October 17, 2024 • 28 mins
Janesville, in Winsocsin, was once the epitome of the American Dream. But everything changed following the global financial crisis when General Motors, the business that provided the town with most of its wealth, shut its plant.
On today’s show we have Amy Goldstein, the award winning author of the FT Business book of the year, Janesville.
Amy spent 36 years as a journalist at The Washington Post writing widely about social issues. Among her awards, she shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. She now works for the Brookings think tank.
Amy joined me to discuss the story of Janesville, a town built on the back on one industry, one company. And what happens to the town and the people of that town when the heart of its economy is ripped out.
And it’s not just about a small town in Wisconsin, this is a larger story of the hollowing out of the middle class and businesses responsibilities to the communities they serve.
RUNNING ORDER:
01:17 - Part one: The story of Janesville
14:00 - Part two: The fallout
20:22 - Part three: what makes an award-winning book
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcometo the Investor Download, the podcast
about the themes driving markets andthe economy now and in the future.
I'm your host, David Brett.
(00:23):
Hello.I hope you're all well.
On today's show, we have Amy Goldstein,the author of the
award-winning book, Janesville.
Amy spent 36 years as a journalist at theWashington Post, writing
widely about social issues.
Among her awards, she shared the 2002Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, and
she now works for theBrooklyn's Think Tank.
(00:44):
Amy joined me to discuss the story ofJanesville, a town built on the
back of one industry, one company.
It's a story of what happens to that townand the people of the town when
that company decides to leave.
But it's not just about asmall town in Wisconsin.
This is a larger story of the hollowingout of the middle class, businesses'
(01:04):
responsibilities to the communities theyserve, and the reverberations
that can be felt globally.
Amy's a great storyteller.
I hope you enjoy.
Amy, welcome to the show.So good to have you on.
Good to be with you.Yeah.
Thanks so much for taking part in this.
There's a few reasons from my personalpoint of view why I wanted you on this.
(01:26):
I began reading your book a few weeks ago.
I'm about Two thirds of the way through.
It's obviously a great book.
The personal stories inthe power of the narrative.
They are so powerful in it.
And that's one of the things I wantto touch on with some of my questions.
Secondly, it's made me think abouthow and why the populist movement has
obviously gained traction overthe last few years as well.
(01:47):
And that's front and centre of mind giveneverything that's going on
with elections this year.
And finally, for someone like me thousandsof miles away, it does actually still
connect with some of the things that aregoing on in my country in the UK and
possibly around the world, whichwe may also touch a bit later.
But before we go any deeper,can I just ask you to give us just a brief
synopsis of Janesvilleand what the book's about?
(02:07):
Sure.
Well, the book is essentially a closeup ofwhat happened during the Great Recession,
or you might call it theglobal financial crisis.
As the United States, at least, was comingout of the recession, the recession was
from late 2007 to partway through 2009,was the official period of the recession,
I have been reading somuch about the bad economy.
(02:30):
But it occurred to me that what Iwas reading was largely a macro view.
It was about the economy.
It was about the political debates overhow the government should respond to this
terrible financial time.
It was about the banking industry.
It was about the auto industry.
And I didn't see a lot of deep writingabout what this bad economic period
(02:52):
was actually doing to people andtheir jobs and their communities.
And that's what I wanted to portray.
Okay, so we could talk about Janesville inparticular, which is a small town in
Wisconsin, certainly smaller than quitea lot of towns and cities in America.
So how did you decide to focus on thatspecific community and their struggles?
(03:15):
Well, Janesville was not a place I knew.
Wisconsin is not a place that I had anyreal connections to,
but I was looking for a communitythat could serve as a microcosm.
And Janesville had severalseveral advantages in the way that
sometimes what's bad for life is goodfor journalism and good for writing.
(03:38):
Janesville was the home of what at thetime had been the oldest operating General
Motors plant in all of General Motors.
And it shut down two daysbefore Christmas of 2008.
And there were 3,000 people who lost theirjobs in two shifts that
closed down that last year.
And in the county for which Janesville isthe county seat, the hub,
(04:02):
there were 9,000 jobs that were lost.
It's a lot of jobs.
Janesville has 65,000 people now.
It's a little smaller then.
So that fit criteria number one.
It had lost a lot of jobs.
More than that, I wanted to find a placethat had not previously been
part of the US Rust Belt.
(04:22):
I felt like people knew about Detroit andabout Flint, Michigan,
which had lost their industries earlier.
But I wanted to find a placefor which economic trauma was new
during this bad economic time.
And that was very true of Janesville.
It had been a very comfortable, mostlymiddle class city with people going back
(04:44):
generations who had worked at this plant.
And suddenly, the heart ofits economy was falling apart.
So that was somethingthat was important to me.
I also knew that I would want totake a look at job retraining.
So I wanted a place that had some kindof a college that was doing this work.
(05:04):
And Janesville has a small technicalcollege that was doing
tons of job retraining in the few yearsafter all this automaking work went away.
It also has an interesting local politics.
Janesville is an olddemocratic-leaning union town.
The autoworkers belong to the UnitedAutoworkers, which is all over the place,
(05:29):
the union that we're represents autowork.
It also had a young, ambitious congressmanwho is a conservative
Republican named Paul Ryan.
Now, Paul Ryan was on his way to becomingspeaker of the House of Representatives.
I didn't know that when Istarted doing the research.
(05:50):
But even back then, which was in 2011,when I arrived a couple of years after the
plant had shut down,I thought there might be some interesting
political tension that I could explorewith this democratic-leaning town with a
very conservative member ofCongress representing it.
And I should say, finally,it was a place where when I started to
(06:11):
visit, people were willing to talk to me.
And for that, I am undyingly grateful.
Those are some of the reasons.
Yeah, exactly what youneed as a journalist.
You need all those quotes of the peoplethat are willing to
give over their stories.Exactly.
Did you know what to expectbefore you got there?
Had you ever been to Janesville before?
No.
I had done a little bit of reading,and I was looking at a few different
(06:34):
places that all more or less fitthese criteria that I just mentioned.
I made a first exploratory visit toJanesville in July of 2011,
and I had lined up a few people to see whoI thought might have an
interesting vantage point.
An old-time journalist in town,the guy who, he's a character in the book,
(06:58):
who ran what was called the Job Centre,which was ground zero for where you went
when your job that you thought was goingto last your whole working life suddenly
vanished on you, youdidn't know what to do.
So a few people like that.
I met with some of the Union leadership.
At this point, it was retired auto workerswho were filling in the offices of the
Union because there weren't any moreactive workers to be filling those jobs.
(07:22):
So I just began meeting with people andasking them, who else
should I get to know?
And I was a little worried becauseusually, even for a newspaper story, I do
a lot of compare and contrastwhere's a good setting for the story.
And something in me just keptsaying, Janesville is the place.
(07:43):
And I thought, am I beingunsystematic,
uncharacteristically about that.
But I just thoughtthere's a lot of interesting stuff here,
and eventually I decided I'mjust going to keep going.
So more than a hunch, but there was alittle bit of a hunch in there as well.
Yeah.
There's a hunch in some good,educated repertorial guesses.
Absolutely.
(08:04):
You obviously keep mentioning the people,and anyone who hasn't read
it does need to read it.There are so many characters in there.
I just wondered how you narrowed it downto maybe the relatively few that are in
there or the relatively few thatended up missing out in the book.
Well, I got to know a lot of people intown, and I was not
(08:25):
quick or efficient in deciding whothe main characters were going to be.
I knew from the outset that one thing thatwould disqualify somebody from being in my
book, not that I have people lining up onthe sidewalk waiting
to be part of my book.
They didn't know me.
But one thing that I felt strongly aboutis that I wanted people who would be
comfortable letting meuse their real names.
(08:47):
Not all books do that, but I felt if thiswas going to be a portrayal of a real
place going through hard economic times,I wanted the people to be real, and
there's nothing more real thanseeing somebody's real name.
So that was an importantconsideration for me.
Beyond that, there were a coupleof things I was thinking about.
(09:07):
I wanted this story to feel like akaleidoscope,
in which when you turned the kaleidoscope,you were seeing the story from different
vantage points, justlike in a kaleidoscope.
So I had people I was getting to know,some of whom ended up in the book,
who weren't the workers themselves, butwere in different positions
(09:27):
to see what was happening in townand try to to do something about it.
So for instance, in addition to the headof the Job Centre, I got to know the woman
who at the time was themain banker in town.
And she formed, with anothervery affluent businesswoman, one town
over, an economic development coalition totry very hard to bring new work to town.
(09:50):
It was hard to do and how they were doingit, some people liked and some people
thought was polarising, but theyreally had their hearts in it.
Another woman who ended up in the book asa social studies teacher
who really was very attuned to her highschool kids and was realising that some of
them just didn't look like they were doingas well when they came
(10:11):
to school in the morning.
They were sleepy, theirclothes weren't all that clean.
And she realised that these formerlymiddle class kids were now
in families that were poor.
And on her own, she begancollecting donations for the school.
It's called Parker High School.
And she created something the ParkerCloset, which exists to this day and is
(10:33):
filled with jeans and school supplies andthe toiletries so that kids
could quietly get what they need.
And she was very sensitive to the factthat teenagers
didn't really talk with each other aboutthe fact that their families were
struggling, even though many ofthem were having this experience.
(10:53):
It was something thatyou kept hidden at home.
And she was very careful to quietly askcertain kids if they needed
a little bit of help.
So that gives you some feel for thediversity of people I was getting to know.
And then there was a core ring of peoplewho were the workers
themselves and their families.
(11:15):
And I met a lot of workers.
And as I said, it took me quite a while todecide who I wanted to
focus on most close up.
And the way that I thought about it wasfamilies that had answered the question,
what do you do when there are nogood choices left in different ways?
So there was a union family in which theguy who had been the top Union guy at a
(11:40):
seat making plant that was the biggestsupplier to the General Motors assembly
plant, ended up training forhuman resources management.
So his transition was to go through a bigidentity realignment and feel comfortable
after three generations of family had beenwith the United Auto Workers,
becoming a management guy.
(12:00):
But he thought this was work that coulduse the union skills he had developed.
There's another family in whichthe guy ended up
very reluctantly starting to commute toanother General Motors plant
several states away in Indiana.
And the reason he did this is because hisfamily was really worried
(12:23):
about losing their house.
And this is a way he could gethis income back to good GM wages.
And he's been doing doing thisfor years now,
leaving home on early Monday morning,driving to Indiana,
spending the work week in an apartmentthat he doesn't really think of as his
home after all these years he's doing it,and then driving back to Janesville
(12:45):
late, late on Friday night.
So that was a different choice, and it wasa choice that other
people in town made, too.
And then the final family I focused on isthe one that most thoroughly
fell out of the middle class.
The husband in that family who had been aGMer did not want to leave his
family for a job out of town.
He had started retraining, but itwasn't going that well for him.
(13:08):
And he just bumped in and outof a lot of bad paid jobs.
And when I met them, twoof their kids who were twin daughters, who
were seniors in high school back when Ifirst ran into them,
were working five part-time jobsafter school on our weekends to
help the family pay the bills.
(13:30):
Yeah, I think that's certainlywhat I've read so far.
It's the balance you get caughtreally nicely in the book.
There are some absolutely heartbreakingstories in there, some really,
really tough stories to read.
But there's also some of the optimums aswell, the way the community gathers around
each other to try and makethings better for each other.
On Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whereveryou get your podcasts, you're
(13:54):
listening to the Investor Download.
I haven't got to the end of the book yet,so I don't know how it finishes in the
book, but I did notice that you've writtensomething on it quite recently
where you've gone back in 2024.
Particularly, obviously, you picked outthe case that it's a middle class person
story in terms of they used to know whatmiddle class is like, and now they're
feeling what it's likeon the poverty lines.
(14:15):
They've gone from one class, and it'staken them out of that.
What did you find in 2024when you went back to Janesville?
Well, I had not been back inJanesville for about five years.
I had stayed in in touch with some people,but I hadn't physically been there.
I went back there because I had agreedto be on a panel of authors one night.
(14:39):
And before I went, I started just lookingup, what could I find about how the
economy was doing now, in particular,what had happened to the site of
this enormous General Motors plant?
The last time I've been there, which wasin 2018, the plant was being demolished.
It had been sold to a companythat specialises
(15:02):
in decaying industrial property andredeveloping it,
cleaning it up environmentally.
And I had expected that by nowthere would be some new use for it,
except what I started to read before Iwent back there for a few days, a couple
of months ago, was that theland was still sitting fallow.
And there was a political fight going onbetween the town government, the city
(15:24):
government, and this company that owns theproperty, over whether the company was
doing well enough to try to get it reused.
And they insisted that, to this day,that they're doing everything they can.
And the city was saying theyaren't trying very hard.
Well, this perked my interest.
So I did some research as to howthe economy is doing overall.
(15:48):
And it's a very mixed picture.
I mean, obviously thisblank piece of land that used to be the
heart of the economy is still whatI call a psychic and economic
wound in the middle of town.
But otherwise, Janesvillehas recovered fairly well.
I mean, it's a veryresilient, persistent place.
You shouldn't generalise about places, butI met a lot of people
(16:10):
who had those qualities.
And what I found was that the unemploymentrate was as low as it is now
in most of the United States.
The percentage of the labour force thatwas actually working, I mean, labour age
people that was actuallyworking was very very good.
(16:31):
Some new jobs had come to town,but there were differences.
There aren't many people makingwages as good as the old GM pay.
There are fewer jobs that are unionised,so they tend not to have as good benefits.
And the amount of work that consistsof manufacturing is substantially less.
(16:53):
So it's not like a ghost town.
The population hasn't fallen,but it's not doing perfectly.
Yeah, and when I was reading thepiece that you wrote on in 2024,
it did remind me of quite a lot of thestuff I've read about major cities
(17:13):
in the US, in London, across the world,which hollowed out during the pandemic,
and now are trying to find different waysto use the space that is left over
from the people that did leave.
It left a little bit of a mark for me.
So that's exactly right.
And what I came away thinking, and Ishould say This piece ran in the Financial
Times the beginning of last month.
(17:34):
It was the cover story in the weekendsection for anyone who was interested
in what we're talking about.
But what I ended up thinking was that ifJaneville was a pretty good metaphor for
what happened to certain communitiesduring the Great Recession,
it's still a good metaphor for what'shappened to the economy lately.
Yeah.
It's a way of showing that towns,places, cities, countries
(17:58):
find a way of bouncing back.
It may not be the old way of doing it,but they might find a new way of doing it.
Or a partial way of doing it.Yeah, exactly.
It's still a bit of way to go.
I mean, how has writing Janesville and thestories you encountered changed
your perspective of the American economy,the social issues and communities
you came across?
Well, I don't think it changedas much as deepened it.
(18:23):
I mean, one of the things we've alreadybeen talking about, which is that
falling out of the middle class isdifferent from having been poor all along.
And one of the things that I did, inaddition to getting to know a lot of folks
in town, I did a couple ofmore quantitative pieces of work, one of
which was a survey of just thecounty that Janesville is in.
(18:45):
And this was with some folks I got to knowat the University of Wisconsin
Survey Research Center.
And we wanted to take a look atwhat people's economic experiences and
perceptions were like five years afterall this economic that trauma happened.
And what was really striking is how manypeople told us that
(19:07):
if they or someone in their home haddirectly lost a job, which was a lot of
people, they were fightingwith their family.
They were avoiding social situations, theyfelt ashamed,
which was particularly striking since thiswas all going on at a time when
the nation, the United States, was goingthrough the worst economic time
(19:29):
since the Depression of the 1930s.
And a lot of their neighbours, right?
And Janesville experience the same thing.
But people take losingwork very, very personally.
And that's one of thethings that I learned.
Yeah.
Again, I haven't gotto the end of the book.
Is the message of the book that there ishope, or does that only come
when you went back in 2024?
(19:51):
Well, you'll have to finishthe book and find it.
I can't wait to finish it.
No, it's neither totallyup nor totally down.
Okay.
I just wanted to createa vivid portrait and let people
take away from it what they would.
Well, you've certainlyabsolutely achieved that.
Get in touch with us by email atschroderspodcasts@schroders.
(20:13):
Com or visit our website, schroders.
com/theinvestordownload.
We've been finishing these podcasts with alittle bit of reflection on
what the award, because you won the FTBusiness Book of the Year Award in 2017.
I want to start with first question, whatdo you think makes an award-winning book?
(20:36):
Well, in terms of writing books, I've gotsample size one, and
we're talking about it.
And I haven't been thejudge for this contest.
But I would say a couple of things.
A book that's about something that reallymatters in the world and is told
(20:56):
in a way that people can grasp.
In my case, I try to tell this storythrough the eyes of people who are going
through this hard experience andhope that people could identify with the
struggles of some of these people and theheroic efforts of some of these people.
So I think that matters.
I think being well-written mattersand having something to say.
(21:22):
And how has the award impacted yourcareer or the reception of your book?
Well, this made a big differencein the reception of my book.
I had beenalready doing a lot of travelling within
the United States,talking about this book at
universities and really bookstores and acouple of book festivals.
(21:51):
But after this book award, I startedgetting international invitations.
So I always say, Janesvillehas taken me far.
I spoke at the London School of Economics.
I spoke at the OECD Forum in Paris.
I spoke at book festivals inAustralia and New Zealand.
(22:12):
I mean, I've gotten around, andJanesville has gotten around.
And I think one of the things thatI've really been exposed to through these
travels is the subtitle ofmy book is An American Story.
The title is Janesville: An American Story. (22:25):
undefined
But what I've really learned, and youreferred to this at the very beginning of
our chat, is that the kinds of economicexperiences that this small city
has gone throughis not unique to the United States,
is not unique to Southern Wisconsin.
I remember being on a stage at a bookfestival in Sydney, Australia,
(22:49):
with a well-known journalist from thatcountry interviewing me as
part of this book festival.
And he was telling the audience aboutAustralian towns that had lost auto jobs.
As analogies.
And it really drove home that thisde-industrialisation
is not unique to any one country.
(23:10):
Yeah, absolutely.And did it...
You like, or me like you, did it give youa bit of appreciation of
this populism movement and why it'saccelerated so quickly
over the last few years?
Well, yes, but.
So the yes is that there are a lot ofpeople whose
personal financial and work circumstancesaren't what they used to be or
(23:34):
what they would hoped to be.
So that, one can understand, canfuel a populist political view.
My book came out in 2017, and peoplealways say, Oh, does your book help
explain the rise of Donald Trump?
Well, that's the no, because Janesvillehas stayed a Democratic-leaning place.
(23:56):
I mean, we'll see what happens in theelection this fall with fewer union
jobs in town than there used to be.
But it doesn't exactly explain whypeople pivoted to Donald Trump.
But I think it explains the disappointmentthat people in other communities that may
be more politically conservativefound a feeling.
(24:16):
Absolutely.
Obviously, we've been talking aboutthe personal stories within the book.
So this next question isprobably a bit obvious, but were there any
challenges or memorablemoments right in the book?
Because as I said, there are some quiteharrowing experiences
that you write about within the book.
Yes.
So one thing, whether we're talking aboutpeople who had extremely hard
(24:42):
experiences or just hard experiences,was winning the trust of a
place that wasn't my place.
I didn't get to know everybody inJanesville Wisconsin, but I got
to know a good number of people.
And other workers who had lost their jobsmight not be the stereotype of somebody
who's lining up to get publicity.
(25:08):
So I had time on my side,and I got to know people gradually, and I
didn't ask them thehardest questions first.
But it was really a process ofhoping that people would understand that I
was serious about this and really wantedto both understand their
(25:28):
experiences and portray it honestly.
So that was one level of hard.
I'm going to give you a second technicallevel of hard, which is, as I said, I
arrived in Janesville the summer of 2011.
The plant closed the end of 2008.
Now, I knew the story had to startin 2008, but I hadn't been around.
(25:50):
So I had to do enoughresearch and figuring things out so that
the parts of the story that predated myarrival on the scene felt equally vivid
to things I witnessed firsthand.
So that was a second layer of challenge.
Well, you certainly achieve everythingI think you set out to achieve.
So what is your one piece ofadvice for any aspiring writers?
(26:17):
Persist.
That's a one-word answer,but I'll try to explain it.
I had this notion that this was goingto be about a year-long project.
My book ended coming out almost sixyears after I had started this work.
And about a year and a quarter in,I had taken a
(26:39):
one year's book leave from the WashingtonPost, and I had an academic fellowship
and a little bit of grant funding.
So I was fine the first year,but I knew I had a lot more work to do.
So I took a second year off.
My editors at the Post atthe time were very kind.
I didn't have a book contract yet.
I didn't have much much of an income.
(27:01):
I didn't know how I was going to buy thetime to finish what I had started,
but I was deep into it already.
And I remember callinga mentor and a friend who was a very
eminent book authorand saying, "I don't know what to do here.
This is just a mess, and I don't know howto get into this and out of this."
(27:22):
And he said to me, You'vegot to find a way to do it.
He said, This matters.It matters to you.
I can hear that it matters to you.
And think what you're workingon is really worthwhile.
And whatever it takes,find a way to keep doing it.
I thought that was good advice.
Well, it definitely was.
I guess the obvious question is, if youknew it was going to take six years, would
(27:43):
you have started it in the first place?
Luckily, that's a hypotheticalI never had to address.
Brilliant.Excellent.
Well, I'm so glad you didbecause it is a fabulous book.
Amy Goldstein, thank youso much for joining us.
Thank you.
That was show.We very much hope you enjoyed it.
You can subscribe to the investordownload wherever you get your podcast.
(28:06):
And if you want to get in touch withus, it's schroderspodcasts@schroders.
Com.
And you can find out much,much more at schroders.
com/insights.
New shows drop every otherThursday at 05:00 PM UK time.
In the meantime, keep safe and go well.
The value of investments and the incomefrom them may go down as well as up, and
(28:28):
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Past performance is not aguide to future performance.
Information is not an offer, solicitation,or recommendation of any funds, services,
or products, or to adoptany investment strategy.
Welcometo the Investor Download, the podcast
about the themes driving markets andthe economy now and in the future.
I'm your host, David Brett.
(00:23):
Hello.I hope you're all well.
On today's show, we have Amy Goldstein,the author of the
award-winning book, Janesville.
Amy spent 36 years as a journalist at theWashington Post, writing
widely about social issues.
Among her awards, she shared the 2002Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, and
she now works for theBrooklyn's Think Tank.
(00:44):
Amy joined me to discuss the story ofJanesville, a town built on the
back of one industry, one company.
It's a story of what happens to that townand the people of the town when
that company decides to leave.
But it's not just about asmall town in Wisconsin.
This is a larger story of the hollowingout of the middle class, businesses'
(01:04):
responsibilities to the communities theyserve, and the reverberations
that can be felt globally.
Amy's a great storyteller.
I hope you enjoy.
Amy, welcome to the show.So good to have you on.
Good to be with you.Yeah.
Thanks so much for taking part in this.
There's a few reasons from my personalpoint of view why I wanted you on this.
(01:26):
I began reading your book a few weeks ago.
I'm about Two thirds of the way through.
It's obviously a great book.
The personal stories inthe power of the narrative.
They are so powerful in it.
And that's one of the things I wantto touch on with some of my questions.
Secondly, it's made me think abouthow and why the populist movement has
obviously gained traction overthe last few years as well.
(01:47):
And that's front and centre of mind giveneverything that's going on
with elections this year.
And finally, for someone like me thousandsof miles away, it does actually still
connect with some of the things that aregoing on in my country in the UK and
possibly around the world, whichwe may also touch a bit later.
But before we go any deeper,can I just ask you to give us just a brief
synopsis of Janesvilleand what the book's about?
(02:07):
Sure.
Well, the book is essentially a closeup ofwhat happened during the Great Recession,
or you might call it theglobal financial crisis.
As the United States, at least, was comingout of the recession, the recession was
from late 2007 to partway through 2009,was the official period of the recession,
I have been reading somuch about the bad economy.
(02:30):
But it occurred to me that what Iwas reading was largely a macro view.
It was about the economy.
It was about the political debates overhow the government should respond to this
terrible financial time.
It was about the banking industry.
It was about the auto industry.
And I didn't see a lot of deep writingabout what this bad economic period
(02:52):
was actually doing to people andtheir jobs and their communities.
And that's what I wanted to portray.
Okay, so we could talk about Janesville inparticular, which is a small town in
Wisconsin, certainly smaller than quitea lot of towns and cities in America.
So how did you decide to focus on thatspecific community and their struggles?
(03:15):
Well, Janesville was not a place I knew.
Wisconsin is not a place that I had anyreal connections to,
but I was looking for a communitythat could serve as a microcosm.
And Janesville had severalseveral advantages in the way that
sometimes what's bad for life is goodfor journalism and good for writing.
(03:38):
Janesville was the home of what at thetime had been the oldest operating General
Motors plant in all of General Motors.
And it shut down two daysbefore Christmas of 2008.
And there were 3,000 people who lost theirjobs in two shifts that
closed down that last year.
And in the county for which Janesville isthe county seat, the hub,
(04:02):
there were 9,000 jobs that were lost.
It's a lot of jobs.
Janesville has 65,000 people now.
It's a little smaller then.
So that fit criteria number one.
It had lost a lot of jobs.
More than that, I wanted to find a placethat had not previously been
part of the US Rust Belt.
(04:22):
I felt like people knew about Detroit andabout Flint, Michigan,
which had lost their industries earlier.
But I wanted to find a placefor which economic trauma was new
during this bad economic time.
And that was very true of Janesville.
It had been a very comfortable, mostlymiddle class city with people going back
(04:44):
generations who had worked at this plant.
And suddenly, the heart ofits economy was falling apart.
So that was somethingthat was important to me.
I also knew that I would want totake a look at job retraining.
So I wanted a place that had some kindof a college that was doing this work.
(05:04):
And Janesville has a small technicalcollege that was doing
tons of job retraining in the few yearsafter all this automaking work went away.
It also has an interesting local politics.
Janesville is an olddemocratic-leaning union town.
The autoworkers belong to the UnitedAutoworkers, which is all over the place,
(05:29):
the union that we're represents autowork.
It also had a young, ambitious congressmanwho is a conservative
Republican named Paul Ryan.
Now, Paul Ryan was on his way to becomingspeaker of the House of Representatives.
I didn't know that when Istarted doing the research.
(05:50):
But even back then, which was in 2011,when I arrived a couple of years after the
plant had shut down,I thought there might be some interesting
political tension that I could explorewith this democratic-leaning town with a
very conservative member ofCongress representing it.
And I should say, finally,it was a place where when I started to
(06:11):
visit, people were willing to talk to me.
And for that, I am undyingly grateful.
Those are some of the reasons.
Yeah, exactly what youneed as a journalist.
You need all those quotes of the peoplethat are willing to
give over their stories.Exactly.
Did you know what to expectbefore you got there?
Had you ever been to Janesville before?
No.
I had done a little bit of reading,and I was looking at a few different
(06:34):
places that all more or less fitthese criteria that I just mentioned.
I made a first exploratory visit toJanesville in July of 2011,
and I had lined up a few people to see whoI thought might have an
interesting vantage point.
An old-time journalist in town,the guy who, he's a character in the book,
(06:58):
who ran what was called the Job Centre,which was ground zero for where you went
when your job that you thought was goingto last your whole working life suddenly
vanished on you, youdidn't know what to do.
So a few people like that.
I met with some of the Union leadership.
At this point, it was retired auto workerswho were filling in the offices of the
Union because there weren't any moreactive workers to be filling those jobs.
(07:22):
So I just began meeting with people andasking them, who else
should I get to know?
And I was a little worried becauseusually, even for a newspaper story, I do
a lot of compare and contrastwhere's a good setting for the story.
And something in me just keptsaying, Janesville is the place.
(07:43):
And I thought, am I beingunsystematic,
uncharacteristically about that.
But I just thoughtthere's a lot of interesting stuff here,
and eventually I decided I'mjust going to keep going.
So more than a hunch, but there was alittle bit of a hunch in there as well.
Yeah.
There's a hunch in some good,educated repertorial guesses.
Absolutely.
(08:04):
You obviously keep mentioning the people,and anyone who hasn't read
it does need to read it.There are so many characters in there.
I just wondered how you narrowed it downto maybe the relatively few that are in
there or the relatively few thatended up missing out in the book.
Well, I got to know a lot of people intown, and I was not
(08:25):
quick or efficient in deciding whothe main characters were going to be.
I knew from the outset that one thing thatwould disqualify somebody from being in my
book, not that I have people lining up onthe sidewalk waiting
to be part of my book.
They didn't know me.
But one thing that I felt strongly aboutis that I wanted people who would be
comfortable letting meuse their real names.
(08:47):
Not all books do that, but I felt if thiswas going to be a portrayal of a real
place going through hard economic times,I wanted the people to be real, and
there's nothing more real thanseeing somebody's real name.
So that was an importantconsideration for me.
Beyond that, there were a coupleof things I was thinking about.
(09:07):
I wanted this story to feel like akaleidoscope,
in which when you turned the kaleidoscope,you were seeing the story from different
vantage points, justlike in a kaleidoscope.
So I had people I was getting to know,some of whom ended up in the book,
who weren't the workers themselves, butwere in different positions
(09:27):
to see what was happening in townand try to to do something about it.
So for instance, in addition to the headof the Job Centre, I got to know the woman
who at the time was themain banker in town.
And she formed, with anothervery affluent businesswoman, one town
over, an economic development coalition totry very hard to bring new work to town.
(09:50):
It was hard to do and how they were doingit, some people liked and some people
thought was polarising, but theyreally had their hearts in it.
Another woman who ended up in the book asa social studies teacher
who really was very attuned to her highschool kids and was realising that some of
them just didn't look like they were doingas well when they came
(10:11):
to school in the morning.
They were sleepy, theirclothes weren't all that clean.
And she realised that these formerlymiddle class kids were now
in families that were poor.
And on her own, she begancollecting donations for the school.
It's called Parker High School.
And she created something the ParkerCloset, which exists to this day and is
(10:33):
filled with jeans and school supplies andthe toiletries so that kids
could quietly get what they need.
And she was very sensitive to the factthat teenagers
didn't really talk with each other aboutthe fact that their families were
struggling, even though many ofthem were having this experience.
(10:53):
It was something thatyou kept hidden at home.
And she was very careful to quietly askcertain kids if they needed
a little bit of help.
So that gives you some feel for thediversity of people I was getting to know.
And then there was a core ring of peoplewho were the workers
themselves and their families.
(11:15):
And I met a lot of workers.
And as I said, it took me quite a while todecide who I wanted to
focus on most close up.
And the way that I thought about it wasfamilies that had answered the question,
what do you do when there are nogood choices left in different ways?
So there was a union family in which theguy who had been the top Union guy at a
(11:40):
seat making plant that was the biggestsupplier to the General Motors assembly
plant, ended up training forhuman resources management.
So his transition was to go through a bigidentity realignment and feel comfortable
after three generations of family had beenwith the United Auto Workers,
becoming a management guy.
(12:00):
But he thought this was work that coulduse the union skills he had developed.
There's another family in whichthe guy ended up
very reluctantly starting to commute toanother General Motors plant
several states away in Indiana.
And the reason he did this is because hisfamily was really worried
(12:23):
about losing their house.
And this is a way he could gethis income back to good GM wages.
And he's been doing doing thisfor years now,
leaving home on early Monday morning,driving to Indiana,
spending the work week in an apartmentthat he doesn't really think of as his
home after all these years he's doing it,and then driving back to Janesville
(12:45):
late, late on Friday night.
So that was a different choice, and it wasa choice that other
people in town made, too.
And then the final family I focused on isthe one that most thoroughly
fell out of the middle class.
The husband in that family who had been aGMer did not want to leave his
family for a job out of town.
He had started retraining, but itwasn't going that well for him.
(13:08):
And he just bumped in and outof a lot of bad paid jobs.
And when I met them, twoof their kids who were twin daughters, who
were seniors in high school back when Ifirst ran into them,
were working five part-time jobsafter school on our weekends to
help the family pay the bills.
(13:30):
Yeah, I think that's certainlywhat I've read so far.
It's the balance you get caughtreally nicely in the book.
There are some absolutely heartbreakingstories in there, some really,
really tough stories to read.
But there's also some of the optimums aswell, the way the community gathers around
each other to try and makethings better for each other.
On Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whereveryou get your podcasts, you're
(13:54):
listening to the Investor Download.
I haven't got to the end of the book yet,so I don't know how it finishes in the
book, but I did notice that you've writtensomething on it quite recently
where you've gone back in 2024.
Particularly, obviously, you picked outthe case that it's a middle class person
story in terms of they used to know whatmiddle class is like, and now they're
feeling what it's likeon the poverty lines.
(14:15):
They've gone from one class, and it'staken them out of that.
What did you find in 2024when you went back to Janesville?
Well, I had not been back inJanesville for about five years.
I had stayed in in touch with some people,but I hadn't physically been there.
I went back there because I had agreedto be on a panel of authors one night.
(14:39):
And before I went, I started just lookingup, what could I find about how the
economy was doing now, in particular,what had happened to the site of
this enormous General Motors plant?
The last time I've been there, which wasin 2018, the plant was being demolished.
It had been sold to a companythat specialises
(15:02):
in decaying industrial property andredeveloping it,
cleaning it up environmentally.
And I had expected that by nowthere would be some new use for it,
except what I started to read before Iwent back there for a few days, a couple
of months ago, was that theland was still sitting fallow.
And there was a political fight going onbetween the town government, the city
(15:24):
government, and this company that owns theproperty, over whether the company was
doing well enough to try to get it reused.
And they insisted that, to this day,that they're doing everything they can.
And the city was saying theyaren't trying very hard.
Well, this perked my interest.
So I did some research as to howthe economy is doing overall.
(15:48):
And it's a very mixed picture.
I mean, obviously thisblank piece of land that used to be the
heart of the economy is still whatI call a psychic and economic
wound in the middle of town.
But otherwise, Janesvillehas recovered fairly well.
I mean, it's a veryresilient, persistent place.
You shouldn't generalise about places, butI met a lot of people
(16:10):
who had those qualities.
And what I found was that the unemploymentrate was as low as it is now
in most of the United States.
The percentage of the labour force thatwas actually working, I mean, labour age
people that was actuallyworking was very very good.
(16:31):
Some new jobs had come to town,but there were differences.
There aren't many people makingwages as good as the old GM pay.
There are fewer jobs that are unionised,so they tend not to have as good benefits.
And the amount of work that consistsof manufacturing is substantially less.
(16:53):
So it's not like a ghost town.
The population hasn't fallen,but it's not doing perfectly.
Yeah, and when I was reading thepiece that you wrote on in 2024,
it did remind me of quite a lot of thestuff I've read about major cities
(17:13):
in the US, in London, across the world,which hollowed out during the pandemic,
and now are trying to find different waysto use the space that is left over
from the people that did leave.
It left a little bit of a mark for me.
So that's exactly right.
And what I came away thinking, and Ishould say This piece ran in the Financial
Times the beginning of last month.
(17:34):
It was the cover story in the weekendsection for anyone who was interested
in what we're talking about.
But what I ended up thinking was that ifJaneville was a pretty good metaphor for
what happened to certain communitiesduring the Great Recession,
it's still a good metaphor for what'shappened to the economy lately.
Yeah.
It's a way of showing that towns,places, cities, countries
(17:58):
find a way of bouncing back.
It may not be the old way of doing it,but they might find a new way of doing it.
Or a partial way of doing it.Yeah, exactly.
It's still a bit of way to go.
I mean, how has writing Janesville and thestories you encountered changed
your perspective of the American economy,the social issues and communities
you came across?
Well, I don't think it changedas much as deepened it.
(18:23):
I mean, one of the things we've alreadybeen talking about, which is that
falling out of the middle class isdifferent from having been poor all along.
And one of the things that I did, inaddition to getting to know a lot of folks
in town, I did a couple ofmore quantitative pieces of work, one of
which was a survey of just thecounty that Janesville is in.
(18:45):
And this was with some folks I got to knowat the University of Wisconsin
Survey Research Center.
And we wanted to take a look atwhat people's economic experiences and
perceptions were like five years afterall this economic that trauma happened.
And what was really striking is how manypeople told us that
(19:07):
if they or someone in their home haddirectly lost a job, which was a lot of
people, they were fightingwith their family.
They were avoiding social situations, theyfelt ashamed,
which was particularly striking since thiswas all going on at a time when
the nation, the United States, was goingthrough the worst economic time
(19:29):
since the Depression of the 1930s.
And a lot of their neighbours, right?
And Janesville experience the same thing.
But people take losingwork very, very personally.
And that's one of thethings that I learned.
Yeah.
Again, I haven't gotto the end of the book.
Is the message of the book that there ishope, or does that only come
when you went back in 2024?
(19:51):
Well, you'll have to finishthe book and find it.
I can't wait to finish it.
No, it's neither totallyup nor totally down.
Okay.
I just wanted to createa vivid portrait and let people
take away from it what they would.
Well, you've certainlyabsolutely achieved that.
Get in touch with us by email atschroderspodcasts@schroders.
(20:13):
Com or visit our website, schroders.
com/theinvestordownload.
We've been finishing these podcasts with alittle bit of reflection on
what the award, because you won the FTBusiness Book of the Year Award in 2017.
I want to start with first question, whatdo you think makes an award-winning book?
(20:36):
Well, in terms of writing books, I've gotsample size one, and
we're talking about it.
And I haven't been thejudge for this contest.
But I would say a couple of things.
A book that's about something that reallymatters in the world and is told
(20:56):
in a way that people can grasp.
In my case, I try to tell this storythrough the eyes of people who are going
through this hard experience andhope that people could identify with the
struggles of some of these people and theheroic efforts of some of these people.
So I think that matters.
I think being well-written mattersand having something to say.
(21:22):
And how has the award impacted yourcareer or the reception of your book?
Well, this made a big differencein the reception of my book.
I had beenalready doing a lot of travelling within
the United States,talking about this book at
universities and really bookstores and acouple of book festivals.
(21:51):
But after this book award, I startedgetting international invitations.
So I always say, Janesvillehas taken me far.
I spoke at the London School of Economics.
I spoke at the OECD Forum in Paris.
I spoke at book festivals inAustralia and New Zealand.
(22:12):
I mean, I've gotten around, andJanesville has gotten around.
And I think one of the things thatI've really been exposed to through these
travels is the subtitle ofmy book is An American Story.
The title is Janesville: An American Story. (22:25):
undefined
But what I've really learned, and youreferred to this at the very beginning of
our chat, is that the kinds of economicexperiences that this small city
has gone throughis not unique to the United States,
is not unique to Southern Wisconsin.
I remember being on a stage at a bookfestival in Sydney, Australia,
(22:49):
with a well-known journalist from thatcountry interviewing me as
part of this book festival.
And he was telling the audience aboutAustralian towns that had lost auto jobs.
As analogies.
And it really drove home that thisde-industrialisation
is not unique to any one country.
(23:10):
Yeah, absolutely.And did it...
You like, or me like you, did it give youa bit of appreciation of
this populism movement and why it'saccelerated so quickly
over the last few years?
Well, yes, but.
So the yes is that there are a lot ofpeople whose
personal financial and work circumstancesaren't what they used to be or
(23:34):
what they would hoped to be.
So that, one can understand, canfuel a populist political view.
My book came out in 2017, and peoplealways say, Oh, does your book help
explain the rise of Donald Trump?
Well, that's the no, because Janesvillehas stayed a Democratic-leaning place.
(23:56):
I mean, we'll see what happens in theelection this fall with fewer union
jobs in town than there used to be.
But it doesn't exactly explain whypeople pivoted to Donald Trump.
But I think it explains the disappointmentthat people in other communities that may
be more politically conservativefound a feeling.
(24:16):
Absolutely.
Obviously, we've been talking aboutthe personal stories within the book.
So this next question isprobably a bit obvious, but were there any
challenges or memorablemoments right in the book?
Because as I said, there are some quiteharrowing experiences
that you write about within the book.
Yes.
So one thing, whether we're talking aboutpeople who had extremely hard
(24:42):
experiences or just hard experiences,was winning the trust of a
place that wasn't my place.
I didn't get to know everybody inJanesville Wisconsin, but I got
to know a good number of people.
And other workers who had lost their jobsmight not be the stereotype of somebody
who's lining up to get publicity.
(25:08):
So I had time on my side,and I got to know people gradually, and I
didn't ask them thehardest questions first.
But it was really a process ofhoping that people would understand that I
was serious about this and really wantedto both understand their
(25:28):
experiences and portray it honestly.
So that was one level of hard.
I'm going to give you a second technicallevel of hard, which is, as I said, I
arrived in Janesville the summer of 2011.
The plant closed the end of 2008.
Now, I knew the story had to startin 2008, but I hadn't been around.
(25:50):
So I had to do enoughresearch and figuring things out so that
the parts of the story that predated myarrival on the scene felt equally vivid
to things I witnessed firsthand.
So that was a second layer of challenge.
Well, you certainly achieve everythingI think you set out to achieve.
So what is your one piece ofadvice for any aspiring writers?
(26:17):
Persist.
That's a one-word answer,but I'll try to explain it.
I had this notion that this was goingto be about a year-long project.
My book ended coming out almost sixyears after I had started this work.
And about a year and a quarter in,I had taken a
(26:39):
one year's book leave from the WashingtonPost, and I had an academic fellowship
and a little bit of grant funding.
So I was fine the first year,but I knew I had a lot more work to do.
So I took a second year off.
My editors at the Post atthe time were very kind.
I didn't have a book contract yet.
I didn't have much much of an income.
(27:01):
I didn't know how I was going to buy thetime to finish what I had started,
but I was deep into it already.
And I remember callinga mentor and a friend who was a very
eminent book authorand saying, "I don't know what to do here.
This is just a mess, and I don't know howto get into this and out of this."
(27:22):
And he said to me, You'vegot to find a way to do it.
He said, This matters.It matters to you.
I can hear that it matters to you.
And think what you're workingon is really worthwhile.
And whatever it takes,find a way to keep doing it.
I thought that was good advice.
Well, it definitely was.
I guess the obvious question is, if youknew it was going to take six years, would
(27:43):
you have started it in the first place?
Luckily, that's a hypotheticalI never had to address.
Brilliant.Excellent.
Well, I'm so glad you didbecause it is a fabulous book.
Amy Goldstein, thank youso much for joining us.
Thank you.
That was show.We very much hope you enjoyed it.
You can subscribe to the investordownload wherever you get your podcast.
(28:06):
And if you want to get in touch withus, it's schroderspodcasts@schroders.
Com.
And you can find out much,much more at schroders.
com/insights.
New shows drop every otherThursday at 05:00 PM UK time.
In the meantime, keep safe and go well.
The value of investments and the incomefrom them may go down as well as up, and
(28:28):
investors may not get back theamounts originally invested.
Past performance is not aguide to future performance.
Information is not an offer, solicitation,or recommendation of any funds, services,
or products, or to adoptany investment strategy.
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