GM ghost town.

• Author: Bybee, Roger
• Position: General Motors Co.'s facility shutdown in Janesville, Wisconsin - Essay

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Janesville is a southern Wisconsin community of tastefully colored Victorian painted ladies and weather-beaten frame homes. The picturesque Rock River winds through the heart of this city of 62,000.

But in the last year, Janesville's tranquility has been shattered by the shutdown of GM's sprawling assembly plant. And the Obama Administration's purported efforts to revive the auto industry, rather than instilling hope, are generating fear among UAW workers and retirees alike.

"Everyone is kind of in a state of depression," says Chuck Huhn, a soft-spoken fifty-one-year-old United Auto Workers Local 95 member who last year retired after thirty-two years at GM. "I guess what bothers me most is the waiting, not knowing what is going to happen. It's the waiting and the thinking about it all the time."

The GM plant in Janesville died a slow death. In the early 1990s, when SUVs were booming, it employed as many as 5,500 production workers. GM shuttered its Janesville plant right before Christmas last year, throwing the remaining 2,400 employees out on the street.

The Obama Administration's auto task force rejected General Motors' restructuring plan submitted on February 17, which called for more plant closings, more mass layoffs, and an increased reliance on cars built in Mexico, China, and Korea. The task force demanded "more drastic restructuring." GM came back in April with a plan for more cuts.

The Obama Administration seems intent on either forcing GM to go into bankruptcy and win court-imposed concessions on retiree benefits, or squeezing the UAW to accede to such sacrifices by a June 1 deadline, according to auto-industry expert Dan Luria, research director of the Michigan Manufacturing Technical Center.

For GM retirees in Janesville and elsewhere, that could translate into reduced benefits.

"I'm very concerned about the possibility of losing pension and health benefits," says Huhn. If that happens, he and his wife would have a hard time paying for their daughter's education at the University of Wisconsin. Huhn supplements his early-retirement pension by working a temporary job with the U.S. Census Bureau. He's been actively looking for full-time work in both Janesville and Madison, forty-five minutes away, but has found nothing.

"The job market is just dead," he says ruefully.

The UAW is deeply concerned about the fate of retirees. "Cutbacks in retiree health care would fly in the face of President Obama's program...