When US’ oldest GM plant closes, families face uncertain future
JANESVILLE, Wisconsin: At 7.07am, the last Tahoe reached the end of the assembly line.
Outside it was still dark, 15 degrees with 33 inches of snow - nearly a December record - piled up and drifting as a stinging wind swept across the acres of parking lots.
Inside the Janesville Assembly Plant, the lights were blazing, and the crowd was thick. Workers who were about to walk out of the plant into uncertain futures stood alongside pensioned retirees who had walked back in, their chests tight with incredulity and nostalgia.
All these GM’ers had followed the Tahoe as it snaked down the line. They were cheering, hugging, weeping.
The final Tahoe was a beauty. It was a black LTZ, fully loaded with heated seats, aluminium wheels, a nine- speaker Bose audio system and a sticker price of US$ 57,745 ( RM260,000).
Five men, including one in a Santa hat, stood in front of the shiny black SUV holding a wide banner, its white spaces crammed with workers’ signatures. “Last Vehicle off the Janesville Assembly Line,” the banner said, with the date, Dec 23, 2008. It was destined for the county historical society.
Television crews from as far away as the Netherlands and Japan had come to film this moment, when the oldest plant of the nation’s largest auto maker turned out its last.
Janesville lies three-fourths of the way from Chicago to Madison along Interstate 90.
The county seat of 63,500 people is the home town of House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican - an old United Auto Workers town in a state led by a new generation of conservative, Republican Governor Scott Walker.
It is a Democratic town still, though the economic blow that befell Janesville is the kind of reversal of fortune that drove many working- class Americans to support Donald Trump for president.
The assembly plant began turning out Chevrolets on Valentine’s Day 1923, and, for 8 1/2 decades, the factory, like a mighty wizard, ordered the city’s rhythms.
Great Recession, the people of Janesville - even as they began to reinvent themselves and their town - clung to a faith that GM would reopen the plant so their future could be like their past.
The radio station synchronised its news broadcasts to the shift change. Grocery prices went up along with GM raises. People timed their trips across town to the daily movements of freight trains hauling in parts and hauling away finished cars, trucks and SUVs.
And so, when the plant stopped in the midst of the Great Recession, the people of Janesville - even as they began to re-invent themselves and their town - clung to a faith that GM would re- open the plant so their future could be like their past.
Over time, though, people began to confront a question they had not considered before: What choices to make when there were no more good choices left?
Aug 24 was coming up soon. The first day of classes. And Mike Vaughn knew he couldn’t put it off much longer.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d kept a secret from his dad, let alone a whopper like this one.
But in this Janesville summer of 2009, every time he imagined telling his father, he couldn’t get past the very real possibility that the man who’d always stood behind him might not be able to stand behind him now. So Mike waited a few more days and a few more days, until time was running out.
How do you tell your father that you’re going to the other side?
The shadow of the three generations of Vaughn union history kept stopping him.
The family lore was his lore. It went back to the lead mines that had been scattered through Wisconsin’s southwest corner in places with names like New Diggings and Swindler’s Ridge, and the McCabe Mine in which his great- grandfather had been killed.
Mike’s grandfather, Tom, had come to Janesville to work for a GM job in the “See the USA in Your Chevrolet” 1950s, doubling his wages from US$ 1 an hour to US$ 2. He became a zone committeeman representing 1,000 GM’ers in UAW Local 95.
Mike’s father, Dave, was hired into the assembly plant in 1967 as a teenager, and three years later, while Tom was on the union bargaining committee, they went on strike together for 11 weeks. Dave became a Local 95 vice president a couple years after Mike got hired at Lear Corp., making seats for the assembly plant.
Dave loved the union so much that now, with the assembly plant closed, he and a buddy stepped out of retirement to reprise their old gigs as its vice president and president.
The Vaughns were one of only two families in town who had three generations on the Local 95 executive committee. Union pride ran as deep in Mike as in the generations before.
But the truth was that his father had been retired for five years and his grandfather buried for a year by the time his wife, Barb, lost her job at Lear and his own would end soon.
What does a union man do when there are no workers left to represent? Mike trolled unionjobs.com in three states, but the more he considered the possibility, the less he could imagine leaving Janesville.
This discovery he made about himself - startling to his core - had come along gradually, but there it was: There were limits to what he was willing to do to keep standing on the union side.
Nothing in his family’s past had prepared him for the choices he was confronting. As he struggled with what to do, he watched Barb in astonishment, her head deep into her schoolwork at Blackhawk Technical College, retraining to go into criminal justice, turning crisis into opportunity.
As it happened, Blackhawk Tech was starting a human resources programme, with predictions of jobs at the end. He’d be crazy not to sign up.
But the jobs weren’t union jobs. He’d be management. What would his father think?
The moment came during his father’s 61st birthday party, as they sat on his parents’ screened porch together with their smokes. Mike turned to his father and said, “I’ve decided what I’m going to do.”
He started with the easy stuff. The stuff about going back to school in 20 days, and Blackhawk’s new programme, and the government’s training money. Then he launched into the part that was hard.
About how he had come to see that human resources management was a way to educate workers, too. About how he figured that, if he’d been doing it from the union side, how different could it be from the company side?
As he was talking, he kept a close watch on his father’s expression. Was that a flicker of sadness? Yes, it was there.
But his words didn’t say what Mike had feared the most: That Mike was going over to the dark side.
No, the old union leader told the young union leader he was proud of him for taking this opportunity to better himself. Then his father wrapped him, the last generation of the union Vaughns, in a hug.
With his father’s arms still around him, he heard the words he had imparted to Lear’s job-losing workers: If you don’t change with the times, you’ll be left behind.