On Newshub Nation: Lisa Owen interviews Author and Journalist Amy Goldstein

Lisa Owen: What happens to a community when good work goes away? That’s the question Washington Post reporter Amy Goldstein set out to answer with her book Janesville: An American Story. The Wisconsin city was the home of America’s oldest General Motors assembly plant. That’s until it closed down in 2008. In a city of 63,000 people, it had directly employed almost 5000 of them. I spoke to Miss Goldstein ahead of her visit here for the upcoming Writers Festival and started by asking her if the plant’s closure had destroyed Janesville.

Amy Goldstein: Well, General Motors doesn’t destroy Janesville, but it certainly was a big economic blow. Janesville, Wisconsin was a city that had a long, proud industrial past. It had the oldest operating General Motors plant in the whole company, starting just after World War I until it closed down two days before Christmas of 2008. And thousands of people who had very good working-class jobs – wages of $28 an hour if they worked for General Motors – lost that work during this time, and this was the kind of blow that Janesville had never had before.
What did that do socially to the structure of the families, to the city itself?
Well, Janesville turns out to be a pretty resilient place. This was not a community that I knew when I decided I wanted to find a place to write about to illustrate close up what really happens to people and families and the texture of a community when good work goes away. But over the years that I spent getting to know Janesville, I found that people had very, very hard decisions to face. People made different kinds of choices. Some people recovered; some people had a harder time getting back up. The community itself, as I said, is very resilient. All kinds of local non-profits were trying to help people who were suddenly falling out of the middle class and kind of shell-shocked that that happened to them. But the town is still going.
The thing is – some people would argue that the demise of cities like Janesville is what handed Donald Trump the Presidency. Do you think that is too simple an explanation?
I think it is a little bit too facile an explanation. Janesville is an old union town, and it leans democratic in its voting. It’s the home town of Paul Ryan, who now is the speaker of the US House of Representative, and he’s obviously a Republican, Conservative guy who has been Janesville’s congressman since he was 28 years old – it’s 20 years by now. But the town itself has held onto its Democratic identity longer than its union jobs have lasted. So in the 2016 presidential election that brought Donald Trump into office – while Wisconsin as a state voted Republican, voted for Trump for the first time since the 1980s – Janesville itself voted narrowly for Hillary Clinton, the Democrat.
Do you think, though, it’s an example of what some people have called the evisceration of America’s working class – within this city, this town?
Well, I can tell you that the industry in this town has not recovered. It’s been nearly a decade. And while the unemployment rate has fallen dramatically from its height of over 13% in early 2009, just after thousands of these well-paid working class jobs vanished; while the unemployment rate has come down, industry has not come back, and wages are a lot lower. So, you know, people are making do, but they are not making do as well as they used to for the most part.
How prepared were they for other jobs when they were forced to look for other jobs?
One of the reasons I chose Janesville, among many reasons, was that it has a small technical college that let me look at job retraining, one of the things I was very interested in. You know, when working-class jobs, good jobs go away, what do people of the United States and what does the government recommend people do to recover? And training for a new job is a very popular idea. So I was really interested in how well this worked in Janesville.
And does it work well or not?
Well, I found that a lot of people went back to school; not all of them finished. And I did a little statistical analysis with some academics who helped me, looking at who had and had not gone back to retrain after they had lost work in this part of Wisconsin. And it turned out to be very sobering findings – that people who had not gone back to school actually did better than those who did.
We have a pretty well-known economist here in New Zealand who talks about a thing called ‘zombie towns’ – towns whose economic glory days are over. And he believes that basically some things can’t be saved. You should just turn out the lights on some towns and walk away. What are your thoughts, having spent a lot of time with these people from Janesville?
Well, I know that that is a school of thought and that may be true of some communities. I can also tell you that the people of Janesville would very much resent being told that they’re a zombie town. They have been trying incredibly hard in two ways – one, to try and rebuild their local economy, and secondly, there are a lot of home-grown non-profits that have done a lot of fundraising, especially when this job loss was so new, to provide various kinds of help for people whose livelihoods have just disappeared. So, Janesville has been really trying not to become a zombie town. Very, very recently, General Motors sold this huge tract of land on which the factory sat, and a new company is trying to clean it up environmentally and is hoping to redevelop it. What ultimately happens with that property is completely unknown. There’s no specific redevelopment plan yet, but people in Janesville are hoping that something will come along that will prevent them from becoming a zombie town.
Well, Janesville, as you mentioned, it’s the hometown of Paul Ryan, who is now the retiring Speaker of the House. Both he and President Obama, well, they talked quite a big game around resurrecting the auto industry in places like Janesville. Did they give people false hope, do you think?
Well, I think that one of the lessons that I learned by spending several years getting to know people in Janesville and looking at both the local and state and federal policies – both Democratic and Republican – in the United States that are meant to help communities when work goes away is that rebuilding a local economy is really hard to do. So President Obama, in fact, gave a very important economic speech right inside the Janesville assembly plant when he wasn’t yet President, when he was Senator Obama from Illinois running for President for the first time, trying to win the Wisconsin primary in the winter of 2008. And he said in this speech, in which he’s laying out his economic agenda for his campaign, ‘The promise of Janesville is the promise of America.’ And he said in this speech that if the country basically agreed with his economic policies and supported him, he said, ‘This plant is going to last for another hundred years.’ It closed that winter, that December.
Well, is President Trump continuing to give false hope to these kind of workers and these kinds of industries? He’s talking about making America great again; he’s introducing tariffs; he’s saying he’s going bring back jobs from Mexico. But can you actually go backwards? Do you need to look at going forwards?
Well, I think it’s too soon to know what the current administration’s policies are going to yield. President Trump has been in office for a year, he’s talking now about tariffs or not tariffs, and time will tell. I think it’s completely impossible that the Janesville assembly plant is going to reopen. It’s been sold. How other parts of the country fare is yet to be seen.
Some people here would argue that we could be on the cusp of a Janesville moment. Some of our regions rely on coal and gas businesses for their wealth. Now, our government is phasing out those industries over 20 to 30 years, maybe even longer. But knowing what you know, what advice would you give us?
Well, let me say first of all that I wrote this book so that it would be relevant to people who knew nothing about the US auto industry and nothing about Wisconsin or the American Midwest – new communities like Janesville that have suffered hard times or the older Rust Belt parts of the American Midwest – but really to show what happens when work goes away in any community in any part of the globe. So the kinds of things that people in Janesville went through, I think, are very relevant lessons for people in your country. So I’m delighted that I’m going to be coming to Auckland to talk about this book at a writers festival, because I think that it’s got, you know, broad meaning. You know, I think that for the communities of yours that are about to lose coal jobs or other kinds of coal jobs, people should be prepared that it takes a lot of resilience – both personally and at the community level – to figure out – as I came to think of it while doing this work – what kinds of choices people make when there are no good choices left, because eventually, people do have to figure out something. And it may not be the same level of income; it might not be the same kind of work. There are people in my story who took auto jobs within the General Motors firmament hundreds of miles away from Janesville in order to keep their family’s income up and commute just great distances every week or every month to keep their lives in Janesville, but they work somewhere they can keep their old General Motors pay. So there are lots of choices that could be made, but they’re all hard ones.
And you can see Amy Goldstein at the Auckland Writers Festival on May 18th.

Transcript provided by Able. www.able.co.nz

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