Reskilling

The question of how to soften the blow of recession is one of the most complex, and retraining has traditionally been the only answer on which all parties can agree. At the time of the GM closure, Janesville-born Paul Ryan, now Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, and then president Barack Obama were unlikely allies as cheerleaders for “reskilling”. But the local people charged with channelling often generous public subsidies to those who need new skills knew “a grittier, ground-level truth”, writes Goldstein: “Retraining laid-off factory workers is not easy.”

Sharon Kennedy, who led the programme at Janesville’s Blackhawk Technical College, laid out some of the obstacles in her own 2013 account. She wrote how Blackhawk was “unprepared for the unpreparedness” of new students to use computers and in many cases had to provide hands-on assistance to help them navigate the maze of applications for training.

Goldstein ran what she described to me as “microcosmic” research into the fate of Janesville’s workers and confirmed an even more worrying truth. The obvious political solution of retraining what US welfare jargon calls “dislocated workers” was ineffective.