Hard times hit Janesville as GM plant winds down

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The last General Motors sport utility vehicle will roll off the assembly line here two days before Christmas, but the hard times caused by the plant’s closing have already begun.

Thirteen teachers and about 80 children are spending their last days at the Just in Time for Kids Child Care Center, which will shut down Dec. 31.

Business is down at least 20 percent at Prime Time Pizza, where two shifts of GM workers once ordered up to 40 pizzas a day.

Zoxx 411 Club, a bar in the factory’s shadow, has cut back from four bartenders during workday lunch hours to two per day. Third-generation owner Andy Sigwell, 40, is trying to lure in new customers with dart leagues and big-screen televisions.

“GM was the town, not so long ago,” said Bob Clapper, president of Fagan Chevrolet-Cadillac. “If you didn’t work there, you were related to someone who did.”

His dealership once sold 2,000 vehicles in a year, with many going to GM workers. This year, it sold 800 autos through October.

“We’re watching every expense,” Clapper said. “We cut our advertising. We’ve cut our inventory. We’ll probably have a few less employees.”

GM has been cutting back the plant’s work force for years, but the shutdown comes amid a recession that could become the nation’s greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The Big Three automakers — GM, Ford and Chrysler — are fighting for their survival.

“The timing is horrendous,” said Steve Deller, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He estimates the closure could cost Rock County nearly 9,000 jobs, with the plant closing affecting everything from construction to health services.

A skeleton crew will remain in Janesville after the last full-sized General Motors SUV is assembled Dec. 23. That will finish off a small joint venture producing trucks for Isuzu. But most of the plant’s 1,200 workers will join 3,000 others in the area who have lost auto-related jobs since June.

“I think it’s going to be pretty quiet around here,” said Devon Bliss, 36, who was laid off by a GM supplier in July.

“You’ll see a lot of people getting out of Dodge,” Bliss said. “A lot of people will be looking for a job, and there aren’t any around.”

He took a $9 per hour pay cut to get a job on the night shift at GOEX Corp., a plastic sheet manufacturer. His wife, Tami, 33, still has a job in the records department at Rock County’s Human Services Department, and they plan to stay in town.

But they’re cutting back on groceries and Christmas presents for their two children, Savannah, 5, and Nathan, 1. They’ve also borrowed a vehicle from their parents since they couldn’t make the payments on a year-old car and had to give it up.

“Our 5-year-old kept her dance class but not many other extracurricular activities,” Tami Bliss said. “She would love to go bowling, would love to go to the movies, but we can’t do that. I also watch our grocery bills every week. I meal-plan so I’m not spending a lot on groceries and extra stuff. We just don’t have it.”

Patricia Torner, 46, isn’t sure she’ll stay when her job as a pipe fitter at the Janesville plant ends. Divorced and raising her 10-year-old granddaughter, Torner said she’ll take a job transfer to another GM plant if she can get it.

If not, she’ll try to finish the 56 college credit hours she needs toward an undergraduate degree in psychology and social work as quickly as possible.

Torner took her granddaughter on a tour of the plant last month, when the so-called Heritage Days provided a last chance for the general public to see the assembly line run.

“As we’re riding around the plant, I’m waving to people I know and I thought, this is it, this is truly it,” Torner said. “It brought me to tears. I realized at that moment, we’re done.”