On that September day five years ago, I was still getting to know Janesville, whose congressman, Paul Ryan, would become speaker of the House of Representatives. But I had already learned that this city of 63,000 took Labor Day seriously, magnifying the holiday into a three-day celebration of the well-performed work and well-mannered labor relations in which the people of Janesville took pride. The weekend’s crowning event had been called the “Parade of Champions” from the 1950s through the ’70s, when the plant’s union and management, along with local business owners, all came together to plan it.
During those years, workers gathered at the United Auto Workers Local 95 union hall, setting aside the work of assembling Chevys to assemble parade floats, each year’s more elaborate than the last. One year’s float illustrated the benefits that unions conferred on working men and women, with a family on a simulated fishing trip atop a float with a fake stream. Another year, the parade set a world record for a hitched team: a 300-foot extravaganza starring eight ponies and 64 llamas towing a wagon. Known in recent years as Labor Fest, the celebration always pulled in enough donations to hire the country’s top-rated fife-and-drum corps.
Nearly four years after the 4.8-million-square-foot assembly plant shut down, the event had become a husk of its former self. The parade had dozens of fewer units than even a couple of years before, with the only marching bands coming from the city’s two high schools. Its goodwill ambassador was a school social worker raising money to help house a growing crop of homeless teenagers.
But it was the shrunken role of the autoworkers, who for so many decades had been Labor Fest’s chief sponsors and backbone, that was most jarring. Not only did Local 95 no longer have a float, but no autoworkers were marching at all. Instead, two old guys in union caps each held the end of a dowel dangling a small banner that read: UAW Local 95 Retirees.
The union’s vestigial presence in a parade intended as a celebration of workers made a fitting metaphor for how far labor’s fortunes have fallen in Janesville in recent years. The once-mighty Local 95 lives on today as a pale reminder of the force it used to wield in Janesville. Its collapse echoes the dwindling power of labor across Wisconsin, where union membership has plummeted to a far greater extent than it has nationwide.