Janesville

by Amy Goldstein

  During his wrap-up, Bob begins in Janesville’s old-time, can-do way, telling Montgomery: “At no time do I feel that anyone in this room has felt defeated or unwilling to step forward to try and make a difference.” Then Bob’s words turn darker, more pointed. “At times,” he admits, “we have felt overwhelmed by the challenges. We have felt isolated and overlooked. We have been frustrated by government regulations and bogged down by the rules and red tape.

  “The one thing we are asking for most,” he tells Montgomery, “is recognition that best solutions to local problems come from the creativity and ingenuity of communities.”

  It is now early afternoon and, in a few minutes, Montgomery and the entourage are heading east to Kenosha, because Kenosha is becoming a hurting auto community, too, with a Chrysler engine plant due to close in the fall. Before he leaves, Montgomery does not promise money but he promises prompt help in reviewing Janesville’s ideas, in nudging them forward. He uses the word “partnership” a lot. His is a message of hope and pragmatism, a message he has been bestowing on every hurting auto community to which he has listened. Communities can rebuild, he says, but that rebuilding will happen one brick at a time.

  The brick-by-brick metaphor is one that Montgomery has used often in this job. But as it happens, he will not stand with Janesville to help piece together the bricks. On the day before he is in town, Georgetown University, two miles west of the White House, has announced that Montgomery will become the university’s next public policy dean. Janesville and Kenosha, it turns out, are his last listening sessions before he leaves the Obama administration in a couple of weeks.

  Three days after Montgomery’s visit, President Obama says that his administration will “move quickly to find a replacement.” Another year will go by before the job is filled. By the time it is given to the mayor of Youngstown, Ohio, the White House will have disbanded the council that Montgomery led, with its leverage to coordinate among federal agencies, to bust through their bureaucracy. The new guy in charge of helping auto communities and workers will not report to the president. He will be inside the Labor Department.

  During the year that the job lies vacant, the federal Government Accountability Office will issue a harsh critique of the White House’s Auto Communities council and the Labor Department’s recovery office. The report will conclude that they were useful as listening posts—but that no one kept track of whether any hurting auto communities got extra federal assistance as a result.

  And Bob? After working so hard to arrange the visit, he soon feels exasperated. Montgomery had a goal of ensuring that each stop on his listening tour got some help from the government. For Janesville, though, it turns out that the supposed red tape cutters have no scissors. As Montgomery is leaving the government, a young man who works in the Labor Department is instructed to add Rock County to the communities for which he is to serve as a liaison. Bob presents this young man with the eleven grant ideas to which Montgomery listened at the UAW union hall. Bob asks for advice on which federal agency would be the best place to pursue each idea, expecting that the liaison can be an advocate and a conduit, shepherding these ideas to the right places to help open fresh spigots of federal money. Except no advice arrives. No money flows.

  After a year or so, Bob and the liaison stop chatting altogether.

   24

  Labor Fest 2010

  On the first Sunday of September, a clear day in the mid-70s for the middle of Labor Day weekend, Main Street is holiday-quiet. Tomorrow, crowds will fill the sidewalks, as they always do, for the 1 p.m. parade. But today, the action is on the south side of town, at the Walter P. Reuther Memorial Hall, the headquarters of UAW Local 95. This is the union hall that Mike Vaughn’s grandfather helped to plan, that the White House’s Auto Communities man visited three months ago. It has been on this spot since 1971 and is named for one of America’s most influential labor leaders—the autoworkers’ president for nearly twenty-five years in the mid-twentieth century. It is a low-slung structure of sand-colored brick, surrounded by broad, grassy grounds that, on this weekend, are studded with tents and stages and a beer garden for Labor Fest.

  Janesville always has made a big thing of Labor Day, magnifying it into a three-day celebration of the well-performed work and well-mannered labor relations in which the community has long taken pride. Labor Fest is sponsored by several unions in town, not just the UAW, and some business, too. But the UAW grounds are always the site of the festivities: live music, mud volleyball for teens, clowns, a rock-climbing wall, a puppet show, and, of course, in a town that produced cars for eight and a half decades, an auto show.

  This year, there is something extra. It comes late in the afternoon, during the spot in the festival’s schedule between a break-dancing troupe and a Madison show band called Little Vito and the Torpedoes. Surrounding the main Labor Fest stage, hundreds of men and women are holding up orange signs that match the slogan they are chanting. JOBS NOW!

  Jobs are becoming political. Unemployment, hovering in Janesville around 11 percent over the summer, is stoking anger. The chanters are workers and out of work. In the middle of the crowd is Marv Wopat. It has been two years since Marv retired and began to draw his GM pension. Still, he has come out as an act of solidarity and to hear the speeches.

  This “Jobs Now!” rally is a regional warm-up for a One Nation Working Together rally in Washington next month that will spill down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and onto the National Mall. The Midwest Territory of the Machinists Union came up with the idea of this warm-up and, together with the Wisconsin AFL-CIO and the Rock County Labor Council, organized this show of labor’s force—its vestigial force, really, in a state in which only one of seven workers still belongs to a union, in a nation in which only one in eight workers still belongs. The machinists could have picked anywhere in the Midwest for “Jobs Now!” They picked Janesville because it has become a poster child for the need for more jobs.

  Marv listens as most of the Democratic candidates in the area take turns on the Labor Fest stage, along with a slew of union officials. When it is his turn, Milwaukee’s mayor, Tom Barrett, has pulled a black T-shirt with the machinists’ logo over his checkered, button-down shirt. Barrett is running for governor, because Wisconsin’s present governor, Jim Doyle, who tried to bring the assembly plant back to life, is not seeking a third term. The days are gone, Barrett says from the stage, when all it took to make a decent living were “a good back and a good alarm clock.” Fighting for good jobs, he pledges, will be his top priority in Madison.

  The next afternoon, a Monday of brilliant September sunshine, unions and jobs are on President Obama’s mind, too. Since his campaign speech inside the assembly plant, he hasn’t returned to town. But he is back in Wisconsin, speaking at another Labor Fest, seventy-five miles northwest of Janesville, on Milwaukee’s lakefront. The president’s shirtsleeves are rolled up by the time he walks out onto the Henry Maier Festival Park stage and unfurls a $50 billion job-creating plan to refurbish the nation’s roads, rails, and runways. He wraps the plan in a hymn to the labor movement, his voice on a crescendo as he recites, one by one, the improvements in working conditions that unions fought for and won across the span of the twentieth century. He is nearly shouting, his arms pumping, and the sunshine-bathed crowd clapping as he arrives where this recitation has been leading. “The cornerstones of middle-class security,” he shouts, “all bear the union label.” From here, Obama presses into his political point: In tough times, his administration has stood by America’s workers. And the workers he invokes as evidence of his administration’s solidarity are the nation’s autoworkers.

  “Today that industry is on the way back,” the president says. “We said yes to the American worker. They’re coming back!”

  As the president is speaking, the Labor Fest parade is coming along Milwaukee Street and turning right onto Main Street in Janesville, where no auto jobs have come back at all. Since this is an election year, political candidate
s are out marching in full force. In his trademark Kelly green polo shirt, with his wife and blond kids in tow, Paul Ryan is a familiar figure, running for a seventh term as his hometown’s congressman.

  Less familiar is another dark-haired Republican, his navy blue polo matching the campaign signs that a retinue of supporters is carrying behind him. This is Scott Walker, who is trying to win the primary, eight days from today, to become the GOP candidate for governor. If Paul’s conservatism, his distaste for Obama’s ideas, is cloaked back home in Janesville in a genial demeanor, Scott Walker is emerging as a firebrand. His campaign issues a statement today that derides, with stinging rhetoric, what the president is saying in Milwaukee: “Obama’s spend-o-rama stimulus-fueled $810 million boondoggle train . . . It seems like every time the president opens his mouth, he spends another $50 billion of our money to ‘create jobs’ but instead we continue to see spiraling unemployment.”

  Walker is the Milwaukee county executive, but he grew up in Delavan, a small town just east of Janesville. He tells a Gazette reporter today that, when he was a teenager, he and his friends liked to hang out at the Janesville Mall and eat at the Shakey’s Pizza that stood just off Milton Avenue for three and a half decades. The Shakey’s closed in February 2008, three days before Obama’s campaign speech at the assembly plant.

  Walker has not yet won the primary. Yet already he tells the Gazette that he has a plan to deal with Wisconsin’s budget deficit: eliminate state jobs that are now vacant, and require public employees to pay in toward their future pensions, as private sector workers lucky enough to have pensions often do.

  In this gathering political storm, on this sunniest of days along Main Street, another figure marches in the parade, too. He is wearing a white polo shirt and khakis, a baseball cap over his gray hair. And he is being trailed by two guys holding up each side of a large campaign sign whose slogan is devoid of pizzazz: “Tim Cullen. Effective for Us.”

  Tim is trying to recapture the State Senate seat that he first won three dozen years ago and that he relinquished twenty-four years ago. The crusade he led to rescue the assembly plant, though unable to outmaneuver the big money of Michigan, has renewed his faith in something else. In the possibility of coalitions. Political right and left, public sector and private, all striving toward a common goal. If he returns to the State Senate, Tim has been saying lately, his seasoned, moderate voice can help forge the kind of bipartisan trust that helps to bring jobs. On this Labor Day, Tim is hopeful again.

   25

  Project 16:49

  In the shadows of town, hundreds of teenagers are becoming victims of a domino effect. These are kids whose parents used to scrape by on jobs at Burger King or Target or the Gas Mart. Now their parents are competing with the unemployed autoworkers who used to look down on these jobs but now are grasping at any job they can find. So, as middle-class families have been tumbling downhill, working-class families have been tumbling into poverty. And as this down-into-poverty domino effect happens, some parents are turning to drinking or drugs. Some are leaving their kids behind while they go looking for work out of town. Some are just unable to keep up the rent. So with a parent or on their own, a growing crop of teenagers is surfing the couches at friends’ and relatives’ places—or spending nights in out-of-the-way spots in cars or on the street.

  The idea of homeless kids in Janesville is disquieting. It is so out of kilter with the community’s self-image that most people prefer to pretend that the problem of hard-luck teenagers does not exist. But this being Janesville, with its tradition of constructive civic response to adversity, some well-meaning people in town and in Beloit formed a Homeless Education Action Team. And the team thought up Project 16:49.

  The name comes from Beloit, where 16:49 is the number of hours and minutes between the end of one school day and the start of the next. The point is that these hours and minutes can feel like an eternity to kids without a safe, steady place to do homework, eat supper, or go to sleep. Sixteen Forty-Nine is also the name of a documentary that has just been finished by an aspiring local filmmaker. It is a work of art and advocacy. Its purpose is to smash through the community’s denial about the homeless kids in their midst. And on a Thursday evening in mid-September, the documentary is having its premiere.

  An hour before showtime, a tall blond woman, one of the main people behind Project 16:49, is standing in the empty U-Rock lecture hall, where the premiere is being held. She is a social worker named Ann Forbeck, and, as the Janesville school system’s homeless student liaison, her mission is to help these kids try to keep their lives hinged together enough, at least, that they do not become dropouts as well as homeless.

  Ann is good at dealing with the unexpected, at staying cool, at juggling—necessary skills in her job and her life. At home, she has eight-year-old quadruplets, plus a son in middle school. Still, she works day and night, helping her brood of homeless teenagers with small crises, such as losing bus tokens to get to school, and larger crises, such as having been kicked out by a relative who was letting them stay for a while. Ann can work these crazy hours because her husband creates novels and videogames, so he is a work-at-home dad, making it possible for her to spring into action on behalf of kids who aren’t lucky enough to have a social worker and a writer as parents to provide them a stable, loving home.

  Though she feels as if she is always in motion, helping as many kids as she can, as much as she can, Ann can see that the problem is getting worse. The school system has more than four hundred homeless kids this year, many more than before GM closed. The hardest cases are the “unaccompanied youth,” the government’s polite term for homeless kids trying to fend somehow for themselves. Ann feels awful every time she gets a call from a panicky teacher, asking whether she knows of a place where one of these solo teens can stay for a while. The truth is that Ann never does, because the adult shelters in Janesville are pretty full and, even if they weren’t, they do not accept teenagers on their own. And no foster care in Rock County will accept a kid older than fifteen. That is why the Homeless Education Action Team has created a goal of opening two emergency shelters for teenagers. A shelter for girls and one for boys. Safe havens.

  The team’s goal is to open these shelters a year from now, which means that Project 16:49 is a Herculean test of Janesville’s spirit. Ann, together with another social worker for homeless kids in Beloit’s schools, have scoured for grants for homeless shelters for kids and reached the conclusion that government grants for this purpose do not exist. So they need to raise $700,000 to create the shelters and $210,000 a year to keep them running.

  They are social workers, not fundraisers, but they really want this, so they are hoping that the new, denial-busting documentary will be so upsetting to people in town—especially to people who have not lost jobs themselves and are doing okay—that they will be motivated to commit acts of generosity. Which is why, an hour from the premiere of Sixteen Forty-Nine, Ann is feeling nothing like her normal calm under pressure. She is a nervous wreck. She is uncertain how many people will come, or how the people who come will react.

  When the time comes to turn off the lights, Ann is amazed. Every one of the one hundred seats is filled. People are sitting in the aisles. They are squeezed, standing, along the back wall. There must be two hundred people crammed into this lecture hall.

  In the front row, three people are younger than the rest. Kayla Brown, Cory Winters, and Brandon Lucian are Rock County teenagers who are homeless and the documentary’s stars.

  Once the room is dark and the film is rolling in public for the first time, there is Kayla on-screen, standing against a school hallway’s cinder block wall, telling about being kicked out by her mother on her eighteenth birthday. And Cory, who has been couch surfing for most of his teenaged years, looking into the camera and saying, “You feel like you are by yourself, that you are a weirdo, not human.” And Brandon explaining that since his out-of-work father committed an act of violence against his stepmom, w
ho was supporting them, he’s been on his own, just trying to get by.

  Ann appears on screen, too, explaining about the teachers’ calls and having to tell them each time that she doesn’t have anywhere to put kids in an emergency. Ann is talking about trying to create temporary “safe homes.” And then the Beloit social worker, Robin Stuht, is on-screen, too, saying that, without emergency shelter for these kids, “I’m constantly in fear of losing them.”

  The film is nearly over, when Brandon appears on-screen one last time, saying that he has talked recently to his mother, who has told him that she is happy that he will be done with high school soon, but, no, she isn’t coming to see him graduate.