What Mike Doubleday could not see in Matt was that, as he was puzzling out electrical theory with some of the guys in class, he also was worrying. Matt is a deliberate man, and deliberate men do not let their mortgage payments slip behind, but there it was. He and Darcy had lived near the edge of what General Motors’ $28 an hour could buy, as so many GM’ers did, paying $270 a month on their camper, trading in cars for newer models, even dipping into their 401(k) once in a while to take the girls on trips. So even though, as a GM’er, Matt was lucky to get his union SUB pay on top of his unemployment checks, and the federal government was covering his tuition and textbooks and gas mileage to campus and even the right clothes for climbing utility poles, it didn’t add up to anywhere near $28 an hour. The reality was that he and Darcy didn’t have much cushion, and his SUB pay was about to be cut in half, and his GM health benefits were going to run out.
He just needed, Matt told himself, to hang on until May. When he got his technical diploma, he could grab on to the kind of job that Mike had given up to become an instructor. But that’s where the rumors came in—the rumors getting louder that the linemen at the local utility company, Alliant Energy, whose average age was about fifty-five, might not be retiring, after all, so that jobs might not be opening up. And that is why, when another GM’er learning to climb utility poles mentioned to Matt that he’d heard that GM jobs were coming open in Indiana, Matt felt he needed to pay attention.
By this winter, hundreds of Janesville GM’ers have morphed into GM’ers working far from Janesville. Their UAW contract gave them these transfer rights. Nearly two hundred are working at a General Motors plant in Kansas City—so many that people in town now joke that Kansas City has become Janesville West. Almost 140 are at a plant in Arlington, Texas—Janesville South—which is still turning out the Tahoe SUVs that Janesville had made. So far, fifty-five have transferred to Janesville East—Fort Wayne, Indiana—to assemble Chevy Silverado trucks, which are so popular that the plant is adding a third shift and is sending job offers to sixty-seven more Janesville GM’ers, including Matt.
GM gypsies, these out-of-town Janesville GM’ers are called, because even the ones in Arlington, nearly one thousand miles away, have, for the most part, left their families behind and are commuting home as best they can. Matt has been firm that he was not going to become any gypsy. No way.
But he and Darcy don’t want to move, either. They have had long, soulful, repeated conversations on this subject. They were in agreement. Close as they are to both their families, how could they leave? Darcy going over to her father’s house, ever since her mother died, to pay his bills out of his GM pension and balance his checkbook. The girls on their sports teams in school. That was the whole reason Matt began doing homework at the kitchen table—to retool so that he can get a different job so that they can all stay together in town.
But that was before the mortgage payments started slipping behind, and his benefits were going to get cut, and the GM jobs opening up were in Fort Wayne, which, while four and a half hours away, is closer than Kansas City or Arlington. That is why, one day, Matt and a bunch of the GM’ers learning to climb utility poles with him decide that it is time to stay after class and ask their instructor, Mike, a tough, pointed question: If they stay in school to graduate, will linemen’s jobs be waiting for them or not?
Mike starts by laying out the benefits of electric power distribution. But the more he talks, the more he feels he needs to be a straight shooter with these guys who already have lost so much. The truth is, he has to admit, not many of his Blackhawk graduates got jobs last year. The outlook still isn’t great. Jobs exist in the utility field but not many of them in southern Wisconsin. He tells them they might end up in the Dakotas or Texas or somewhere in the Southwest.
Listening to this straight shooting, one thing the instructor says, in particular, burns into Matt’s mind: “If I were you guys and had an opportunity to get GM wages, I would run and not look back.”
That is when Matt understands that the option he’d rejected is the only choice he has left. He couldn’t even call it a choice, because he feels that it has all come down to either Fort Wayne or maybe even bankruptcy sometime soon, and responsible men don’t file for bankruptcy.
As his mind churns on this jam he is in, the strangest thing is that he can find absolutely no one to blame. Not the instructor who, poor guy, was just leveling with him. Or the government, dutifully paying for classes for a job he might never get. Not GM, shelling out for his benefits even as the company had gone bankrupt itself. Certainly not Darcy, trying her damnedest to find a job better than restocking her Hallmark displays a couple of days a week. Not even himself, because every time he has rethought the exceedingly hard question of whether he missed a clue, whether he overlooked some narrow passageway that would have led him out of the maze, he came to the conclusion that he had not.
Nine weeks of classes to go before he is to get his diploma, Matt leaves school.
So now, in less than twenty-four hours, he will be working at a GM plant he’s never seen in a city he’s never visited. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do less, or anything he needed to do more.
He and Darcy and the girls have just finished Sunday lunch, and he’s stood in their warm, bright kitchen, insisting that it won’t be so bad. It will be just five days, Mondays cruising toward Fridays, he said as he hugged them all, and he’ll be back every weekend. And who knows, maybe, sometime soon, something decent in Janesville, something close to $28 an hour, will finally come along.
Now, sitting in the Sierra with his hand on the gear shift, it is time to pull out of the garage and head south to the Wisconsin border and on into Illinois, past the Belvidere Chrysler plant—not hiring, of course—and then east into Indiana all the way to Fort Wayne, where he will crash on the couch of another Janesville GM’er—another guy who quit learning to climb utility poles a couple of weeks ago—because Matt doesn’t have a clue where he’s going to live.
It is time. But he sits there five minutes. Ten. Just brooding, staring at nothing, the only sound the idle of the pickup in his garage. Matt still remembers a long-ago moment when he was younger than even Bria is now. Money was short because his father was drinking in those days before he became Employee Assistance rep, and he was riding around town in his dad’s rusted-out boat of a Cadillac, feeling as if he was in the only wreck in a new-car-proud town. A friend of his was on the sidewalk, and he’d been so embarrassed about the Caddy that, pretending to tie a shoelace, he’d ducked down.
It is so plain: He can’t let his kids feel that kind of money shame. Plan A, Plan B, or whatever plan it takes, he will at least be the man he’s always understood himself to be. Who would rather put himself out than his family. Who always keeps his word when he says he’ll do a job. Who understands that, in order to protect his family, he has to leave them.
He grips the steering wheel, shifts into reverse, and backs out of the garage and down the driveway.
21
Family Is More Important than GM
Spring has just returned to southern Wisconsin when Jerad Whiteaker grabs a buyout from General Motors like a brass ring. It isn’t much—about $4,000 and six more months of health insurance. At least it’s something.
As he signs the paperwork that seals the deal, Jerad trades away the possibility of another job within General Motors, somewhere, sometime, for the certainty of this small severance package right now. He is transforming himself from a GM’er who happens to be on an indefinite layoff into an ex-GM’er. Not much difference, it might seem. Except that, for Jerad, whose father and father-in-law put in their thirty years at the assembly plant and now live on their comfy pensions, he is signing away the future he has expected for himself.
The decision was not easy at first. He and Tammy talked over their choices, at moments when they hoped that the twins and Noah wouldn’t hear. None of the choices were any good. Of their need for the cash and the insurance there was no d
oubt. The early days of layoff life, when Jerad treated the curious absence of a job as a deserved vacation, seemed far in the past. Of all their bad choices, this one, at least, had the virtue of being in line with the basic understanding of his life that Jerad carries around: Family is more important than General Motors.
Family being more important than General Motors is the kind of mantra—terse yet sturdy—typical of Jerad, whose feelings for the people he loves are often cloaked in a taciturn nature. And so, when he says, “To me, family is everything,” the twins, Alyssa and Kayzia, understand what their dad is saying, even if he doesn’t come out and say it. They understand that their father has never quite gotten over the night of December 22, 1986, when he was sixteen, growing up in Footville and just a year older than they are now. His parents were finishing Christmas shopping, so he was the only one home to open the door to a police officer who was standing on the front steps. Jerad’s brother, Michael, had just been killed in a car crash. The car brakes, it would turn out, probably had failed as he was driving in a rural part of Janesville’s west side, so that he plowed through a stop sign and into another car. His girlfriend was with him; she was killed, too. Michael was twenty—Jerad’s big brother. His death left their parents with only one living child—and left Jerad with a gloom that arrives before every Christmas.
With his family-is-everything attitude, Jerad disliked his second year at the assembly plant. After having been hired into the paint shop, he was bumped to second shift, which started at 4:30 p.m. and ended at 2:30 a.m. He disliked not eating supper or spending evenings with Tammy and the twins, in the days before Noah was born, leaving him time with them mainly on weekends. He so hated being away from them that, after a year, he managed to switch to the plant’s medium-duty truck line, even though the work was harder on his body, because medium-duty had only one shift in those days and it was first shift, which meant that he could punch out at 3:48 p.m. and go home. A few years later, once the medium-duty assembly moved from Janesville to Flint, Michigan, Jerad had enough seniority that he could stay on first shift when he slid over to Tahoes.
These days, Jerad cannot imagine living the way his best friend, Kevin, now lives. Kevin took a transfer to GM’s Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas City, five hundred miles away. He has a family that he loves, too, and he drove the seven and a half hours each way, back and forth, every weekend until Fairfax started giving overtime, so that now he drives back and forth one weekend a month. No way to live, Jerad thinks.
When Jerad got his chance to transfer, like his friend Kevin and like Matt Wopat and hundreds of others, the idea didn’t seem worth thinking about. Tammy and the kids didn’t want to move. He wasn’t going anywhere without them. Besides, his own mother, Lucille, already felt too far from her only son and her only grandkids. Jerad’s father, Randy, had retired from the assembly plant on the day before his fiftieth birthday; after a while, they’d moved three hundred miles up north to a small town, Spooner, in an area speckled with pretty lakes. Even if Tammy and the kids wanted to go, which they didn’t, Jerad couldn’t pull his family further from his parents, his girls further from the grandmother they adore. Family is everything.
So late last summer, just around the time he slid down the wooden practice utility pole in his electric power distribution class, when Jerad got a job offer, he took it. It was his first offer since he’d begun looking, an offer when jobs weren’t coming along in Janesville. “The heck with school,” Jerad thought after the pole-sliding, chest-scraping, nerve-jangling incident. “I’m going to work.”
He was aware that this wouldn’t be a perfect solution. The job is at a local company called GOEX, which makes plastic sheeting and plastic rolls. The fact that his new job is in a factory making plastic, not automobiles, is not a problem. The problem is that the work comes in twelve-hour shifts, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., on a rotation that requires him to work every other weekend. While he is still living with his family in Janesville—and not in some apartment near a GM plant hundreds of miles from home—he can’t go to his kids’ events after school or, half the time, on a Saturday or a Sunday. For this family-disrupting work, Jerad is paid $12.48 an hour—less than half his old $28 GM wages.
With this skimpy new pay, trying to scratch together enough money to live on has become a family project. While raising three kids, Tammy has been working part-time from home, typing in data on a laptop for a company called Home Entry Services. The rules of her job say she can work up to six hours a day. It often turns out to be less. The work is piecework. She averages $10 an hour, but the amount of work is unpredictable week to week. And after volunteering and making a point of getting to know the principal, she finally got hired as a part-time teacher’s aide at the kids’ former elementary school.
Alyssa and Kayzia have begun to chip in, too, now that they are fifteen and go to Parker High. Wisconsin allows teenagers as young as fourteen to work three hours on school days and eight hours on weekends. Alyssa goes first, managing to get hired as a hostess at Texas Roadhouse on the north side of town for $2.33 an hour, plus her tip share. Kayzia starts as a cashier at minimum wage at Culver’s, home of the ButterBurger and frozen custard, and soon Alyssa switches to Culver’s, figuring that it’s easier for them to work at the same place, plus Culver’s is close enough to home that they can walk. They are saving for cell phones and used cars; no way their parents can help pay for these basic props of Janesville teenage life. But they listen carefully to the conversations their parents hope they can’t hear. Soon, without their parents asking, they begin to offer some of their small paychecks from serving up ButterBurgers and frozen custard to help cover their family’s bills, even if the phones will have to wait a little longer.
Because the truth is that a low-pay plastics job and piecework home data-entry plus part-time as a teacher’s aide are not enough for a family of five to live the normal, middle-class way that the Whiteakers have lived. When Jerad was laid off from GM, he and Tammy had about $5,000 in savings. After more than one and a half years of pulling out a bit at a time to keep up with the mortgage and the utility bills, the savings are gone.
They have cut back as much as they can. The $200 a week that Tammy used to spend on groceries is down to $200 a month, with more pasta and less meat. No more going out to eat. No more of their favorite weekend afternoons, with all of them piling into the car for a drive into the countryside, nowhere in particular. Wasting gas money on a country drive is now out of the question. No high school dances for Alyssa and Kayzia, unless they pay their own way.
Tammy and Jerad can see that their family is not the only one cutting back. Around town, “For Sale” signs have been cropping up on boats and campers and other grown-up toys that were trophies of middle-class lives. And as more houses have gone up for sale, Tammy and Jerad talk over whether to try to sell their raised ranch with its backyard pool and find something smaller to rent. They bought their house for $140,000 in 2004. Then, back in the days of Jerad’s GM wages and ten overtime hours most weeks at time-and-a-half, they took out a second loan to fix up the basement for the twins and Noah to have their bedrooms downstairs. They owe $160,000 on the house, which was fine when it was appraised at $161,000 in May 2008, a month before GM announced that the plant would become a goner. But it is no longer fine at all. Last they knew, the house was worth just $137,000—and that’s if anyone were buying houses in Janesville these days. Every time Tammy and Jerad talk about it, they end up in the same place: Trying to sell a house with a mortgage underwater in a crummy real estate market doesn’t make sense.
If they cannot sell their house, they can at least join the rush of people around town selling off belongings. Jerad and Tammy already have sold their snowmobile and two four-wheelers. Now Tammy gets rid of her Harley in a garage sale. But much as they need the cash, she draws a line: She will not sell the oak, glass-shelved curio cabinet that sits in the far corner of the living room, the curio that she always wanted as a girl and that Jerad bought for her when t
hey were first married—he twenty-two, she all of eighteen.
Curio or no curio, something has to give. The buyout begins to seem like a good deal. It is a good deal for General Motors, too, because, for the past five years, one tool the company has been using to try to straighten out its finances is to coax workers to leave—saving GM the expense of their benefits and pensions. In March 2006, a few months after the major cutbacks that unnerved yet spared Janesville, GM offered buyouts to 113,000 hourly workers. Nearly 35,000 took the offer, including about 900 from Janesville. In February 2008, the day before Obama arrived in town for his campaign speech at the plant, GM offered a “special attrition program” to all 74,000 of its remaining hourly workers. Nearly 19,000 took that buyout. If Jerad had taken the buyout then, he would have lost his benefits right away but received $140,000 in cash—$136,000 more than he is getting through the buyout he signs for now. If only he’d jumped sooner, but who knew the plant was going to close?
The buyout cash now won’t put him ahead. The few thousand dollars is about the same amount of money as the SUB pay that the UAW contract would have provided him anyway until later in the year. And the buyout means that he’ll never be eligible for a General Motors pension. Retirement benefits, though, would have been years away, and the clincher for taking the buyout is now. The clincher is the health insurance; for six more months, Jerad and Tammy will not need to buy health insurance through GOEX. Of all their bad options, the buyout seems best.
As it turns out, when Jerad signs the paperwork converting him into an ex-GM’er, he happens to be doing himself and his family a favor. General Motors may have been given nearly $50 billion in government loans for the bailout and the bankruptcy, yet it still is trying to shrink its workforce. In May, the company will give its remaining out-of-a-job Janesville GM’ers one more opportunity to transfer to a plant out of town—to Lordstown, Ohio, eight hours away. This transfer opportunity will be different from the one that Matt Wopat took when he began driving to Fort Wayne on Mondays and back home on Friday nights, or the ones that led hundreds of others to Arlington, Texas, or Kansas City, where Jerad’s best friend is working. This will be a forced transfer, allowed under the contract when laid-off workers have already turned down three transfer offers. Janesville’s remaining GM’ers will need to report to Lordstown. Otherwise, they will be severed from General Motors with nothing except a slim chance they might be rehired if the Janesville plant ever reopens.
Janesville Page 11