairman of an eight-hundred-person factory. He would get noticed, he figured, because of the contracts that he negotiated, the grievances he handled, the employee contract language he interpreted, the Kronos workforce management system that he already knows how to use. Union side or management side, he figured, the work is similar, and companies would surely notice that he had been doing it for years.