* Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award Winner * A New York Times Notable Book * NPR Best Books of 2017 “A gripping story of psychological defeat and resilience” (Bob Woodward, The Washington Post)–an intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle … and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class.
This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its main factory shuts down–but it’s not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay around long enough to notice what happens next when a community with a can-do spirit tries to pick itself up.
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Amy Goldstein spent years immersed in Janesville, Wisconsin, where the nation’s oldest operating General Motors assembly plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession. Now, with intelligence, sympathy, and insight into what connects and divides people in an era of economic upheaval, Goldstein shows the consequences of one of America’s biggest political issues. Her reporting takes the reader deep into the lives of autoworkers, educators, bankers, politicians, and job re-trainers to show why it’s so hard in the twenty-first century to recreate a healthy, prosperous working class.
“Moving and magnificently well-researched…Janesville joins a growing family of books about the evisceration of the working class in the United States. What sets it apart is the sophistication of its storytelling and analysis” (Jennifer Senior, The New York Times).
“Anyone tempted to generalize about the American working class ought to meet the people in Janesville. The reporting behind this book is extraordinary and the story–a stark, heartbreaking reminder that political ideologies have real consequences–is told with rare sympathy and insight” (Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of a New Machine).more
This was my book club book for July. I read the description and wasn’t very excited. The author did a GREAT job in the way she wrote the book. It really pulls you in and keeps you interested to see what will happen to the families and people involved. It gives a look at what happens from a personal perspective when a town loses the big employers in town. So much better than I ever would have guessed!
Janesville is the true story of the leaving of General Motors from the town in Wisconsin. Rather than be a dry book, the author, Amy Goldstein, pulls you into the tale by following people who lost their jobs related to the closing of General Motors. It follows not only employees of GM but those working for companies which made items for use by GM. You feel the frustration, dashed hopes, and efforts by the people and the community. The tenacity of the people of that city will marvel you and how the community rose to help those impacted is a true tale of what community is. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the recession of 2007 and the personal impact on people and towns.
“History. Vision. Grit.” Janesville City Hall Mural
Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein has won many accolades, including 100 Notable Books in 2017 from the New York Times Book Review and the McKinsey Business Book of the Year.
Goldstein presents the story of a town and its people coping with the closing of the GM factory and how the town and families worked to reinvent themselves.
Janesville, WI was a tight-knit community with a successful history of factories beginning with cotton mills in the late 19th c, including Parker Pens and the GM auto assembly plant and the factories that supplied it.
The book covers five years, beginning in 2008 with Paul Ryan, a Janesville native, receiving the phone call from GM informing him of their decision to close the Janesville plant. Goldstein portrays the impact on employees and their families: the cascading job losses, the ineffectual retraining programs, the engulfing poverty, the men who take employment at plants in other states and see their families a few hours a week, teenagers working to help keep food on the table while preparing for college.
This is one of those non-fiction books that is engrossing while being informative, bringing readers into the struggles, successes, and failures of individual families. If you want to know about the people who have lost the American Dream, the impact of business and political decisions, and what programs ‘work’ and which have not delivered, then Janesville is for you.
There is a dark side to the American Dream: the fact that for the last almost 30 years the purchasing power and earnings per hour of the blue collar American worker have been far behind the rise in wealth and living cost. The working poor instead of the middle class is the new normal in America. People who live paycheck to paycheck and have little or nothing squandered away for a rainy day.
Janesville paints a tragic picture of how this happened as the industrial might of the US migrated to other countries with lower costs. Those are jobs that will not be brought back and which raise the still unsolved question of how to do all these displaced workers find a place in the workforce that pays living wages.
The book goes deep into looking at what are the actual results of the idea that all that these workers need is to be retrained and they will find new better paying jobs. Unfortunately the conclusion is that the outcome is better for those workers who do not go into retraining and simply look for another opportunity.
As Buffett has said before “it’s never paid to bet against America” but this is a problem that demands all of America’s ingenuity to get the country on its feet again.