Janesville Pdf Summary
A Washington Post reporter’s intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors’ assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin – Paul Ryan’s hometown – and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class.
This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its factory stills—but it’s not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay around long enough to notice what happens next, when a community with a can-do spirit tries to pick itself up.
Pulitzer Prize winner Amy Goldstein has spent years immersed in Janesville, Wisconsin where the nation’s oldest operating General Motors plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession, two days before Christmas of 2008. Now, with intelligence, sympathy, and insight into what connects and divides people in an era of economic upheaval, she makes one of America’s biggest political issues human. Her reporting takes the reader deep into the lives of autoworkers, educators, bankers, politicians, and job re-trainers to show why it’s so hard in the twenty-first century to recreate a healthy, prosperous working class.
For this is not just a Janesville story or a Midwestern story. It’s an American story.
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Janesville Review
5.0 out of 5 stars Janesville: Microcosm of the Heartland Rustbelt
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 30, 2017
Verified Purchase
“Even a small city wrenched by the worst of what a mighty recession metes out does not have a single fate.”
Amy Goldstein tells the varied fates of the people of Janesville, Wisconsin beginning with the closing of Janesville’s manufacturing plants in 2008. She retells the lives of those who lost their jobs, explaining how they have fared in the following eight years. Janesville is a microcosm of hundreds of towns in the Rustbelt that starts at the Delaware River in eastern Pennsylvania and ends along the Des Moines River a thousand miles west in Iowa. It’s the story of many towns in this distressed part of our country that roared in last year’s election.
The book interested me because as an industrial consultant I’ve worked in Janesville and dozens of similar industrial towns from Wisconsin to Upstate New York. I’ve witnessed first-hand how my clients among America’s former great industrial companies booted thousands of their employees out the door and shipped their jobs off to China and Mexico, often after brutally extorting the fired American employees into training their foreign replacements by threatening to withhold their severance pay.
Though I moved to Florida in 1998, I returned in 2011 to a town in Michigan’s beautiful NW Lower Peninsula that is now reinventing itself, with some success, as a recreational town of marinas, boutique shops, craft breweries, and fishing charters. It is right across Lake Michigan from Green Bay.
I get over to Wisconsin in most years, and have observed the changes described in this book.
The story begins with the closing of the Janesville’s GM plant in 2008, which had operated since 1923. GM’s closing caused a chain reaction of closures among the other auto component factories in town. It was followed by the unrelated closing of the town’s other major employer, the famous Parker Pen Company, which fired its American employees and moved their jobs to Mexico.
What happened to all these people booted from employment?
As usual in life, it’s a mixed bag. Some of the union members with seniority were offered positions at other GM factories hundreds of miles away. They left their families in Janesville and commuted home on weekends for years until they retired. (Perhaps they did not make permanent moves to the other towns because they held out hope that GM would eventually re-open the Janesville plant. Or perhaps, they were worried that the other GM factories would be closed too, stranding them yet again in another jobless town).
A few moved into jobs in social work (getting paid with public money to rehabilitate their laid off neighbors) and criminal justice (prison guards for the unemployed who became criminals).
Being the home of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Janesville had the political pull to make a mighty effort to recover its fortunes with grants of tens of millions of dollars of state, local, and federal money to potential new employers. The town succeeded, by paying $11,500,000, to attract the distribution center of one of the “dollar store” chains, Another grant of $36,000,000 of public money (state, local, federal) attracted a startup medical devices manufacturing company, that may eventually employ up to 150 people. However, offers of nearly $600,000,000 failed to convince GM to reopen its plant.
The new jobs pay much less than GM paid, so many people have drastically reduced their standard of living. And the new jobs took years to be created (the medical company will not create most of its projected employment until 2019 at the earliest). Many people were permanently removed from the middle class and drifted into the despair of living from food stamps in public housing, and of resorting to substance abuse to fill their empty days.
The most surprising aspect of the book is that going back to trade schools and community colleges for “retraining” was generally counterproductive.
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“Laid-off workers who went back to school were less likely to have a job after they retrained than those who had not gone to school.”
Retraining did not translate into greater success at finding a job. Among those who went back to school, the proportion who ended up with steady work was smaller than among the laid-off workers who did not. Worse still, more of those who retrained were not earning any money at all.
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Perhaps this should not be surprising. When the major employer in a town closes, every other employer loses business and starts laying off its people too. What good does it do to retrain from being a factory hand to an office worker, when every office in town is also letting its office people go?
The story ends in 2016, with Donald Trump elected President by the votes of folks battered by unemployment in the Industrial Midwest — people who until then had leaned Democratic. (I was one of them — having voted Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016). Janesville’s county voted for Obama in 2012 and Ms. Clinton, by a much narrower margin, in 2016. But it elects Conservative Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan to Congress. Anyone who wants to find a place to study American politics should start in Janesville, which mirrors the national mix of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents
My takeaways from the book are:
1. Plant closings create an economic cataclysm that is always worse than anticipated. They take down the component feeder factories that supply parts to the big plant. They destroy many small businesses that provided contracted services to the closed plant. The town’s restaurants, merchants, bowling alleys, and so on lose much of their business and start to close. Foreclosed homes owned by the unemployed who are unable to continue paying mortgages flood the market and devalue everybody’s property. It is difficult, if not actually impossible, to fully recover the economy of a town after a major employer lays off its people.
2. We were sold a pack of lies about free trade benefiting our workers. NAFTA-WITH-MEXICO and GATT-WITH-CHINA were sold on the promise that they would “create millions of high paying jobs for American workers who will make products for export.” American companies never intended to use free trade agreements to export to other countries. Not a single vehicle was ever exported from Janesville to Mexico or China. The pool of $2 / hour labor in Mexico induced the Parker Pen Company to give its American employees the boot, and perhaps expedited the decision by GM to permanently close its Janesville operation. (I don’t know if GM’s management made this calculation, but I witnessed management’s calculation at other companies that moving work to Mexico and China would enable the closing of US factories during the next recession).
3. The “New Economy of high-paying ‘information worker’ jobs” is bogus propaganda. Once high-paying jobs are lost, they never come back. The pool of low-cost jobs in Mexico and China impedes the creation of middle class jobs in the USA like we had prior to NAFTA being ratified in 1994.
4. “Retraining for a better job” is a delusion foisted by executives and Wall Street money funds who profit by beating Americans out of their jobs. They want to make it socially acceptable to profiteer by sending their people’s jobs to Mexico or China by pretending that it’s the American workers’ fault for being too dumb to retrain for some line of work more in demand. In truth, there aren’t enough well-paying jobs anywhere in the USA to soak up the slack from industrial dis-employment (which, by the way, also dis-employs professional people in accounting, production management, and technology). It’s like a game of musical chairs where after every round there is always somebody left standing who doesn’t have a chair.
5. I’m also wondering if Congress should pass laws making it illegal for governments to bribe companies with tens of millions, hundreds of millions, and even billions of dollars to set up shop in their jurisdictions. This merely creates “bidding wars” to see which government entity can offer the most incentive to bring in mediocre businesses. We’ve run up $10 trillion of national debt and no telling how much debt at the state and local levels paying bribes to businesses, which often never fulfill their promises to hire people. This is yet another sign that the so-called “new economy” failed to replace the jobs that were lost when we relocated the high-paying jobs to Mexico and China.
Nevertheless, despite all odds, there has been some recovery in the Rustbelt. Wisconsin, even with its diminished manufacturing economy, retains some family-owned, closely-held companies that haven’t yet been taken over by Wall Street hacks who buy companies in order to shut them down and move the Americans’ work to Mexico and China. I recently bought a Wisconsin-made Gravely lawn mower and a Wisconsin-made Speed Queen dryer. Excellent products built with the old-fashioned American pride of quality engineering and workmanship. Many other of Wisconsin’s famous industrial companies like Harley Davidson, Kohler, and Manitowoc, have found ways to prosper by remaining in the state. Some are even hiring faster than they are laying people off. Some of my son’s friends from Florida moved to Wisconsin in order to go to work building construction machinery.
There are also quality of life issues that make the Midwest a special place. I moved my family back to NW Michigan, across the lake from Wisconsin, in 2011. Many of us who moved to glamor spots like California, Florida, Colorado, and Seattle when we were young returned to the Midwest in middle age. In Florida, I have neighbors from Michigan. In Michigan, I have neighbors who returned from Florida. Others are back from Colorado, and dozens are back from California. We like living in communities here the people know each other and care for each other’s families.
New businesses with new jobs, albeit primarily at minimum wage, are also coming to town for the first time in decades. A shadow of prosperity is glimmering for the first time in living memory.
Places like Janesville and other towns in the middle of the country have a sense of community that will always make them home to the people who grew up there. If they have not recovered as quickly as we expected, neither have they died.
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for all Americans
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 6, 2018
Verified Purchase
When former President Obama shares his favorite books from 2017, curiosity strikes. I saw Amy Goldstein’s JANESVILLE: AN AMERICAN STORY on his list, and it caught my attention. Once I started reading the book, I could not put it down. The author spent two years researching the small town just outside of Madison, Wisconsin, which was hit hard, no torn apart, during the recession when the GM manufacturing plant, closed for good, and devastated the livelihood of not only the people who worked there but others who were affected by the operation as additional businesses slowly closed as a result. It went from a middle-class population to a town of poverty. Not only were incomes lost, but families were torn apart, homelessness became rampant, food was scarce, finding jobs became near impossible, and pride was long a thing of the past.
Goldstein tells the story from unique vantage points. She tracks several families over the course of a couple of years. Showing their personal stories from generational GMers, retirees, folks who want to help their community bounce back, and numerous others who put their hearts into Janesville. Hometown boy Paul Ryan is a part of the story as a congressman with a direct line to the CEO of GM and during his campaign on Romney’s ticket, but even his weight, when he was throwing it, can’t convince the automobile behemoth to re-open their longest standing plant in Janesville. Other political figures who play a key role in this fight, while trying to get Janesville back on its feet, perhaps have ulterior motives than simply helping GM workers regain their jobs.
Embrace Janesville via workers, community leaders, teachers, and union leaders helping to re-train the unemployed with the hopes of finding new work post-education. This is a town with history that has now lost its glue. Can it and the people be put back together?
Told with the objective style of a journalist, Goldstein engages her readers through the eyes of the Janesville families and their deeply personal stories. You might never look at a small town in the same way again. Certainly not one affected by an economic downturn so grave. Your heart will break while they try to hold on to every bit of dignity possible.
Dr T
5.0 out of 5 stars Pulitzer prize-winning author writes another fantastic book.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 10, 2017
This is an important book, and one that will stand the test of time. And, contrary to the subtitle, it isn’t just an American story. It speaks to issues that apply worldwide, and which have applied to cities for two centuries now, and will no doubt apply for centuries to come.
Janesville is the story of an medium sized American city in Wisconsin, home to Speaker Paul Ryan. It is a Factory Town – and the factory is a GM plant, producing Chevy Tahoes. The plant closes, and does not reopen. Other businesses close – both those that supplied the GM plant, and those whose customers lose their jobs, and cease to be customers.
The book charts the fortunes of those affected. It talks of those who try to rebuilt the town, drawing new businesses in. It tells the stories of those in the community colleges who are offering retraining courses to those who have lost their jobs, and the outcomes for those people. It tells us of the people who work in the job centre, and those who work in charities supporting those in trouble. Those who used to give to good causes, and who now receive.
Goldstein is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, and it shows. This is a beautifully written book. Simply written, yes, with honest directness. Few books this important are this good to read.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone interested in how an economy and society face changes. You won’t find any easy solutions, but you will better understand the issues.
About Amy Goldstein Author Of Janesville pdf Book
Amy Goldstein is an American Author director, producer and screenwriter of music videos, television series (HBO, Fox, CBS, Showtime, MTV), and feature films. Her work has been presented at film festivals worldwide.
Janesville pdf, Paperback, Hardcover Book Information
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster; First Edition (April 18, 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 368 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1501102230
- ISBN-13 : 978-1501102233
- Item Weight : 1.12 pounds
- Dimensions : 8.66 x 5.91 x 0.98 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #407,547 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #143 in Sociology of Rural Areas
- #186 in Labor & Industrial Economic Relations (Books)
- #496 in Sociology of Class
- Customer Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars 453 ratings
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