Janesville

by Amy Goldstein

  What does a union man do when there are no workers left to represent? Mike began to talk to the International about a job in Detroit. But a real offer hadn’t come yet from headquarters, and the more Mike considered the possibility, the less he could imagine leaving Janesville. Why should he have to trade his roomy yard with the vegetable garden and the flowers and trees that he and Barb love to tend, with family and old friends around them—all to continue working for the union?

  Still, he couldn’t shrug off the allegiance. For months, he trolled unionjobs.com, scouring every listing on the site in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois. The problem was, he didn’t see a single job that would let him keep doing what he loved: representing workers. The openings were all for organizers. Mike had been on two UAW organizing drives, enough to know that he wasn’t cut out to knock on the doors of strangers, many of whom had been distinctly hostile once they found out why he was there, enough to have heard the stories of organizers who’d met unleashed dogs and brandished guns. And on top of the dogs and the guns, he couldn’t imagine being on the road three weeks of every month. It wasn’t a life for him.

  This discovery he made about himself—startling to his core—came along gradually, but there it was: Deep as his UAW heritage was, there were limits to what he was willing to do to keep standing on the union side.

  Nothing in his family’s past had prepared him for the choices he was confronting. The reality of life was that he and Barb were both out of work, two incomes gone—poof!—and he didn’t have a fix. As he struggled with what to do, he watched Barb in astonishment, her head deep into her schoolwork, turning crisis into opportunity.

  The more he thought about how to handle this moment without precedent, the more an idea coalesced inside him, faint at first, then growing into a solid belief. His union experience could be a foundation. A foundation for human resources work. As it happened, Blackhawk Tech was starting an HR program, with predictions of jobs at the end. It seemed right, this chance in front of him: the federal Trade Adjustment Act tuition money he’d fought for while still at Lear, a college degree, the prospect of work he felt suited to do, the ability to stay in town. He’d be crazy not to sign up.

  But the jobs weren’t union jobs. He’d be management.

  As he sat with this idea, he sensed himself making peace with it. On his own, he doesn’t feel like a bad man. Still, what would his father think?

  The moment there is no escaping comes the early August afternoon that his stepmom, Judy, invites the whole family over for his father’s sixty-first birthday. As Mike knew they would, he and his dad eventually head out to the screened porch together with their smokes, his hand-rolled, his father’s Marlboros. He takes a puff before he begins. Then, with the party going on without them, he turns to his father and says, “I’ve decided what I’m going to do.”

  He starts with the easy stuff. The stuff about going back to school in twenty days, and Blackhawk’s new program, and the government’s training money. About how, as the months have gone by, the pain of his fourth last day at Lear has grown milder, leaving inside him, even though he is nervous, a small seed of optimism about his future.

  Then he launches into the part that’s hard. About how he’s come to see that human resources management is a way to educate workers, too. About how he figures that, if he’s been doing it from the union side, how different can it be from the company side?

  As he is talking, he keeps a close watch on his father’s expression. Is that a flicker of sadness? Yes, it’s there. But if his dad’s long, grooved face betrays certain feelings, his words don’t say what Mike has feared the most: that Mike was going over to the dark side. No, the old union leader tells the young union leader he is proud of him for taking this opportunity to better himself. Then his father wraps him, the last generation of the union Vaughns, in a hug.

  Inside his father’s hug, hearing the words encouraging him to do the very best he can, Mike knows that his guilt will fade and that, scary as college is, he must embrace what lies ahead. His passion for labor, the special place of unions in his family history—nothing can take that away.

  But he must give himself the counsel that he gave to the men and women he represented on the days of walking the Lear aisles to say his goodbyes: that they must each formulate their own plan. The same advice that he remembers giving to Lear’s workers years before when the plant was migrating to linear assembly, and they would no longer be building seats in modules. Look for the truth of the situation, he remembers telling his union brothers and sisters back then, and embrace it.

  With his father’s arms still around him, he hears his own words once again: If you don’t change with the times, you’ll be left behind.

   15

  Blackhawk

  Training people out of unemployment is a big, popular idea. In fact, it may be the only economic idea on which Republicans such as Paul Ryan and Democrats such as President Obama agree, anchored, as it is, in an abiding cultural myth, going back to America’s founding, of this as a land that offers its people a chance at personal reinvention.

  The evidence is thin that job training in the United States is an effective way to lead laid-off workers back into solid employment. Still, there is a lack of political consensus that the government should invest in creating jobs, and there is very much a consensus that it should help displaced workers go back to school. Which is why the Rock County Job Center that Bob Borremans runs in the converted Kmart now finds itself on the receiving end of millions in federal job-training money.

  This spigot of federal money is impressive for a small community, even one that has just lost thousands of jobs, and it flows together from several streams. Bob relied on his old grants-writing skill to pull in nearly $1.8 million in a National Emergency Grant for communities whacked hard by job losses. The county is also receiving almost $1.1 million from an economic stimulus law that President Obama, now ending his first summer in the White House, has pushed through Congress. Both of these streams require Bob to devote more than $4 of every $5 to job training—$2.3 million in all. In addition, Rock County is getting roughly $1 million through a fund from the U.S. Labor Department’s Workforce Investment Act for training workers whose jobs are unlikely to come back. Plus, though it isn’t handled by the Job Center, Trade Adjustment Act training benefits—the help for workers hurt by foreign competition that Mike Vaughn fought to get for his Lear union brothers and sisters—is providing these laid-off workers more than $900,000 this year to pay for tuition and schoolbooks and gas to commute to classes.

  Counselors at the Job Center, who meet with Janesville’s out-of-a-job factory workers, talk up the fact that retraining opportunities are affordable even for people whose paychecks have disappeared. This has been a mantra since the beginning, when the GM’ers and Lear employees and all the rest first showed up to register for unemployment benefits and scout out what other help might be available. But it has taken months for some—more than a year for others—for the reality to sink in that replacing one job with another is not easy around Janesville, and learning a new skill might be a good idea.

  So, on the last Monday in August, the first day of the fall semester at Blackhawk Technical College, Janesville’s displaced, not-finding-jobs, don’t-know-where-else-to-turn factory workers descend in such numbers that they fill every space in the sprawling parking lot and leave their cars on the lawn and on the shoulders edging the cornfields along South County Road G.

  A year ago, Barb Vaughn and Kristi Beyer were part of an early trickle of laid-off workers who ventured back to school. Now, when Barb’s husband, Mike, arrives for his first day of classes, he is startled to find himself in a mob scene. In this mob scene, too, is Matt Wopat, the GM’er whose father, Marv, persuaded the Rock County board to quadruple its contribution to the now failed plant rescue crusade. So is Jerad Whiteaker, the GM’er who at first stumped his twin daughters by showing up at breakfast. Their trajectories at Blackhawk will diverge, but on this fi
rst day, all three are frightened and overwhelmed.

  Blackhawk Tech is named for a famed Sauk Native American warrior who in the 1830s unsuccessfully fought against nearby white settlement in what came to be known as the Black Hawk War. The school that bears his name is part of a century-old network of technical colleges in Wisconsin. In 1911, they became the first system of state-supported trade schools in the United States, created to transform farm boys into labor for the early twentieth century’s industrial boom. Today, these two-year schools are like community colleges, except that they focus only on instilling skills that come in handy for jobs, preparing their students to work as welders, computer specialists, medical lab technicians, or—as Barb and Kristi are studying to become—employees of the criminal justice system. Of the sixteen colleges, Blackhawk has been among the smallest. But on this first morning, August 24, the campus is being slammed with the largest surge of students in the technical college’s history—a 54 percent increase.

  Coping with this surge falls to Sharon Kennedy, who has the august title of vice president of learning, which means that she is Blackhawk’s chief academic officer and second-in-command. Sharon is in her early sixties, with a blond bob, a wide smile, a law degree, and steely smarts. She was a seasoned college administrator when she arrived at Blackhawk shortly before anyone in town found out that General Motors was going to shut the assembly plant.

  During the past few months, she has watched with amazement and alarm as the roster of new students signing up for the fall semester climbed, and climbed more. Even before the roster turns into the overflowing parking lot and the mob getting lost looking for their classrooms on this first day, Sharon anticipated that transforming factory workers into successful college students would not be easy. Unlike at some two-year colleges, where older unemployed students are treated as afterthoughts, she recognized that, for Blackhawk and for Janesville, the city’s out-of-work workers were now mission number one. Since the spring, Sharon and others decided to create programs in fields that seem most likely to produce jobs sometime soon. During the weeks before this first, crowded day of fall semester, Blackhawk added an astounding eighty-eight new class sections. And in a remarkable accomplishment, Sharon was part of a team that persuaded one of Wisconsin’s Democratic U.S. senators, Herb Kohl, to push for money back in Washington that he somehow managed to insert as an earmark into the federal budget: $1 million for each of two years, all for Blackhawk to lavish extra effort on trying to transform some laid-off autoworkers who aren’t really ready for college into competent students and, eventually, workers of other kinds. This money won’t become available until the winter, but Sharon is relieved that it is coming.

  An associate’s degree in human resources management, the path that Mike Vaughn is pursuing, is one of the new programs created on the premise that it will lead to jobs. Compared to most arriving students, Mike is unusual, because he is starting out with a firm direction, having gone through the reasoning that led him to decide on his own that HR would be a logical sequel to his union roots. Yet as he enters his first class this morning—psychology—Mike is worried. Does he really know how to study? Can he write a research paper? Will he be able to learn to use Word on a computer? Hovering in the background are larger questions. Now that he and Barb are both in school, will they lose their house? Will it all lead to jobs for them in the end?

  Such questions are also worrying Matt Wopat. Matt is more typical of today’s crush of new students, having picked something to study, not out of passion or even moderate curiosity, but because it seemed as likely a path as any back to a decent wage.

  Diligent as always, Matt went to the Job Center last summer, as all GM’ers were being encouraged to do, weeks before he cleaned out his locker at the end of his final shift. He went to the Job Center even though he shared his father, Marv’s, faith that the plant would come back. He went, in other words, just in case.

  Matt took a test called JobFit that gauged his learning style (visual/verbal, it turned out), his numerical skill (rapid grasp of numerical information), and his sociability (comfortable working with a group or individually). Matt was then issued a “Career Compatibility Passport,” which told him that he would be equally adept as a database developer, a podiatrist, or a registered nurse—his best fits out of a list of fifty occupations for which he was well suited, with horticulturist and software engineer not far behind.

  Next to a box indicating that he was being recommended for a training program, a Job Center caseworker handwrote about Matt: “Currently undecided.”

  He truly was undecided. Matt’s unemployment checks and union Supplemental Unemployment Benefits would pump out 72 percent of his GM wages for a while longer. And even when he had still been at GM, he’d had a buddy with a small roofing crew, and he would make extra money once in a while working on roofs before his shift or on a weekend. So he expected that he’d get more roofs, but neither his buddy nor a cousin with another roofing crew were getting many jobs with so few people wanting to spend money these days on their roofs. Matt was getting just a couple of roofs to work on a month.

  He tried to take it easy, figuring that he might as well, before the plant opened back up. He did yardwork. And that first fall, he took drives out to some public land west of town when pheasant hunting season opened in October and deer hunting the next month. He liked being outside, walking in nature. He enjoyed teaching his chocolate Lab, Cooper, to be a hunting dog. It was peaceful. But he noticed himself worrying about what he was shelling out for gas. Could he really afford the $10 to $15 each time he went hunting?

  Once hunting was over for the year, Matt began to think about whether he could convert “Currently undecided” into a decision. He wasn’t focused so much on what his Career Compatibility Passport had told him. He focused on what he could study that would, in the end, pay nearly as well as GM and be certain to have a job waiting for him. The common wisdom was that good jobs would be opening up at Alliant Energy, because it had older workers getting ready to retire.

  This is what led Matt to the idea that learning to climb utility poles at Blackhawk’s electric power distribution program was his best bet. The prospect of working with electricity scared him. Maybe he could work for a cable company. Maybe GM would reopen and he could go back where he belonged. Worst case, it would just be a year in school for a technical diploma, not two years for a degree. It was a Plan B, after all. Just in case.

  Except that Plan B wasn’t so easy to set in motion. So many other out-of-a-job factory workers were hearing that good positions would open soon at Alliant that, when Matt tried to sign up at Blackhawk, the electric power distribution program was full and the waiting list long. By now, Matt was serious about his Plan B, just in case. He was noticing that, month by month, with Darcy working less than half-time, restocking Hallmark cards for just above minimum wage, and Brittany, Brooke, and Bria needing stuff, their bank account was starting to drop in a way that was not good at all. He looked into the electric power distribution program at a technical college in Milwaukee, nearly one and a half hours away. He was about to start school in Milwaukee when a spot at Blackhawk opened up.

  On this first day of classes, Jerad Whiteaker is starting to learn about electric power distribution, too. He has run through the same calculations as Matt. Health benefits ending before long. The assembly plant not yet reopening. The Job Center pushing all its training money. After a while, it became clear to Jerad that sleeping in and treating his layoff as a vacation he deserved was not a realistic strategy.

  Like Matt, Jerad is a year shy of his fortieth birthday, and the last time he was in school was half a lifetime ago, when he went to Blackhawk for a year right out of high school to learn to be a diesel mechanic. He finished the program, but a diesel mechanic’s job never came along, and that was before Janesville was in a nasty recession with thousands tossed out of work. Fearful though he is, Jerad is also glad to have gotten off the waiting list.

  Jerad and Matt are in
the same program but on different class schedules. Soon, Matt settles into a routine. He brings to campus habits from his years as a GM’er, like many of the fish-out-of-water autoworkers at Blackhawk. They get to school early and shoot the breeze with the guys, as they did at their jobs. They bring to class the same work thermoses they brought to their jobs.

  Jerad starts out fine, too. He enjoys going outside behind the classroom building on a nice late-summer day with the instructor, Mike Doubleday, a Blackhawk graduate himself and journeyman lineman until he was hired to help with the waiting list. The instructor divides the eighteen students into groups and assigns each group to work together to create a hole twelve inches across and six feet into the ground. No problem.

  On another day soon, a practice utility pole is set into the hole, and each student must take a turn climbing it. When Jerad’s turn comes, he gets five feet up when a knee gives out. He slides to the ground, the rough wooden surface scraping his chest all the way down as he clings to the pole.

  By the time he hits the ground, terrified, his skin raw, Jerad considers the fact that this was just a practice pole. What would have happened if he were on a real pole, thirty feet in the air, when he lost his footing and fell? How much good would he be for Tammy and the kids then? Besides, rumors are circulating that the good jobs at Alliant Energy, the jobs that are supposed to be waiting at the end of his year in school, may not be opening so fast. Instead of retiring, he is starting to hear, the older guys are hanging on to their jobs because, in this economy, their 401(k)’s are a shrunken mess. What will happen if he can’t get a job at the end?