Transcripts For CSPAN2 Amy Goldstein Janesville 20171111 : c

Transcripts For CSPAN2 Amy Goldstein Janesville 20171111

From the prizewinning reporter amy goldsteen is next. She talks be the closing of a Gm Assembly Plant in jamesville, wisconsin, during the Great Recession. Good evening, everyone. My name is carmelo of villa, the director of the work project of the Wisconsin Humanities Council. Thank you all for coming tonight to see Amy Goldsteins book presentation, janesville an american story. Thank thursday amy for come he to tower about the live of the hard working people of janesville, beautifully documented in your wonderful book. The book festival comes to life every year thanks to the hard work and dedication of our friends at the Madison Public Library, the event could not be possible without the sponsorship of our friend sod i encourage you to go to the festival web site and fine out more about our sponsors tonight. The Wisconsin Humanities Council is proud to sponsor amys talk this evening. Its a wonderful opportunity for us to continue to do what organizations has done statewide for 25 years, which is to support and promote programs that use history, culture and discussion to strengthen Community Life in wisconsin for everyone. Tonights presentation would not only delight you but help you move forward in this direction. For to might not know the Wisconsin Humanities Council the wisconsin book festival was credited by Wisconsin Humanities Council organization, coordinatedded the event for over 13 years, before friend ted Madison Public Library decided to take on the herculean event. So cued doze for them making this event great, great and greater every year. So, Amy Goldstein is presented by working life project which asks wisconsinites what does work mean in your life. Our project seeks to enrich statewide publicities discussion about the past, present and future of work in wisconsin, to public events, radio programs and online resources, or projects promote what works, what means to all of us meaned individually and all of us together as a group. To fine out more about our working life project and other wisconsin Humanity Council programs, you can check us out at wisconsin humanities. Org. So, i like to introduce amy with basic idea that is somewhat profound and its that to many of news the room today, work is part of what the finals individual and what connects us a members of society. This is why we felt so inspired by amys book. Janesville, an american story, tells the story of working people and their families in ways that promote empathy, admiration and dignity. Its profound and inspiring, the book brings to life the story of how auto worker and the families and the community of janesville team came to turn with the gm plant shut down. Dominate conversations about what the future of our economy and the nature of work life. Amys book remind us that theres more to our economic upturns and downturns than. Be understood. In midst of its there are a lives, real people with real hopes and as operations, seeking to make a life and live in dignity. Amys impressive credentials include 30 years tenure as a staff write are for the Washington Post, where much of her work has focused on social policy. Herred her accolades including a Pulitzer Prize a fellow at the herbert humidities foundation for journalist and the Radcliffe Institute for advanced knowledge. This is her first book. I like to invite everyone to silence your phones and put it in you know, silent mode. Also, if you feel that this is a really compelling conversation, youre more than welcome to share your thoughts through the Media Outlets at the wisconsin book festival has set by using the we book fest, when posting information and uploading photos. Well be very, very grateful if you do this after the presentation so we can hear amy. So now without further adieu, highs Amy Goldstein. [applause] thank you for that very nice introduction and those flattering words about my book. Thank you to the wisconsin book festival for the invitation to be here, and thanks for a large number of you for coming out on a damp night tonight. For me its actually great to be back in janesville. One of the side effects of having spent several years getting to know janesville, wisconsin,ings that madison is something of a second home to me. So, i feel like im on semi home surf talking with now and it like that. I have a question. How many of you here have some connection to janesville, either ever lived there or know people who are there . Okay. I thought this was a safe question to ask because i have not spoken anywhere where there hasnt been at least one person in the audience from janesville, and that includes l. A. , san francisco, boulder, colorado, a lot of people who came to one Motor Vehicle first readings in d. C. So i have a sense that this story, which is about one community and about the mean offering the loves work and loss of community, very specifically affects kind of a janesville diaspora i have learned exists once the book came out. I thought that i would start by telling you a little bit about my first exposure to janesville, wisconsin. I first stepped into town on july 26, 2011 and was on an Exploratory Mission and had lined off few people to meet. The first guy was somebody named stan milam. An oldtime journalist in town. The state house bureau claim nor Janesville Gazette for years and he had left the newspaper and was working aned a education consultant and had a Radio Station and had an office in what had been the parker pen world headquarters, which has been rennovated into Office Building with many offices empty. That morning stan and i talked nonstop for probably about three hours, he was from janesville, early 60s at the time and we talk about his community and what happened to its economy weapon just talked and talked, and finally, stan said to me something ive been hoping he would ask which is, do you want to see the plant . So i got into this car and we drove down center way turned left on sullivan drive and there was what i see in the pictures, 4. 8 million square feet of nothing going on. And the thing that surprised me more than the potency of saying this closed, huge, old auto plant, was what stan said so me as we were approaching it. He said i hate to see this. Well, knew that stan was a pretty tough old reporter. He told me that he was a cynic and over the year is came to believe him. And i said to him, why would somebody like you not want to see this . He told me that his father had worked at the auto plant, and he remembered as a boy how proud has dad had been when he earned enough money to buy his first. I thought u. S. If this tough old journalil cringe ted site of the ought to plant that told me something very powerful 0 on the community sense of identification with the work that had gone i. For a journalist like me that gets one juices flowing and i kept coming back for year. What was doing and janesville that day . On this Exploratory Mission . Well, for a couple years at that point id been thinking about writing a long closeup of what really happened when good work goes away. At the time i was covering a broad social policy beat for the Washington Post, and its a Great Recession began at the end of 2007 and kept going until it officially ended in 2009, a little bit after that, did a few stories as part of my beat for the post on things i later learned were call recession effects. What was the ground level view of what difference it made that the u. S. Economy was in the worst shape it had been in since the Great Depression of the 1930s. So i did a story for the post poet out of southwest florida on people who were falling out of the middle class and on to welfare rolls and just meeting people in the Welfare Office and seeing how traumatized and shellshocked they were by finding themselves there. I did a story out of South Carolina which at the time the nations second highest unemployment rate, about the strains on the private sector parts of the social safety net, places like nonprofit food pantries that were just slammed with more clients than they had ever had and had real diminution in charity. People didnt have enough money to donate so strains as a tangible level. From having done this little bit of work on recession effectsit made the start to Pay Attention to what other journalists were and werent writing about the bad economic time. What i noticed was there were really two strains of stories that dominated. There were lots of stories about the governments economic policies and whether the stimulus package of the then pretty new Obama Administration was working or not working and the political fighting about that. A lot of coverage about those policies. And then as a little time went on i was struck that in the 2010 election this may sound quaint given the stanford last years election there was still already a lot of writing about voter disaffection and anger and what struck began to strike me was didnt see much writing that was fusing those two strains. I had the sense that you couldnt really understand why some people in the United States were feeling disaffected and scared and turned off from what was going on in their government unless you really understood their personal economic experiences and fears. Jobs that they were losing, jobs theyre neighbors were losing, their anxiety their job us might be the next ones to go. Around this time i came across a few Foundation Studies that really caught my attention. It was a content analysis of stories about the bad economy in the first half of 2009. So, the last part of the official period of the Great Recession. And what it showed was that most of the stories were about the stimulus package, the Auto Industry bailout, the Banking Industry and whether the country should the government should have been putting money into rescuing troubled financial institutions, and there was a little bar way to the right of that chart that showed the percentage of stories that were about the effects of the bad economy on ordinary people. And that little bar was five percent of the total. And that kind of absence i thought was a very important gap that we all knew the unemployment statistics but we didnt really understand what it was like to have work go away. So i became, i can only describes as obsessed with finding a way to tell this story and i was sufficiently obsessed by it that i did something i have never been done in my long career which i took a good chunk of time off from the job to find a community which i could tell the story and get to know people in that place. So, how was it that i came to find janesville . If youre going write a story as a microcosm or a metaphor for what is going to happen, what is happening broadly in country, you better choose carefully. So i thought a lot about what kinds of criteria i should use to pick a place, and i had heard about janesville a few years before when i was looking for settings for some of the stories i was doing about the bad economy, for the post, and somebody had mention met mow a small city in wisconsin never heard of had just had a very old General Motors plant that closed. And i never went there at the time because the plant closing was pretty fresh, and the people who had worked at General Motors itself, not other people in town, who lost their jobs took it but the gmers themselves were still getting what was called union subpay, supplemental Unemployment Benefits whichs buffering the economic pain for a lot of people in town if never showed up at that time. When i began to think seriously about trying to find a place that could my microcosm, janesville lingered in the brain. One reason was needed to fine a place that lost a lot of jobs and janesville and the area filled the built. 2008 and 2009, 9,000 jobs disappeared from janesville, the county seat in lock county. A lot of jobs for a small place in southeastern wisconsin. But beyond that, wanted to be able to write about some place that had never been been part of the rust belt, because i wanted to be able to look at what this bad economic time in our countrys history had done and not an accumulation of economic decay over a period of decades and janesville had gotten its General Motors plant in 1918. Started making tractors in 1919. Just after world war i. And it started turning out chevys in 1923. And over the intervening decades, products had come and had gone, but every time a product left that factory, General Motors sent in Something Else to replace it. So this had not been a rust belt community, and it really made what happened in 2008 two days before christmas of 2008 that the good morning plant closed down, something that was just unprecedented and in this town, and very hard for people to get their head around, that this time was going to be different. And i knew that no place i was going to pick would be exactly like everybody the country but as much as possible it seemed to me a good idea to pick a community in which the pattern of job losses matched the broad pattern of job losses in the Great Recession. So, nationally, and in janesville, a lot of the jobs that disappeared were oned that paid well and didnt require much formal education. That was certainly true of these auto worker jobs. And in this recession broadly and in jamesville, more men tom women lost jobs. Theres a sense that the kind of job loss that happened in this small wisconsin city was typical of the country. That appealed to me. I also had a sense when i started to research the place that janesville fit nice lie interest the sweep of u. S. History. On that first reporting trip where i met stan milam, somebody else told me that i should find a Youtube Video of a speech that thensenator barack obama had given in the janesville Assembly Plant in february of 2008, when he was campaigning to try to win the wisconsin primary. And this was a very big, important economic speech in his campaign in which he out his assed, his agenda and he said two things in that speech. And i it just gave me got a bumps he said, first of all, basically, if the country elected him in followed his economic prescription, that this plant will be here for another 100 years. The other thing he said was, the promise of janesville is a promise of america. And i thought, if im going to write about this i want to have that sentence in whatever i write. So that appealed to me. Now, janesville has interesting politics a lot of other moment inside u. S. History in which janesville figured directly. The late 1930s there was a very important moment in u. S. Labor history called the General Motors sitdown strike, and janesville is one of the sites of the strike. During world war ii, it was part of the home front when it stopped making vehicles and started making 16 mill meet millimeter artillery shells. It felt like it was a microcosm of what was happening broadly in the country and u. S. Do you recall. Understand the politics were interesting. An old democratic leaning union town represented by somebody who had been elected to congress when he was 28 years old and very consecutive, named paul ryan. And at the time that i first shopped up in janesville, paul ryan was not even a committee chairman, let alone a candidate for the vicepresidency of this country, let alone speaker of the house. But i just had the sense to there might be some interesting Political Tension to be found about this Democratic Union town with this man as its congressman and the state that if you think about when i showed up, was newly in the hands of scott walker. Now, on top of all that, i have to admit thought that janesville was a cool ash american sounding name. So, that seemed sort of appealing, going to be living with a name i liked the fact it was janesville. So, those are some reasons why that summer of 2011 i made this exploratory trip and met with this oldtime journalist who took me to see the site of a plant that had closed, that was the most interesting thing that happened in town recently, and he didnt want to see it. So, how did i tell this story . Well, the idea i had from the outset was that it wanted this book to feel like a kaleidoscope. I wanted to have people from different vantage points in the community whose perspective and attitude and behaviors i could trace over a period of years. Showing how job loss affected, yes, some of the family ill talk about the main families in a moment also other people in the community and how they thought they ought to respond. So i was interested in a social studies teacher i met who was tell you the two high schools in town are named for parker pen, so parker high school, and the other high school is named craig high school, and craig was the man who persuaded General Motors to come to janesville. So these iconic industrialists from the community, their identities are woven into the name of the high schools. Parker high school, theres a social studies teacher who formed the parker closet. The noticed more and more kid from. What used to be middle class families were coming t

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