美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Janesville' Looks At A Factory Town After The Factory Shuts Down

 

RAY SUAREZ, HOST:

All eyes turn to the Rust¹ Belt where three states that voted for Democratic candidates since the 1980s helped Donald Trump² win the election. Wisconsin hadn't given its electoral votes to a Republican since 1984. It was key to Trump's surprising win. Republicans said Trump's promises to bring back manufacturing jobs won over working-class voters.

That's not exactly what Amy Goldstein saw. She's a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post, and she's been visiting one factory town in Wisconsin for the past six years. Her new book "Janesville: An American Story" is about what she found. Welcome to the program.

AMY GOLDSTEIN: Thank you for having me.

SUAREZ: A lot of a reporter's life is really more like parachuting into people's lives, getting what you need and then leaving. You decided³ to do something more like embedding⁴. What drew you in?

GOLDSTEIN: Well, I began thinking as the Great Recession was ending - 2009, a little bit after that in 2010 - that there was a lot of writing going on about whether the country's economic policies were working. And there was a lot of writing about voter anger, voter anxiety, and I realized that there wasn't a lot of writing that was putting the two together.

So I had this idea of taking a real close-up look at what was going on in one community that had lost a slew⁵ of jobs to try to find out what losing work really meant to people and to a community.

SUAREZ: You know, at first blush that sounds like an old story - a town where one big employer really dominates the town economically. Help us understand how important the General Motors factory was to Janesville.

GOLDSTEIN: Well, this General Motors assembly plant when it closed at the end of 2008 had been the oldest operating General Motors plant in the country. It had begun turning out tractors in 1919 and then began making Chevrolets in 1923. There were generations of people for whom this was the best working-class work in town. And it was good work. I mean, at the end, General Motors was paying its UAW workers $28 an hour and really good benefits. This is what had been going on for a long time in Janesville, and it's what people had thought would continue.

SUAREZ: If you've heard of Janesville before, it might be because of Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House who talks about growing up there often. Here he is at a campaign event in Cleveland during his 2012 vice⁶ presidential run on Mitt⁷ Romney's ticket.

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PAUL RYAN: I come from a town that has been hit as hard as any. A lot of guys I grew up with worked at the GM plant in my hometown, and they lost their jobs when that plant was closed. But what happened next - our town pulled together. Our churches and charities and friends and neighbors were there for one another. In textbooks, they call this civil society. I know it as Janesville, Wis.

SUAREZ: It's an important part of Paul Ryan's worldview - isn't it? - that it's not government that we should look to in times of crisis but each other. How did that play out in Janesville?

GOLDSTEIN: Well, Paul Ryan is deeply embedded⁸ in his hometown. As he puts it, he's fifth generation Janesville, and he had neighbors who he knew were losing their jobs. I mean, so this was pretty personal to him. But he has a worldview in which government is not the solution, and he really believes that there should be a layer of help in communities between the individual and the government, a layer of philanthropy.

And Janesville, I found, is a pretty philanthropic place. There are lots of fundraisers going on all the time for little nonprofits in town. But what I also found was that during this time when so much work had gone away, the need was rising and the amount of fundraising wasn't keeping up.

SUAREZ: We talked to one of the people you profiled in the book, Robert Borremans, who was running the Rock County job center when the GM plant closed. He led efforts to retrain factory workers and get them new careers, and it wasn't easy.

ROBERT BORREMANS: I remember one interview I did. A guy said my wife is going to have to go down to Fort Wayne, and it's not fair. I just want her to have her old job back, and we knew that wasn't going to happen.

SUAREZ: When he says Fort Wayne, by the way, he means Fort Wayne, Ind., which is a five-hour drive from Janesville. So there were GM gypsies heading to work during the week and then coming home on weekends, but not looking to move to Indiana. Why wouldn't they leave Janesville?

GOLDSTEIN: You know, there's kind of this mythos in this country sort of this theoretical idea that when work goes away in one place, well, people should just go to where work still exists. And what I found is that in Janesville, at least, which is a place where people really have roots and have extended families, people don't want to leave town.

So some of these former Janesville assembly workers made big sacrifices to keep their family income going by taking these jobs far away working in, as you say, Indiana and farther away in Texas and Kansas and coming home as best they can. And I've heard some of these people say they stay, say, in Fort Wayne, but their home is in Janesville.

SUAREZ: One of the most difficult parts to read was how upskilling and retraining and going back to community college didn't really change the outcomes for a lot of these workers.

GOLDSTEIN: It's a very popular idea that people who lose work should go to school and reinvent themselves. And it's striking that it's one of the few economic ideas in which both Democrats⁹ and Republicans tend to put stock. So I wanted to look at what was really happening. If you think about it, factory workers going back to school having lost their jobs, I mean - they were scared about studying. They were scared about how they were going to put dinner on the table. They were scared about what was going to come next. I mean, this was a pretty traumatic time.

And for these people to have to start studying on top of it all, it was a pretty big challenge. So what I looked at with the help of a couple of good labor¹⁰ economists¹¹ was what did the data show? And it turned out that, you know, not today, but if you looked a few years out from when these jobs went away, on balance people who went back to school at the small technical college were less likely to have steady work all seasons of the year compared to people who had not retrained. And if you looked at their income from before the Great Recession to then, their income drops were greater.

SUAREZ: What did Janesville do when it came time to pick a president in 2016?

GOLDSTEIN: Well, it's interesting because, as you were saying at the beginning, Wisconsin went Republican for the first time in a long time. But Janesville and the county in which it is did not. I mean, this is a long time Democratic identified county. And in 2012, it had gone for Barack Obama for re-election 62 percent. This time in 2016, it voted 52 percent for Hillary Clinton. And if you look at the raw numbers, what is interesting is that it wasn't as if there were people shifting from Democratic voters to Republican voters.

There were almost no additional Republican votes, but the Democratic turnout had declined significantly. And the way I think about this - I mean, there's obviously a lot of talk these days about the role of the working class in putting Donald Trump in the White House. And the way that I've come to think about this is that the kind of economic experiences that people have had in Janesville are the same kinds of experiences that people have had elsewhere in less democratic places. And those experiences in other places perhaps motivated some people to vote for President Trump.

SUAREZ: Well, this book is the culmination¹² of many years of work. Are you done with Janesville? Is Janesville done with you?

GOLDSTEIN: Well, I'm going to be in Janesville next weekend...

SUAREZ: So I guess not (laughter).

GOLDSTEIN: ...Talking with people at the public library about this work that I've done and how grateful I am that they let me get to know their town.

SUAREZ: Amy Goldstein is a reporter for The Washington Post and the author of "Janesville: An American Story." Amy, thanks for talking to us.

GOLDSTEIN: Thanks for having me.

1 rust   

n.锈；v.生锈；(脑子)衰退

参考例句：

• She scraped the rust off the kitchen knife.她擦掉了菜刀上的锈。
• The rain will rust the iron roof.雨水会使铁皮屋顶生锈。

2 trump   

n.王牌，法宝；v.打出王牌，吹喇叭

参考例句：

• He was never able to trump up the courage to have a showdown.他始终鼓不起勇气摊牌。
• The coach saved his star player for a trump card.教练保留他的明星选手，作为他的王牌。

3 decided   

adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的

参考例句：

• This gave them a decided advantage over their opponents.这使他们比对手具有明显的优势。
• There is a decided difference between British and Chinese way of greeting.英国人和中国人打招呼的方式有很明显的区别。

4 embedding   

把…嵌入，埋入( embed的现在分词 )； 植入； 埋置； 包埋

参考例句：

• Data embedding in scrambled Digital video complete source code, has been tested. 数据嵌入在炒数字视频完整的源代码，已经过测试。
• Embedding large portions of C++ code in string literals is very awkward. 将大部分C++代码嵌入到字符串中是非常笨拙的。

5 slew   

v.（使）旋转；n.大量，许多

参考例句：

• He slewed the car against the side of the building.他的车滑到了大楼的一侧，抵住了。
• They dealt with a slew of other issues.他们处理了大量的其他问题。

6 vice   

n.坏事；恶习；[pl.]台钳，老虎钳；adj.副的

参考例句：

• He guarded himself against vice.他避免染上坏习惯。
• They are sunk in the depth of vice.他们堕入了罪恶的深渊。

7 mitt   

n.棒球手套，拳击手套，无指手套；vt.铐住，握手

参考例句：

• I gave him a baseball mitt for his birthday.为祝贺他的生日，我送给他一只棒球手套。
• Tom squeezed a mitt and a glove into the bag.汤姆把棒球手套和手套都塞进袋子里。

8 embedded   

a.扎牢的

参考例句：

• an operation to remove glass that was embedded in his leg 取出扎入他腿部玻璃的手术
• He has embedded his name in the minds of millions of people. 他的名字铭刻在数百万人民心中。

9 democrats   

n.民主主义者，民主人士( democrat的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The Democrats held a pep rally on Capitol Hill yesterday. 民主党昨天在国会山召开了竞选誓师大会。
• The democrats organize a filibuster in the senate. 民主党党员组织了阻挠议事。 来自《简明英汉词典》

10 labor   

n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦

参考例句：

• We are never late in satisfying him for his labor.我们从不延误付给他劳动报酬。
• He was completely spent after two weeks of hard labor.艰苦劳动两周后，他已经疲惫不堪了。

11 economists   

n.经济学家，经济专家( economist的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The sudden rise in share prices has confounded economists. 股价的突然上涨使经济学家大惑不解。
• Foreign bankers and economists cautiously welcomed the minister's initiative. 外国银行家和经济学家对部长的倡议反应谨慎。 来自《简明英汉词典》

12 culmination   

n.顶点；最高潮

参考例句：

• The space race reached its culmination in the first moon walk.太空竞争以第一次在月球行走而达到顶峰。
• It may truly be regarded as the culmination of classical Greek geometry.这确实可以看成是古典希腊几何的登峰造级之作。