Janesville

by Amy Goldstein

  So the cash isn’t much, and the insurance won’t last long. But by the time the Lordstown transfer comes along, Jerad is feeling clever to have grasped for the last brass ring when he could.

   22

  Honor Cords

  The Dream Center is the Beloit auditorium in which Blackhawk Tech holds its graduations, and Barb Vaughn feels as if she’s pinch-me dreaming, seated in a black cap and gown amid rows of caps and gowns. Draped around her neck are a golden Phi Theta Kappa sash and honor cords, royal blue and gold, their tasseled ends dangling past her waist. Wisdom, aspiration, purity. The honor society at two-year colleges such as Blackhawk takes its name from the initial letters of the Greek words for these virtues. Barb is having trouble absorbing that the shame she lugged around since she was a sixteen-year-old dropout is gone, her ferocious studying and string of As having earned her a place in this virtue-named honor society and, within a few moments, an associate’s degree.

  Barb is not seated next to her friend Kristi. The 268 students, to be handed their diplomas in gold-trimmed black cases on this day, May 15, are organized by program. Within each one, they are seated alphabetically. So Kristi, wearing her own sash and honor cords, is near the front of the criminal justice degree earners and Barb is toward the rear. When the time arrives that Blackhawk’s president calls out, “Criminal Justice,” they rise in unison and move toward the steps that lead onto the right side of the curved stage. They share the same outsized pride, even though, in the end, Kristi edged out Barb, who hasn’t forgiven herself for the lone A-minus—in their juvenile law course—that sullies an otherwise perfect record.

  In their pride and their graduation regalia as they approach the stage, just under two years since they left the Lear Corp. factory floor, Barb and Kristi are part of what is notable about the Blackhawk graduating class of 2010. This year’s graduates include the first Great Recession refugees who turned to Blackhawk. Even before the throngs of laid-off autoworkers and laid-off other workers—including Barb’s husband, Mike—descended on the campus a year later, this first wave began to reshape the school. By the spring of Barb’s and Kristi’s first year, the little campus surrounded by cornfields had 850 more students than a year before—a 20 percent increase—most of them fresh out of factory jobs.

  So it is fitting that this morning’s commencement address is delivered by an American Dream story herself—a woman named Tiffaney Beverly-Malott, who lifted herself from the overnight shift in a jelly-making factory to the boardroom of a network-marketing firm. In the process, she became a millionaire selling cosmetics. She gives a lot of motivational speeches. When she takes center stage at the Dream Center, in an elegant cream-colored suit with ruffled lapels, she aims her words straight at this morning’s unlikeliest graduates, including Barb and Kristi, who had never expected that a recession would steal their factory jobs. “There were many reactions, I’m sure, to the dire circumstances facing the economy of this community,” she tells the graduates. “Many people complained, many people cried, many people gave up. Some waited for things to go back to the way they were. . . . But there were a vital few that decided to create a new future for themselves and this area. They decided to use the economic obstacles as an economic opportunity. Those people were all of you.”

  Blunt though she is, there is a piece of the story that the American-Dream-in-a-suit commencement speaker leaves unspoken. Many of the former factory workers who turned to Blackhawk veered off course before today. Of the laid-off workers who arrived at the college in the fall of 2008 with Barb and Kristi, nearly half left without finishing what they’d begun. Of the three hundred or so who, like Barb and Kristi, aimed for an associate’s degree—the highest degree that Blackhawk offers—just over one third will stick around to finish within a few years. And of the thirty-one laid-off workers who began to study criminal justice with Barb and Kristi? Just half are collecting diplomas today or will graduate next year.

  Such bumpy outcomes are not unusual at two-year colleges in general. In fact, at Blackhawk, more of this first wave of laid-off workers finished their studies than did their classmates who hadn’t lost a job. Still, the point unspoken in the Dream Center today is that, even when people desperate for a job try to retrain, as the Job Center has been encouraging, they don’t always succeed.

  Paul Ryan, now chairman of the House Budget Committee, and President Obama remain unlikely allies in cheerleading for out-of-work Americans to retrain for new jobs. Still, the people at Blackhawk know a grittier, ground-level truth: Retraining laid-off factory workers is not easy. Even at a little college like Blackhawk, which has been trying like hell.

  Sharon Kennedy, Blackhawk’s vice president of learning who arrived in town months before anyone knew that the assembly plant would close, believes in job retraining. She also believes in candor. In her scant spare time, she has begun to research a book on Midwestern assembly line workers who go back to school. Not long ago, she drove up to Madison to the Wisconsin state capitol, where she told lawmakers eager to build Wisconsin’s workforce the story of her baptism by fire and the frenzy of her staff as they raced to figure out how to help dazed, confused, out-of-a-job factory workers trying to transform themselves into students. Even that first year, the year that Barb and Kristi arrived, before the bigger crush, Sharon testified, they arrived in numbers “too overwhelming to do business as usual.”

  That is why Blackhawk added the eighty-eight extra class sessions; hired extra instructors such as Mike Doubleday; borrowed financial aid officers from other schools; and—when it ran out of classrooms—added courses at night and on Saturdays, along with a “Nighttime Is the Right Time” marketing campaign to attract students to these unpopular hours for sitting in class. It hired a mental health counselor for students and created stress-reduction sessions for instructors and administrators. And it wasn’t enough. Just before the fall semester of 2008, Sharon and the staff tried hard to foster a welcoming feel for laid-off workers who hadn’t been in school for a long time. Blackhawk had a community picnic for families, with games for kids and a chance for about-to-be students to talk with deans and instructors over hamburgers and hot dogs. At the picnic, staff members brought computers for anyone who wanted to register for classes on the spot. Sharon was startled at how few registered. “This,” she later told the legislators, “should have been our first clue as to a looming problem.”

  Because to Sharon and Blackhawk’s instructors, the most surprising fact about these arriving factory workers was how many of them didn’t know how to use a computer—didn’t even know how to turn one on. “We were caught totally off guard by the minimal skills most have, and they were caught off guard by the need to have these skills in order to be a student in today’s world,” Sharon testified. Blackhawk’s staff was nimble. They hustled to create a computer boot camp, and on short notice they created a Student Success course on how to study. Even so, some students dropped out as soon as they found out that their instructors would not accept course papers written out longhand.

  So, when Jerad Whiteaker left school after two weeks, his decision wasn’t unusual. By the time Matt Wopat left Blackhawk, nine weeks before this graduation day, to reclaim General Motors wages, he already had stayed in school longer than many who had started classes with him.

  For the men and women in caps and gowns on this cool, clear late morning, even the ones who aren’t wearing Phi Theta Kappa sashes and honor cords, the fact that they are walking across the Dream Center stage makes them standouts.

  By the time Barb and Kristi remove their regalia and head off together, with their husbands and Barb’s in-laws and Kristi’s mom, to celebrate graduation with a late lunch at Olive Garden, they are double standouts. They have just graduated with top grades. They are about to start good jobs.

  Back in December, as they were finishing their third semester, both added their names to a list of applicants for four openings at the Rock County Sheriff’s Department. Given all the people in town who still n
eed a job, the list was long—about one thousand names. The Sheriff’s Department invited four hundred of them to take an application test. Barb and Kristi were among them.

  The jobs are entry-level—correctional officers at the County Jail—but they pay $16.47 an hour. Nearly $6 an hour less than at Lear, it is better than most places in town offer these days. Plus, correctional officers are state employees, with solid health insurance and vacation time. And these jobs are in the criminal justice system—exactly where Barb and Kristi have been aiming in school. When their instructor, Kevin Purcell, got a call for background checks, he said he was impressed, not just by their grades, but also by how well they had done in their internships. Kristi’s internship was at the Beloit probation and parole office, Barb’s at a halfway house that worked mainly with sex offenders just out of federal prison.

  “You are nuts if you don’t hire them,” Kevin told the Sheriff’s Department.

  So Kristi will be starting her job at the jail in six days. Most of all, her mother, Linda, is thrilled that someone in their shared household will be getting a paycheck again. “Oh wow,” had been her mother’s first reaction when Kristi told her the job offer had arrived. “We will keep the house.”

  With her badge and her Sheriff’s Department khakis, Kristi will become an instant role model, an inspiration for Janesville’s out-of-work workers who can’t figure out how, in a still bad economy, they will get a new job. “Kristi Beyer Turns Hardship into Victories” is the front-page headline of the June 1 issue of the newsletter produced by CORD, the group formed by Bob Borremans at the Job Center to help prop up Janesville’s unemployed. In the article, Kevin, the criminal justice instructor, says that she was the best student he has taught in his ten years at Blackhawk. Kristi has “an incredible drive to succeed and true desire to learn. She has been an inspiration not only to her fellow students but to me as an instructor. She re-set the bar!”

  Less than two months from now, Barb’s job offer at the jail will come through, too. And Kristi will be profiled again, in the Janesville Gazette this time, by a reporter who meets up with her coming off a Sunday shift at the jail. “Every day that I put on this uniform, I’m more and more proud of it,” Kristi tells the reporter. “I’m doing what I set out to do. I’m helping keep the community safe.”

  For the staff of the Job Center in the abandoned Kmart, hungry for good-news stories to lighten the caseload still struggling to find work, these two best friends will be proof that the American faith in reinvention is still alive in Janesville. And Barb and Kristi will be filled with pride over their success, never imagining that their paths from here will not lead where they expect.

   23

  The Day the White House Comes to Town

  Over at the Rock County Job Center, Bob Borremans has scored a coup. Just before 9:30 a.m. on Friday, June 11, he is waiting in the Job Center’s broad lobby for a man named Edward B. Montgomery to arrive. Montgomery is an economist and, more particularly, he is executive director of the White House Council on Auto Communities and Workers.

  Bob has been maneuvering toward this visit for more than a year. It has not been easy.

  The eight hundred miles from Janesville to Washington often seems a long distance to Bob. Steering people toward jobs in a wrecked economy is not a simple matter, and he wishes he were more than a speck in a labyrinthine government apparatus that has too many rules about how to spend the federal money that flows into the Job Center. Bob is dogged, though, and he watches carefully for every new opportunity for help that pops up in the nation’s capital. So it did not escape his notice when President Obama, barely two months after he was sworn into office, gave a big speech about fighting for the 400,000 Americans who had lost jobs in the past year in the hemorrhaging auto industry.

  A lot of the speech was a justification for sending more money to General Motors, along with Chrysler, both of which had already started to collect their billions in emergency federal loans. The auto industry, he said, was “an emblem of the American spirit” and a “pillar of our economy that has held up the dreams of millions of our people,” so these companies deserved another shot of federal aid and a brief chance to restructure. As a sign of the changes at GM, the president announced, Rick Wagoner was stepping down as CEO right away. (The White House had pushed him out, though he was leaving with an estimated $23 million in pension and benefits.)

  For Bob, the attention-grabber—more than the extra billions for the companies or the push-out of the CEO—was Obama’s promise, late in the speech, aimed straight at “all those men and women who work in the auto industry or live in countless communities that depend on it.” The president pledged to give communities struck by “the storm that has hit our auto towns” as much caring attention as the government devotes to places wiped out by tornadoes or hurricanes. The specific form of this caring attention would be the new White House Council on Auto Communities and Workers and a new Labor Department office helping those places and people recover. To guide them both, the president said, Ed Montgomery was the man for the job. Montgomery had a successful career that toggled between government and academia, rising to become Labor’s deputy secretary during the Clinton administration and now a University of Maryland dean. In both worlds, his sensibility had been shaped by a Pittsburgh childhood as the steel mills were about to go to rust.

  Bob was not clear on what exactly Ed Montgomery was supposed to do inside the White House; rebuilding communities struck by the auto storm seemed more complicated than sending billions of dollars to the companies that had ended their jobs. His role seemed to involve new initiatives and busting through bureaucratic barriers among federal agencies. And Montgomery was planning “listening sessions” around the country.

  Right away, Bob knew that he must find a way to bring Montgomery to Rock County. Bureaucracy busting was a favorite theme of Bob’s. He couldn’t wait to get this new man in the White House focused on the specific fact that Janesville’s economy had sunk through the floor and was having trouble getting up.

  Bob presented the idea to CORD, the coalition he had built in Janesville’s classic good-government style to coordinate help for displaced workers. CORD’s members could see that this was, indeed, an urgent mission. Bob sent off letters to Janesville’s congressional delegation, including Paul Ryan’s staff, asking for help in arranging a visit. Preferably an all-day visit, because there was a lot to discuss with the White House’s auto communities man. And preferably by summer’s end, because, if the government could send relief to the hurting auto community that was Janesville, there was no time to waste.

  By the time that the executive director of the White House council gets to Janesville, he has toured twenty-six other auto communities in the past year. The all-day visit Bob envisioned has been trimmed to three and a half hours.

  Still, it is a thrill when Montgomery walks through the Job Center’s double glass doors, wearing pinstripes and accompanied by thirteen officials from eight federal agencies. Bob thanks him profusely for coming to Rock County and whisks him and the entourage on a tour of the warren of cubicles in the former Kmart. The staff is working, just as on any normal day on which the White House’s top Auto Communities man isn’t peering around, because what Bob wants Montgomery to see is how busy this Job Center is, with fifteen thousand visits a month, on average, because of all the services it provides and all the people who still need its help.

  After the tour and a quick press conference in the lobby, Bob escorts Montgomery and everyone else to a forum at the UAW Local 95 hall, a couple of blocks away. More than one hundred people are waiting there—Rock County’s leaders from every imaginable vantage point, including Mary Willmer, representing the Rock County 5.0 economic development campaign. Bob has invited the area’s congressional delegation to be present on this day, but the only member here in person, rather than having dispatched an aide, is a liberal Democrat from Madison. After working on the failed plant-rescue mission and voting for the auto bailou
t, Paul Ryan’s attention has been drifting away from his hometown’s needs. He has been amplifying his role as a voice of the right on federal fiscal policy, bashing government spending, bashing the national debt. This morning he is in Washington, a guest on a conservative talk radio show aired nationwide, hosted by a guy who dubs himself the “Voice of Tea Party Patriots.”

  Montgomery is seated at a small skirted table, along with Wisconsin’s labor secretary and the Democrat from Madison. On the wall behind them is a large black-and-white photo—a nighttime scene from the great 1936–37 sit-down strike. The picture was taken moments after Janesville GM’ers agreed to the clever plan that averted violence, and it shows men cheering as they poured out of the assembly plant.

  This is a listening tour, so Montgomery listens to laid-off workers who can’t for the life of them find a job. He listens to state legislators and union officers and economic development specialists who explain about the county’s soaring foreclosures and bankruptcy filings and public assistance cases, and its plummeting building permits because almost nobody is building a new home, and the crisis at the United Way of North Rock County, where General Motors used to account for almost 40 percent of the annual giving but isn’t giving anymore. Montgomery listens to a choreographed presentation of eleven creative, economy-enhancing ideas—flashes of the old can-do—that the Job Center and Blackhawk Tech and the local school systems and various community organizations would like to set in motion, if only the federal government could give enough money and freedom for spending it. These grant ideas add up to nearly $40 million for three years, on top of the job-training money and unemployment benefits the government already funnels into town. The most ambitious idea is called Workers4U. It is a $12 million plan, reprising an early federal manpower development strategy of the 1960s, to create five hundred jobs for Janesville’s laid-off workers by subsidizing their pay at first at companies willing to hire and train them. Some employers in town are still laying people off, but Bob thinks that others might be poised to grow—ones in innovative manufacturing techniques, health care, or food processing, for instance. A version of this very idea will, in fact, be part of the American Jobs Act that President Obama proposes sixteen months from now. But as of this day when the White House’s auto man is in town, neither federal job-training programs nor unemployment benefits allow money to be spent for this kind of on-the-job training.