GM worker preserves job, perseveres 1,000-mile commute

February 25, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

JANESVILLE, Wis. (AP) — In the early dawn, after another week building cars, Michael Hanley leaves his job in Kansas. He quickly zips into Missouri, then heads up a ribbon of highway past grain silos and grazing deer, across the frozen fields of Iowa, over the Mississippi River and into the rolling hills of Wisconsin.

Finally, he pulls into his driveway — 530 miles later.

It’s one heck of a haul: more than 1,000 miles round trip, 16-plus hours of driving, every week.

“I like to say I gave up an eight-minute commute for an eight-hour commute,” he says wearily, running a hand though salt-and-pepper hair as he watches his two sons play basketball for the first time this season.

After the aging General Motors plant where he worked for 23 years was idled about a year ago, Hanley faced a Hobson’s choice: Stay with his family and search for an autoworker’s salary ($28 an hour) in a county where more than 40 percent of its manufacturing jobs disappeared from 2006 to 2009. Or hang on to his GM paycheck and health insurance and follow the job, no matter where it leads.

In his case, it led to Fairfax, Kan., the same place his brother and two brothers-in-law — also GM workers, and now his roommates — landed. For others, it has been Indiana or Texas.

The long commute is not just a story of hard times, tough choices and a shrinking American auto industry. It’s also a case study of what happens when an aging industrial town loses an anchor, when workers too old to start over and too young to retire are caught in a squeeze and when economic survival means one family, but two far-flung ZIP codes.

Hanley is not one to complain.

“GM has been good for us,” he says. “This whole town knows that.”

For 90 years, the sprawling plant — it started out building tractors — became a different kind of family business. Through the decades, sons followed fathers onto the line, sometimes rubbing shoulders as they built Chevrolet Cavaliers, Caprices, Tahoes, Suburbans and more.

Hanley’s father and brother worked there. So did his father-in-law, two brothers-in-law and an assortment of uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews.

But as GM’s financial troubles mounted, car and SUV sales fell and gas prices climbed, the automaker closed several plants, eliminating thousands of jobs.

Janesville — then the oldest of GM assembly plants — ended production of SUVs in December 2008, months before the automaker received billions of dollars in government loans and filed for bankruptcy. (The factory is on standby status; some hold out hope it will reopen one day.)

Some of about 1,200 remaining workers took buyouts or retired; some began new careers. Hundreds more stayed with GM, relocating, commuting or just waiting for an opening. The automaker has about 6,500 laid-off workers nationwide.

Even before the doors closed, Hanley began preparing for life after GM. He returned to college to complete two credits he needed for an accounting degree, but an offer in Kansas came first.

He didn’t hesitate. Auto work these days is like playing musical chairs. You grab an opening where you can.