Janesville, city of 63 in Wisconsin, United States, is far from Turin. Or from Taranto or other industrial places in decline in our peninsula. Geography places her far away but her human dramas are close and damn similar to those of thousands and thousands of Italians and Europeans. This is a good reason not to remain in the dark about what has happened over there in the last decade and read the story of Amy Goldstein, journalist of the The Washington Post, on what happened in the city before and after the hits of the 2008 crisis (Janesville. An American story, LUISS, 24 euros).
It is a mosaic narration, which brings together the automobile industry scene with the political scene of the state, Wisconsin, with that of the Union, the USA. The individual family and domestic events, the personal anxieties and sufferings of men, women and children detach themselves from the background scene. We readers enter Janesville houses, kitchens and bedrooms, to follow the torments that the loss of dignity entails, generated by the end of work; to witness the fall into poverty, a precipice that cannot be avoided and cannot be resisted by the will of redemption and by the innumerable relief and recovery programs, as well as by philanthropy. Why does the closure of a factory turn into a cataclysm that penetrates so deeply? The reason is only one: this is not a crisis like any other, but one of the episodes of the collapse of an era, the era of industry in the Western world.
In fact, the day before Christmas 2008 General Motors SUV assembly plant closes in Janesville, the result of the devastating crisis that will spread from the United States to the whole world. The inhabitants of the city, workers and workers of all kinds, entrepreneurs and merchants are not new to the ups and downs of the economy. Here in Janesville, industry took off early, starting in the second half of the XNUMXth century. The Parker pen was born here, here lies the great interstate auto district, which has its central hub in Detroit. Over the decades, certain establishments have closed and then reopened, certain products have faded, giving way to others, technologies have changed but Janesville remained an industrial city.
So the closure of 2008 is a disastrous but not fatal event, at least that's how it is perceived in the sensitivity of most of the city's workers. Healed, reversed the negative situation, the factory will reopen the gates. So, with an aptitude for change and a habit of mobility that are uniquely American prerogatives, we will start over with optimism and confidence.
That's what he believes too Paul Ryan, young rising star of the Republican Party, born and raised in Janesville, Congressman in Washington, who immediately mobilizes and will end up threatening the head of GM, Rick Wagoner: the Janesville factory must reopen, one way or another. Heads of families, trade unionists, philanthropists, banks are immediately mobilized, these are not people who wait for charity and indeed would be ashamed of it; it does not ask, but offers its strength, its intelligence to the economy. They are people used to getting busy and above all they are middle class, educated, aware, independent.
This is one of the most interesting and at the same time most moving aspects of Amy Goldstein's story, the story of the loss of a social and personal condition that gives way to nothing. Until that day in 2008, a worker in the GM assembly factory earned about 28 dollars an hour, paid the mortgage on the house with a garden, perhaps with a swimming pool, where he lives and which will be all his, owned several cars, perhaps even a snowmobile and a quad, a camper. The family took the holidays, some sporting and recreational activity, paid for the children's college, all the more easily if two incomes entered. In short, Janesville it is a middle class placeself-confident and confident in the future of their children.
It is a certain fact that those who were born poor and get used to poverty, get by and are not too ashamed to resort to subsidies, to resort to charity or to tighten their belts. Instead, those who have tasted their ability to settle in well-being face the economic collapse in a highly dramatic way, as demonstrated by the story of the families of these jobless workers, canceled by GM.
In fact, good will is not enough if the factory does not reopen and if the conversion does not take place. After the SUV factory, suppliers close down, such as Lear who built the seats. It's not enough to enroll in college in your forties, studying hard, getting a degree, applying for a job, looking on the internet for new capital and other initiatives, futuristic start-ups with associated salaries if they don't arrive in the city. Bob Borremans, director of the employment office, discovers it with dismay, who has never been faced with such a total blockage of job offers and, on the other hand, an avalanche of applications from the unemployed.
The Whiteaker family, among others, discovers that it's not enough to wear out clothes, narrow down the menu, sell the camper, shop at the discount store, spend on occasional jobs. Selling the house? To whom, if the real estate market collapsed? The middle class, once self-confident families, discover hunger. So much so that Deri Wahlert sets up a supply room at the high school, where kids can find food stored there by those who have more, and can draw on it discreetly, almost in secret, without suffering shame. Under this enormous pressure, families fall apart, and Ann Forbeck scrambles to offer shelter to abandoned children who sleep on the street at night and fast during the day.
For Mary Willmer, who directs the M&I Bank, it is urgent to set up alternative projects, find capital, welcome ideas, launch start-ups, start over. You search and find capital, but with few and very slow results, not enough to give new life to the economic life of the city. Mike Vaughn, after eighteen years at the Lear of seats, adapts to the transfer to GM in Fort Wayne, Indiana, hundreds of miles from home, away from the family who, however, secures with his salary. For Alyssa and Kayza Whiteaker, daughters of Jerad, a worker at GM for thirteen years, adolescence has just begun and is already over: they finish high school dividing themselves between study and a job or several jobs, they eat thanks to charity, they save for college. They'll make it, and they'll graduate.
The working-class Wopat dynasty, engaged in the union for two generations, helplessly witnesses the disaster that evaporates work, destroys the social fabric, calls into question the ancient solidarities, wounds identity and shatters relationships. And the «history of the deindustrialization of the greatest industrial power» as Ferdinando Fasce writes in the afterword, but "seen from below" or observed in the living flesh of people who suffer and do not give up (except for Kristi Beyer, thirteen years at Lear, then a college student, then a prison guard and finally suicidal) but they are however destined for a much worse life than the one they knew before 2008.
Not the powerful. The powerful dodge the damage and are still doing well, very well and certainly better than that people of workers who have not avoided sending to the massacre. Paul Ryan occupies a prominent place on the national political scene, has unsuccessfully aspired to the White House, is far from his native Janesville in mind and heart. Rick Wagoner, the head of GM, is fired in 2009 after he shuts down fourteen more factories, rich in $10 million in severance pay, plus $1 million in annual premiums for the first five years of retirement, plus $65 in his pension a year and a $74 million life insurance policy. Without indulging in moralism, it must be acknowledged that those responsible for the fate of millions of people, the industrial, financial and political leaders, have paid no price for their reckless ambition, for their greed, but have passed it on to helpless people and future generations.
Apart from the emotion that the stories of Janesville arouse in the reader, Amy Goldstein gives us some reflections on such a catastrophe, useful to provide for those that could follow (now, twelve years after the Janesville affair, the setback of the Covid19 pandemic has intervened). Is the advanced world, until recently wealthy, equipped to face the disappearance of work, the disintegration of the social fabric that this entails? One would say not, the disgruntled masses and angry young people fill the squares (and bars, discos, beaches). If it weren't for a political-administrative system that doesn't work, we Italians – unlike the middle class of Janesville in 2008 – have in recent memory an epic of redemption that goes by the name of an economic miracle.
The grandparents went through it, and they don't forget that that "miracle" was simply the fruit of the freedom to get busy, to bear the hard work, to hope for a better world. Era the result of the industriousness and intelligence of people of flesh and blood, those that in Janesville as elsewhere are underestimated, mortified, liquidated. Of course, we need capital, we need technologies, we need to look at the markets. But without the human factor all this is useless.
