This must have been a difficult book to write. Goldstein almost succeeds in giving us a 360⚬ view of the deindustrialization of one Wisconsin city—Janesville, Paul Ryan’s home town—but the effect is oddly muted. In trying to describe the city’s fortunes in a strictly nonpartisan way, she unfortunately emasculates the place. Her view, while it lives and breathes through the portraits of workers she introduces, does not explain.
The only reason I know that Goldstein’s street-level stories do not explain anything is that I have been curious about, and following, District #1 in Wisconsin for some years now myself, and I came away with a different view of why the queerly upbeat Paul Ryan feels “the stress of DC literally just rolls off me as I…come into town.” If he has his eyes open, he’s lying. Janesville is the most economically depressed small city I have seen in years.
Ryan’s townspeople can’t stand him and have been trying to vote him out of office since 2010. But they can’t manage it because of something Goldstein did not mention: the severe GOP-inspired gerrymander that has turned a blue state red. There is also lots of outside money pouring in to support GOP candidates, which Goldstein did point to when Governor Scott Walker faced recall in 2012 but managed to stay in office.
Goldstein gives valuable background information for the period 2008-2013, but by itself, her work is insufficient to explain Wisconsin’s and the mid-west deindustrialization in general. The reasons for that, I’m afraid, are much more macro and has quite a lot to do with global trends, trade policies, Wall Street, and the “haves” who are anxious to preserve their financial advantages rather than help the generalized “worker class” prepare for a different world.
The GM assembly plant based in Janesville opened in 1919 and had some 7,000 workers at its peak in the 1970s. When it closed its doors in 2008, it was down to some 1,200 regular workers. Auto manufacturers had unionized labor. Unionized wages were higher than non-unionized wages. The book made several points learned only after a couple of years of study:
✦ People working in the plant had middle-class lives they did not want to give up, naturally, when the plant closed. Several buyouts were offered. Those that took the earliest buyouts had better financial outcomes than those who waited hoping the plant would gear back up.
✦ Newly unemployed people who attended Blackhawk Technical School retraining sessions and who graduated with an associates’ degree made less money, on average, than those who did not retrain and found work elsewhere. (Those who retrained made 1/3 less than before; not-retrained made 8% less than before.)
✦ Families came under severe stress, and many broke up, in some cases abandoning school-age children who then became homeless, sleeping on friend's couches. This disregarded population of floaters is not only extremely vulnerable now, but will likely experience trouble adjusting in the future as well.
✦ An online virtual academy for high school students in Janesville, called Arise Virtual Academy, exempted its students from Wisconsin limits on how many hours teenagers are allowed to work, providing an youthful source of--virtually--slave labor for local business behemoths. Teenagers could therefore help their families survive, while straining their own chances to thrive.
✦ Some former GM workers became ‘gypsies,’ working at GM plants in nearby states while their families stayed in Janesville, many because their homes were difficult to sell since the market had dropped.
It is unlikely that a city or town doing well economically would have had so prescient a leader who could have helped the community prepare one’s mindset from receiving a weekly wage to something quite different. After all, why rock the boat? Very few small cities have corporations providing almost the entire income base, but if they did, congressional representatives probably counted their lucky stars rather than worry about the future.
Goldstein does talk a little about Governor Scott Walker's assault on teachers and the teachers' union in 2011, the very people who would be able to help a population come to grips with a changing world. It is difficult to come to any conclusion but that the conservatives in state government think sticks are more effective than carrots when it comes to modifying behaviors. Bad daddy politics.
Goldstein introduces two women who used capital to which they already had access to build up the small sister-city to Janesville, outside of Paul Ryan's District #1 lines, called Beloit. Beloit is now a kind of fiefdom of one billionaire, Diane Hendricks, helped along by Janesville businesswoman and banker Mary Willmer.
This kind of fiefdom investment has taken place in at least two other places also on the border of Paul Ryan’s district, Waukesha and Verona. Ryan sometimes holds meetings in these locations rather than in his own district, where he has declared he will no longer hold public meetings. There are too many protestors.
In Nov 2017, Goldstein was invited to speak at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison. She was able to explain her reasons for choosing Janesville to study, her methodology, what she intended to accomplish. The public policy implications of her book will be clear to any reader. I may have wanted a different book, a book that makes a different kind of case.
Tweet
No comments:
Post a Comment