Engage Wisconsin

In 2005, General Motors (GM)’s oldest manufacturing plant, located in Janesville, Wisconsin, produced its 16 millionth vehicle. The plant had been producing vehicles since 1919 and had long been the largest employer in Janesville, a city of 60,000. “GM was the town,” one area Chevrolet-Cadillac dealer recently said. “If you didn’t work there, you were related to someone who did.”

In 1990, the Janesville GM plant started building full-size SUVs and then later medium-duty trucks. But by early 2008, the price of fuel was rapidly rising and consumer demand was shifting toward more fuel-efficient vehicles. Slow sales and concerns about the long-term viability of SUVs led GM to announce it would eliminate the second shift in Janesville, laying off 750 workers. Then in June 2008, more news shocked the state: GM announced it would discontinue all manufacturing in Janesville. The doors of the plant officially closed on December 23, 2008, leaving 2,600 workers unemployed.

That would have been bad enough for Janesville, but the ripple effect made things worse. According to the Institute for Research on Labor, Employment, and the Economy at the University of Michigan, “Each manufacturing job that is lost through an automotive plant closure causes at least 5 additional jobs to be lost in the region via the supply chain, in commercial, retail and service sectors, as well as local units of government, school system and in other public and private sector organizations.”

In fact, all of Rock County, where Janesville is located, took an economic hit. In 2007, before the plant’s closure, the unemployment rate was 5.6% and comparable to other parts of the state. But by June 2009, the unemployment rate skyrocketed to 13.2%. Lear Operations Corporation (made car seats for the plant), Logistic Services, Inc. (made parts) and Allied Automotive Trucking (transported vehicles to dealerships) all reduced their workforces. Across the country, businesses that relied on GM’s round-the-clock workforce suddenly were without customers.

Today, almost two years since the plant closed, Janesville is trying to pick itself back up as a community. Unemployment is down to 11%, a small change from previous months, but indicative nonetheless that dislocated workers are slowly beginning to move on. With the end of GM’s 99-week unemployment benefits coming to an end soon, many are going back to school to develop new skills and begin fresh career paths. Others are transferring to work at different GM plants or retiring. Regardless of the choices that individuals are making, their common goal is to find a new and stable norm for the lives of their families and for themselves.

The JANESVILLE STORYTELLING PROJECT has been inspired by Digital Nation, a Frontline documentary, and Milwaukee-based 371 Production’s As Goes Janesville. Wisconsin Public Television’s EngageWisconsin team seeks to give a face to the current, post-GM situation in Janesville; to give the community a chance to respond to that negative press from the recent past, which frequently depicted Janesville as a permanently ruined city; and to explore the relationship of technology and people within a Mid-American city in flux.

As the EngageWisconsin team produces this project, you can join us Behind-The-Scene through dispatches posted by our journalists. Click here to see an archive of JANESVILLE STORYTELLING PROJECT dispatches.

PARTICIPATE: If you are a resident of Janesville, Wisconsin, or Rock County and you’re interested in sharing your story or the story of your business or organization, please contact Zahra Haider via email – zahra.haider@engagewisconsin.org – for more information. More specifically, we are also looking for high school students who might be interested in using a Flip camera to interview their family, friends, and neighbors to tell the story of their life in Janesville.

ABOUT DIGITAL NATION, A FRONTLINE DOCUMENTARY – Over a single generation, the Web and digital media have remade nearly every aspect of modern culture, transforming the way we work, learn and connect in ways that we’re only beginning to understand. FRONTLINE producer Rachel Dretzin (Growing Up Online) teams up with one of the leading thinkers of the digital age, Douglas Rushkoff (The Persuaders, Merchants of Cool), to continue to explore life on the virtual frontier. The film is the product of a unique collaboration with visitors to the Digital Nation Web site, who for the past year have been able to react to the work in progress and post their own stories online. Dretzin and her team report from the front lines of digital culture — from love affairs blossoming in virtual worlds, to the thoroughly wired classrooms of the future, to military bases where the Air Force is fighting a new form of digital warfare. Along the way, they begin to map the critical ways that technology is transforming us — and what we may be learning about ourselves in the process.

ABOUT (UN)EMPLOYED IN A DIGITAL NATION, A WPT FRONTLINE DIGITAL STORYTELLING PROJECT -- WPT set out to work with the Rock County Job Center and the local Auto Worker’s Union to document the stories of General Motor’s displaced workers as they navigated technology in their new found unemployed status. A special community is created in a company town like Janesville, because so many residents interact professionally and socially around that common denominator. When a plant and its interdependent businesses close, that community collapses. Workers are not just unemployed—with all the dislocation and distress that that brings—they are disconnected from one another. And so the social fabric of the community disintegrates. Through video diaries (recorded on Flip cameras) and interviews of recently displaced workers, we were able to her the stories of Main Street America navigating technology in a new way. This was part one of the Janesville Storytelling Project and will be absorbed into and highlighted within part two, due to launch in the fall of 2010.

As Goes Janesville is a film currently in production by Brad Lichtenstein’s 371 Productions (Milwaukee, Wisconsin). Lichtenstein and his team are following the story of how the community of Janesville, Wisconsin, recovers and reinvents itself after the loss of its century-old General Motors plant. The film is scheduled for broadcast on PBS in 2012.