Janesville

by Amy Goldstein

  Mike is surprised that all he has gotten are rejection letters, when he has heard anything at all. Company after company telling him that they are looking for someone with a bachelor’s degree and three to five years’ experience in human resources management. He understands that companies can afford to be choosy when so many people want these scarce human resources jobs, want any job. Yet Mike can’t help but be nervous that, three days before graduation, he hasn’t gotten a single callback.

  Proud as he is of his accomplishments, his mind-set is not helped by the fact that, in March, for reasons unfathomable to him, his unemployment checks stopped arriving. His unemployment benefits were supposed to keep flowing as long as he was in school. He knows other out-of-a-job workers who were laid off earlier than him and are going to be in school longer than he will and are still collecting their unemployment. But try though he has, he cannot persuade anyone in the Wisconsin agency that handles unemployment insurance that the status someone assigned to him—“exhausted time period for benefits”—must be a mistake. He and Barb have been dipping lately into their small savings, because trying to live on her $10.30 an hour, from her new job helping a developmentally disabled client, isn’t the same as living on her $10.30 an hour plus his unemployment checks.

  So finding a job as soon as he graduates is a matter of urgency to Mike—such urgency that he has even started to apply for laborer’s jobs, just in case the human resources management plan in which he has invested these two years of his life does not pan out. He has started to stare hard at the question of how far he is willing to commute each day if a job were to come along. Is Madison too far? Rockford, Illinois? Further away? As Mike walks toward his truck, his last exam just behind him, his graduation just ahead, a large question jostles in his mind: “What’s next?”

  This pride-fear combination will linger inside Mike for precisely two more weeks. Two Wednesdays from now, he will go for an interview at Seneca Foods Corporation, a vegetable processing plant in Janesville that happens to have an entry-level position in its human resources department. That Friday, he will get a call to come in on Monday for a pre-employment physical. On Tuesday, he will be told that he can start work the next day. And so, on June 1, Mike will not be thinking much about the fact that he has to work the overnight shift, or that he will be dealing with workers and interpreting labor contract language from the corporate side and not the union side, or that he and Barb will, between them, be earning just over half the money they had made at Lear.

  Mike will be thanking his lucky stars that, after twenty-eight months without a job, he is starting a new career.

  This summer will mark three years since the assembly plant and its supplier companies, such as Lear, began to shut down—long enough that most people who wanted to retrain have gone back to school. By this summer, the laid-off workers who went to Blackhawk will be faring less well than their laid-off neighbors who did not.

  Counterintuitive as it may seem, the out-of-a-job workers who went to Blackhawk are working less than the others. Nearly two thousand laid-off people in and around Janesville have studied at Blackhawk. Only about one in three has a steady job—getting at least some pay every season of the year—compared with about half the laid-off people who did not go back to school.

  Besides, the people who went to Blackhawk are not earning as much money. Before the recession, their wages had been about the same as for other local workers. By this summer, the people who have found a new job without retraining are being paid, on average, about 8 percent less than they were paid before. But those who went to Blackhawk are being paid, on average, one third less than before.

  Most startling, the group whose pay has fallen the most are people like Mike, who stuck it out at Blackhawk until they graduated. These successful students tended to have had higher wages before the recession. For that reason, the decrease in their pay is especially steep, dropping by nearly half.

  At the Job Center, through which so much federal money has flowed in support of the job-training gospel, Bob Borremans has been noticing that not everyone who went to Blackhawk has emerged with a job with good pay. Or with a job. This is not what he expected. He has a mystery on his hands.

  Did some out-of-a-job workers snap up the few jobs that came along while some of their out-of-a-job neighbors were back in school? Is part of the problem that people like Mike, who had eighteen years at Lear, are now starting out at the bottom rung of a new field? If so, will their pay go up if they move up the ladder over time?

  Whatever the reasons, Bob is becoming aware that the retraining gospel that the federal government and the Job Center’s own caseworkers have been spreading is based on a rock-bottom premise that hasn’t turned out to be true—at least, not yet. The premise is that this recession would be like past recessions and that jobs would come back at the pace that they have before. It is not happening. So Bob is aware that the Job Center, with good intentions but wrong expectations, has sent people into what he is starting to regard as a double whammy. They lost their jobs. They went to school to equip themselves with new skills, and they still can’t find jobs.

  At Blackhawk, Sharon Kennedy, the vice president of learning, has been trying hard to ward off the kind of double whammy that Bob is recognizing in the Job Center. Sharon has urged Blackhawk’s staff to confer with executives and personnel directors of the companies still in town about where jobs are likely to appear. The college’s tiny, overloaded crew of counselors has tried to navigate dislocated workers into studies to prepare for those fields.

  Blackhawk’s most remarkable effort, though, has been through the little program Sharon and the staff built with the $2 million gift that one of Wisconsin’s Democratic U.S. senators, Herb Kohl, managed to wangle from Congress for the college. With this money, Blackhawk created CATE—Career and Technical Education—for the specific purpose of heaping extra help onto a small batch of out-of-a-job workers. CATE started the winter of 2010 with just 125 students. At the start, they took tests, which found that some were ready for college, but others could read, write, or do math at only a middle school level. Each of the two groups was allowed to pick programs in just a few fields that Sharon, Bob, and their staffs all agreed were the most promising fields for finding a job. The out-of-a-job workers who were ready for college could train for computer work or clinical lab technology. The unready students could train for work as nursing assistants or welders or certain kinds of business jobs. They got a lot of handholding, with tutors and twenty hours on campus each week.

  CATE was expensive—$8,000 to $10,000 per student. Yet, despite the care devoted to deciding what these students should study, despite the intense coaching lavished on this small batch of laid-off factory workers, the results were modest. And the grim reality was that, even in those fields selected as most promising by Sharon and everyone else who built CATE, the out-of-a-job Blackhawk students who studied for these fields haven’t had any more luck in finding a job than the others. By this summer after Mike graduates, about half will be working—about the same as everyone else.

  On occasion these days, Mike runs into people from Lear who went to Blackhawk. Some of them are still looking for work, and some are doing work nowhere close to what they planned. A guy who studied computer IT is bagging groceries. That kind of thing. So, by the afternoon of June 1, as he gets ready to go to Seneca Foods for his first overnight shift, the pride-fear jostling inside him has turned into pure pride—a feeling that his life has become a best-case scenario.

  Yes, he will be making less money than before. But that is part, he believes, of accepting that the old times are gone. Part of not dwelling on what you can’t change. Part of being grateful for what you have. In these new times, what Mike sees when he looks over the sweep of his life is, not the loss of his union office, but a gamble on human resources management that has paid off. He has a job. It is in his field. It is in Janesville.

   33

  Labor Fest 2011

  The Labor Fest
parade begins marching at 1 p.m., as it does each year, along Milwaukee Street and bends south onto Main. This afternoon, September 5, has postcard skies, but the mood isn’t right. As the stuntmen of the New Glarus Fire Department scale their ladders in the street, as the classic Chevys roll by, a palpable anger marches alongside the parade. The anger has descended in a straight line from last winter’s protests against Scott Walker’s anti-union, budget-cutting first weeks as Wisconsin’s governor. The anger flouts Janesville’s long, proud tradition of civility, its good-natured responses to adversity.

  In his sixty-seven years, Tim Cullen has never seen anything like it. Since the State Senate Democrats hiding out in Illinois returned to Madison in defeat, Tim has been trying to smooth partisan relations. He thought he was making a peace gesture with his proposal to outlaw legislators fleeing the state from now on. Instead, Republicans mocked his idea, and his fellow Democrats derided him as a patsy. The Wisconsin State Journal in Madison and the Gazette have chronicled Tim’s olive-branch efforts with two Republican state senators willing to try to heal working relationships by visiting each other’s districts. “It is all part of a plan to prove to someone, somewhere, that bipartisanship is not dead in Wisconsin,” the State Journal wrote in July. Tim often feels alone in his faith in the virtue of rekindling a tolerant, bipartisan spirit in Madison. He often feels out of step. And now, on this cool, breezy afternoon, he is walking along Milwaukee Street in his hometown parade. He looks to the crowded sidewalk on one side of the street, and about twenty people are cheering him as he walks by. He looks toward the crowd on the other side. A guy is giving him the finger.

  The finger? In the midst of the Labor Fest parade? Right on Milwaukee Street in nice, can-do Janesville?

  Tim can’t believe it. He doesn’t know whether the guy resents him for hiding out in Illinois or resents him for being too moderate. Either way, he thinks, these few seconds sum up everything that is wrong in Wisconsin politics today. Everything that is tearing down Janesville’s trademark civility.

  Tim is not even getting the brunt of the worst of the anger that is marching alongside the parade. The worst is marching alongside Paul Ryan. It is standing with Paul before he and his family begin to march. The anger arrives in the form of a young man with tousled brown curls and a blue zippered sweatshirt. The young man, Todd Stoner, is a twenty-five-year-old labor organizer and a member of the nascent Occupy Wall Street movement, which is denouncing the richest one percent of the world’s population and the sorry state in which the concentration of wealth is leaving everyone else.

  Stoner begins politely enough, extending his hand as he approaches. “Congressman Ryan,” he says.

  Paul shakes Stoner’s hand before putting his own hand back on the handle of a double stroller, holding it steady for small, blond Sam, at six the youngest of the congressman’s three kids, to scramble into one of the stroller’s twin seats. “I’m sorry,” says Paul, who is looking every inch the Wisconsinite in a striped Green Bay Packers polo shirt and khakis. His cell phone is clipped to his belt, just as it was on the night, more than three years ago now, that he got the heads-up, plant-closing phone call. “Nice to see you. I apologize. We are just getting started here.”

  Next to Paul, his wife, Janna, her blond hair pulled into a ponytail, is standing with their two other kids, Liza and Charlie. Around them are supporters in Kelly green T-shirts with “Ryan” in small white letters on the front and larger white letters on the back.

  Stoner is not deterred. “I just really need to ask you a question.”

  “Not right now,” Paul repeats, “ ’cause we are just getting started.” He hands Stoner a cream-colored business card, as young Sam waves a small American flag from his stroller seat. “Do me a favor. Go to my website,” Paul says, but the young man, becoming less patient by the second, cuts him off.

  “I have. I’ve read it.”

  “Well, then you know what I think we need to do,” Paul says.

  Stoner says he is not happy with what he has read.

  “We are just going to disagree on that, okay?” Paul says. “Take care. I hope you do better. I want to get jobs. We just have a different opinion about how to get ’em, okay?”

  Stoner’s voice rises, his tone more strident. “What should I have to work for to get a job? Should I have to work the same wages as in China? Should I have to work for $1 an hour?”

  Janna’s hand is resting on the stroller, too, a smile pasted on her face. Charlie, who is eight, is watching. Finally, Janna turns to the young man and wishes him a nice day. Paul wishes him a nice day, too.

  “Would you like some candy?” the congressman asks. His kids have hard candies they are going to toss to the parade-goers if they ever can start walking.

  “No,” Stoner says, sounding incredulous that this is what he is being offered.

  “Would you like a Packer-Badger schedule?”

  “No.”

  As Stoner veers into a monologue on the dangers of deregulation, Paul is now facing away from him, his lips pulled tight. Janna is still wearing her smile. A man in a Kelly green Ryan T-shirt chimes in. “C’mon,” he tells the heckling young man, “we are all here to have a good time.”

  Stoner does not mention that unemployment in Rock County last month was still above 9 percent, with six thousand fewer people working than before GM and all the rest shut down. But he might as well have said it, because he says: “How can we be at Labor Day when there is so much unemployment? This is a sad Labor Day!”

  Finally, Paul and his family and his Kelly green entourage start down the parade route. By the time he passes the Main Street reviewing stand, near the end of the mile-long route, his Labor Day hasn’t gotten any better. Paul is still shouting out, “Everyone, happy Labor Day,” and waving as he walks. On the sidewalk, behind the parade-goers in their lawn chairs, Stoner’s curly-headed figure is visible. He is with friends. Several of them are from a group called Wisconsin Jobs Now!, which formed last spring, after the protests against the governor. This is the group for which Stoner is an organizer. The group’s activism is being paid for by a large labor organization for which he also has worked, the Service Employees International Union. In fact, Wisconsin Jobs Now! has a float in the parade. The float is a flatbed, being towed behind a station wagon with “Unemployed Workers United for Good Jobs” written along the side. Sitting on the flatbed are a few out-of-a-job and low-wage workers from Paul’s congressional district.

  “Paul Ryan. He’s the worst. He puts corporate interests first,” Stoner and his friends are chanting, as the object of their anger nears the end of the parade route.

  “Stop the attacks on the middle class!” Stoner yells, as he holds up one edge of a white sheet, hand-lettered with the words: “Ryan ignores WORKING people.”

  “Where are the jobs? Where are the jobs?” the protesters are yelling, as Paul opens the driver’s door of his blue Suburban—a Chevy, of course, in his hometown that no longer makes them. Janna finishes hugging people in the Kelly green T-shirts, and she and the kids pile inside. As Paul drives off, a few blue and white signs are still visible in the mid-afternoon sun: “Save the American Dream.”

  Days later, Janesville’s fortunes get a fresh dent. Yet again, it comes from Detroit. That Friday night, General Motors and the United Auto Workers reach a tentative agreement on a new four-year labor contract. These labor negotiations have been GM’s first since Presidents George W. Bush and Obama agreed to the federal auto loans, since the GM bankruptcy and the restructuring that was its recovery strategy. During these negotiations, a minor issue has been the future of the company’s only two assembly plants that are on standby—Janesville and the one in Spring Hill, Tennessee, a bit south of Nashville, a newer plant that opened to make Chevy Saturns in 1989 and was making SUVs until production stopped two years ago.

  To the people of Janesville, the issue is not minor. At the Job Center, Bob Borremans still sees the longing in clients for the assembly plant to reope
n, with the ripple effect it would bring along of so many other jobs. Realist that he is, Bob likes to believe that most people are no longer really banking on this phoenix. Still, some do—people such as Marv Wopat, retired for three years by now after his quarter century as the plant’s employee assistance representative. Marv still holds a passionate belief that the plant’s reopening, which would end his son Matt’s workweeks in Indiana, is just a matter of time.

  On the Friday night, word begins to slip out that the tentative contract would reopen Spring Hill. Janesville would stay closed.

  As vice president of UAW Local 95, Dave Vaughn rushes to Detroit with Mike Marcks, his friend and fellow retiree who is the local’s president. Throughout the negotiations, the local has been urging the union international’s leaders to get the assembly plant reopened or—failing that—at least to keep it designated on standby, because standby is better than closed. Now they listen to the UAW’s president lay out the tentative terms. By the end of the month, the union’s members ratify the contract. General Motors announces that the new contract will create 6,400 jobs in the United States over the next four years. It will add just one percent to the corporation’s costs and give bonuses and larger profit-sharing to its workers. General Motors’ chief executive, Daniel Akerson, calls the contract “a win-win for both membership and the company.” It is, he says, “further evidence that this is really a new GM.”

  And in Janesville? Disappointment, sure. Yet the old optimism, the old can-do flickers. Dave Vaughn and the other local officers are relieved that the UAW shielded the plant from a permanent death sentence. The same flicker of hope appears in the Gazette. If Spring Hill is going to reopen, a newspaper article reasons, doesn’t that mean that Janesville, General Motors’ only plant left on standby, is next in line?