An industrial town's struggle to rebuild a prosperous working class

“A weight pressed on him, the kind of weight that presses hard on a man who is on the cusp of his fifth decade when he discovers that doing everything right is not enough.”

Mike started by laying out the benefits of electric power distribution. But the more he talked, the more he felt he needed to be a straight shooter with these guys who already had lost so much. The truth was, he had to admit, not many of his Blackhawk graduates got jobs last year.

“If I were you guys and had an opportunity to get GM wages,” the instructor said, “I would run and not look back.” That was when Matt understood that the option he’d rejected was the only choice he had left. He couldn’t even call it a choice, because he felt that it had all come down to either Fort Wayne or possible bankruptcy, and responsible men don’t file for bankruptcy.

As his mind churned on this jam he was in, he could find no one to blame. Not the instructor who was just leveling with him. Or the government, dutifully paying for classes for a job he might never get. Not GM, shelling out for his benefits even as the company had gone bankrupt itself. Not even himself, because every time he’d rethought the exceedingly hard question of whether he had missed a clue, whether he had overlooked some narrow passageway that would have led him out of the maze, he had come to the conclusion that he had not.

Nine weeks of classes to go before he was to get his diploma, Matt left school.

So now, in less than 24 hours, he would be working at a GM plant he’d never seen in a city he’d never visited. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do less, or anything he needed to do more.

It won’t be so bad, he had told his family. He would be back every weekend.

Now, sitting in the Sierra with his hand on the gear shift, it was time to pull out of the garage and head south into Illinois, past the Belvidere Chrysler plant — not hiring, of course — and then east into Indiana, where he would crash on the couch of another Janesville GM’er because Matt didn’t have a clue where he was going to live.

Plan A, Plan B or whatever plan it took, he would at least be the man he’d always understood himself to be: Who would rather put himself out than his family. Who always kept his word when he said he’d do a job. Who understood that,
to protect his family, he had to leave them.

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