Frederica Freyberg:
The latest jobless rate released this week for Janesville, where GM was once king stands at 13.2 percent, up even from the month before. But who are the people that put a face on that rate? One of them is Mark Vanek. He lost his job around Christmas last year when the GM supplier he worked for went out of business right along with the local auto plant.

Mark Vanek:
I’m just seeing what kind of availabilities, what you guys are looking for.

Frederica Freyberg:
We first met Mark Vanek when he visited a job fair in Madison last spring. At that time, he’d been out of work for four months. He lost his job when the General Motors plant shut down production in December 2008. Because that same month, the GM parts warehouse and assembly facility Vanek worked for closed its doors. The GM closure put thousands out of a job in Rock County. Many like Vanek have so far been unsuccessful in finding a new one.

Mark Vanek:
People are worried. Every day in the paper, there's something, who is laying off, or who just went through bankruptcy, Chapter 11.

Frederica Freyberg:
It's true. The state labor department reports that lay-off notices continue to come in from across the state — big companies and small. Shedding jobs because of the continued slumping economy and reduction of orders.

Joel Rogers:
It's going to be a very, very bad period. There's no question about it. It comes on top of a bad period in general for the upper Midwest.

Frederica Freyberg:
UW-Madison professor Joel Rogers calls what Wisconsin is going through a “wrenching dislocation.” It's certainly that for Mark Vanek. He describes making cold calls to potential employers.

Mark Vanek:
“We're not taking applications.” You say you're part of the displaced workers and they say, “Good luck to you.”

Frederica Freyberg:
Vanek spends part of every day scouring job boards on the web.

Mark Vanek:
There's one for Staples. A lot of medical assistants.

Frederica Freyberg:
He’s got a long resume and a bachelor's degree, but matching jobs to his experience proves discouraging.

Mark Vanek:
A lot of them are, I've looked at $8.50 an hour, $9.50 an hour for most out there. You can't live on that, or most people couldn’t.

Frederica Freyberg:
Vanek has recently taken to driving a tri-county area, across state lines to check out potential job leads, literally eyeballing big-looking companies with lots of cars in the parking lots — because they might be hiring. So far, no offers have come of those efforts.

Mark Vanek:
That doesn't mean you're a bad person or that, you know, you're unemployable. I've talked to a lot of friends. They say, ‘why do you get “I'm a loser” mentality?’ That's something that you always have to keep yourself out of.

Joel Rogers:
This is the biggest crisis, financial crisis, since the Great Depression. People aren't kidding.

Frederica Freyberg:
It's not a lot of solace for Vanek that these are historically bad times. And he's got a lot of company on the unemployment line. But through it all and seven months into being without a job, he's trying to stay positive.

Mark Vanek:
When you focus on the negative, it just seems like, well, there's no need to get out of bed today. It's just hopeless.

Frederica Freyberg:
Mark Vanek tells us he did get a couple of bites after attending the job fair last spring, but unfortunately, the HR people he was communicating with about a potential job were laid off themselves. We should also note that the city of Beloit, also in Rock County, has the highest unemployment rate in the state at over 18.5 percent. Beloit is a city that, as part of Rock County, saw its share of jobs dry up right along with the General Motors plant.