>> A first look tonight at Janesville and what happened to
the city and its people following the devastating
closure of the General Motors plant there in 2008.
The last Chevy Tahoe came off the line just before Christmas
that year, knocking 9,000 people at GM and other businesses out
of work.
Our next guest called it an economic earthquake in her new
book "Janesville: An American Story".
Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post journalist Amy
Goldstein tells the then and now story.
A story we all followed but not like this.
She joins us now.
Thank you for being here.
>> Glad to be with you.
>> The reason I say not like this is because this was
amazingly thorough reporting, putting it kind of all together.
Why did you want to go to Janesville?
>> I had this idea that you think back several years ago
after the great recession and the economy still wasn't very
good that people across the country knew the unemployment
numbers and there was all this discussion about the
government's policies and whether they were or were not
helping the country recover from this bad economic time.
But I thought people might not really understand what it feels
like to people and to a community to have the best of
its work go away and that's the story that I wanted to tell.
I chose Janesville because so many jobs went away.
I was also drawn to it because unlike a lot of places in the
Midwest that had industry, Janesville had never been part
of the Rust Belt.
I was interested in telling the story of what had happened out
of this bad economic time, not kind of an accumulation of
economic decay over the decades.
>> How would you describe current day Janesville eight
years later since GM closed.
Has it recovered from the earthquake?
>> I think it depends how you measure recovered.
If you look at unemployment numbers, unemployment had shot
up to over 13% in early 2009, a few months after all these jobs
vanished.
Now it is under 5%.
If you think of it in those terms, things are much better.
If you look at the jobs that people have and what they're
paying, it's not what it was.
At the time that the assembly plant closed in Janesville,
General Motors was paying the UAW workers $28 an hour.
It's hard to find working class jobs in Janesville today that
pay anything like that.
>> Meanwhile the "Janesville Gazette" editorialized this
week, describing the city's current economic prospects as
brighter than expected after the GM plant closed and they credit
today's anti-union environment.
Do you think it's true that the economic prospects of Janesville
exceeded expectations?
>> Certainly Janesville and Rock County are places that have been
trying very hard to recover economically.
There has been a county-wide coalition, Rock County 5.0 that
has been working since shortly after the announcement that
the plant was going the close to try to bring back jobs.
There are some things to point to.
Tangible things.
There is a startup called Shine Medical that has been for
several years now kind of working its way through a pretty
complicated federal approval process to try to begin
manufacturing a medical isotope in Janesville.
Now, that company, assuming that the manufacturing can begin, is
going to bring good jobs.
It is going to bring about 150 jobs.
If you think about the number of jobs, the thousands of jobs that
went away and how many will come when this new company if it gets
going actually starts, you can see it is not filling in much of
the gap.
>> You also describe in your book Janesville as kind of
divided.
The haves and the have less.
Is this kind of the local expression of the American story
as your title would suggest?
>> Well, my whole idea in doing this work was to write about a
place that could serve as a microcosm.
Not every community can stand in for every place in the United
States.
I didn't think that was what Janesville was.
But certainly over time, what had been a pretty cohesive
community has become a little more polarized.
That's true in many parts of the country as people's economic
experiences have diverged with the number of good working class
jobs shrinking a lot and there's been political division that has
heightened.
>> To me in all of this the most striking findings that you
describe have to do what usually seems to be the first response
to layoffs or joblessness and that is worker retraining.
I just want to cite some of the things you found.
You report that job training was not a path to more work
or better pay in and around Janesville.
That laid off workers who went to school were less likely to
have a job after they retrained than those who had not gone to
school and that most of those who retrained were not earning
any money at all.
How surprising was it to find these things out?
>> They certainly weren't what I expected.
You know, the whole question of what should people do when a job
they expected to have their whole life suddenly disappears,
and, you know, is there a road back to being in the middle
class?
These have been, as we say, very well-paying jobs.
It was a very interesting question to me.
I work with a couple of labor economists to take a look at a
group of people who were unemployed in southern Wisconsin
in and around Janesville who had and had not gone back to
Blackhawk Technical College, the main place that people went to
try to get job retraining.
And we looked statistically at what happened to people who went
back to school and people who didn't.
It is not that nobody retrained and benefited from it.
But as is true at community and technical colleges all around
the country, many people went back to school who didn't finish
their programs and even some of those who did found that at the
end of this hard work, there wasn't a job waiting for them or
not a job in their field.
So there was kind of a double whammy that people had lost a
job they thought they had identified a path forward, and
at least these data are from a few years ago now.
At least several years after all this work went away retraining
wasn't proving to be the panacea that sometimes people think it.
>> And meanwhile a lot of money was put toward that.
>> That's right.
Federal policies really encouraged people to retrain.
There was coming through the Rock County Job Center a lot of
federal aid for what is called dislocated workers to help
people go back to school.
And if you think about it, you know, imagine yourself having
been a factory worker in your 30s or 40s.
You haven't been a student for half your lifetime.
You didn't think you needed higher education to get a solid
job with a solid income.
You have lost your work.
You don't know what is going to come next.
You haven't necessarily been somebody who likes school very
much and there is all this economic trauma and then you are
expected to study on top of it.
It is a hard thing.
Let me just say that, you know, as I got to know the people at
Blackhawk Tech I was very impressed with the work they
were doing.
They tried very hard to figure out what factory workers coming
back to be students needed and to provide it.
So I don't think that these results were anything denoting
that the college hadn't been trying hard.
It's just that there weren't always jobs for people to come
out and get.
>> With just about a half minute left, if Janesville can make a
kind of recovery after the loss of GM, will the city ever forget
that part of its history, do you suppose?
>> You know, I think that General Motors was so essential
to the identity of Janesville for so many decades.
This was an assembly plant that started turning out tractors in
1919 and the first Chevy came off that assembly line in 1923.
That's a hard thing to forget.
>> All right. Amy Goldstein. Thanks very much.
>> Thank you.