Mark Reutter, author of Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might, talks about why steel production collapsed across America
I grew up in Sparrows Point. This guy hit the nail on the head. The mentality was that they were invincible. They thought the need for steel was so important that it was inconceivable the plant would ever shut down. In the end they priced themselves out of the market. There wasn't enough money to cover the cost of wages, benefits, pensions, etc, etc, etc (which kept rising every year) and invest in new technology/materials at the same time. Those folks have a lot to be proud of. They definitely played a part in building our country and in its defense. Unfortunately it's all just a memory now.
Do you remember the 13 week's paid vacation every 5th year? Full pension after a mere 30 years of work? The older guys told me that injection molding was the state of the art for making what we did, and that our plant could not be modified to make injection molding a reality. Shortly after I left BS in the 1970s, I learned about Nucor's recycling scrap and using nonunion labour. Then and there, I knew that BS was doomed.
I gre w up In Dundalk and was a boy that was failing in the 9th Grade. Bethelehem steel, Sparrows point had a program that took some of us Hyperactive boys into the steel industry to teach us. I spent a month of the first year there moving from mill to mill. A month in the Open hearth a month making coke for the making of steel from what would have just been Iron. That first year and beyond we went to the old Sparrows point high school two hours a day. One on Bethlehem steels time. the other hour was on my time and I paid the school from wages for being thought. I began serving a Machinist apprenticeship to become a Machinist. I am sure what they did for us was illegal as I and the other boys ranged in age fro 15years old to seventeen. My father had been a machinist as all the other boys were machinists sons. as well. I recently read that America makes only 45million long tons of iron and steel. The article claimed that China makes 800 million long tons today. All the wastern nations come up short on the making of steel. I wonder would we have to be the first to fight a Nuclear war in defense. Does that make us the most dangerous Country in the world? Also, do we mine enough coal to make steel in the quantity needed to fight a mechanized ww3. Thanks for the Vidio really informative.. Douglas Pollard
during the 80's computer automation was booming , my first service call as a tech rep was upgrading a furnace pre-heat system i was told not to wear a "white shirt" having a lot of industrial experience that shocked me the second shock was how ancient the electrical infra structure was, it seemed a mish mash not well thought out ..do the best you can with what you are given kinda thing. sad to see the giants die that way ..good people out in the cold
1. The use of steel to make bridges, highways, cars etc. declined. For example, when I was a boy, home appliances had steel bodies. Plastic bodies are near universal now, except at the high end. 2. Recycled scrap satisfies 60%+ of the demand for steel. Minimills recycling scrap were much cheaper to build and operate, then the physical plant needed for virgin steel. 3. Most American steel making capacity predated the Depression and so was past its use-by date. This legacy technology wasted energy (e.g., no continuous casting), polluted the atmosphere, and released large amounts of climate changing gases. 4. Third world nations paying low wages learned to make steel of acceptable quality. 5. The USA's commitment to free trade strongly limited the ability of the USA to keep out cheap imported steel. 6. In the 1940s and 50s, the USW negotiated vacation, health and retirement benefits that were unaffordable, given the prevailing market price of steel. These benefits included 13 weeks of paid vacation every fifth year, after 20 years of service. Free health care for an employee's entire family. Retirement on full pension after 30 years of service, regardless of age. The USW declined to negotiate a reduction of these benefits. 7. Steel workers and executives assumed that American steel making was a gravy train that would last forever, when there is no such thing as forever.
When the steel market declined and these plants started closing and laying off workers, they remained arrogant. Many men refused to try working in any other industry and stayed home hoping steel would come back. They sent their wives off to work.
@@lisk3822 I landed my first serious year-round job when I turned 21. The shop I worked in closed in the year I turned 37. We all knew that the shop was obsolete. So after a year, I quit and went back to college, so as to avoid having to start a new career in early middle age. Since marrying me 30 years ago, my Missus has worked for pay all of 3 years.
@@lylecosmopolite Good for you! So many laid off workers were obstinate and refused to look for other work. They say at home for years waiting for steel to come back but it never did.
@@lisk3822 USW pay was good, benefits were very good. My shop was dominated by guys who had been hired during the Korean War or the late 1930s. We talked about our shop using obsolete technology. We did not talk about how scrap melters like Nucor were underbidding us left right and centre.
Check this out. Has everything: Historical perspective, the problems of responding to technological change, labor relations, personal vanities... great interview!
A fact that has been bothering me for years now is: Along with manufacturing comes dangerous pollution, and sometimes a lot of it. Can a healthy environment and manufacturing coexist in the US today? Catch 22
A decent concern for the environment and the possibility of climate change, rules out keeping open legacy plants like Sparrow's Point. Forgetting retrofitting; the only economical way forward is building fresh greenfields plants.
problem is that will never happen the shit will just be made in china where they dont have laws. they will pollute the air until the atmosphere is completely ruined. i would love to see brand new state of the art mills but it wont happen unless we get WWIII. this country s finished.
I was surprised at the complete lack of mention of the lengthy (12 weeks in duration) 1959 steel strike, and its impact on steel-consuming industries. If I recall correctly, that span of time was when many U. S. industries figured out they could get by quite nicely with imported steel--and thus the would-be monopoly started to erode particularly quickly. (I was 7 years old then, and can still see the strikers huddled around 55 gallon drums with fires going to keep them warm while picketing, and seeing the stacks of the mill beyond 5th Street emitting absolutely nothing--and I lived on the 500 block of D Street, so I know what the mills looked like when going full throttle.) As I recall, there was near-total intransigence on both sides in 1959. One wonders how things might be different had Ike declared the US steel industry to be essential to national defense, stepped in, ordered mediation, and gotten it settled in (let's say) four to six weeks instead of twelve.
It's interesting to speculate, but he touched on some of the core essences of these installations: They were all really old and really resistant to change. Not adopting stuff like BOF's and eventually moving into the scrap recycling market with EAFs meant that it was only a matter of time. Both Sparrows Point and Homestead for US Steel were still running Open Hearths way...way...past their prime.
I think reutter is partially right, but there’s a lot more to this. Steel was never that popular in beer except for kegs, even then beer bottles were much cheaper than steel. He talks as if the steel companies weren’t innovating at all when many did have research and development departments. Steel would’ve always been used to build more buildings and more infrastructure. Why is less infrastructure being built today? It’s not like The domestic market demand for steel exploded because Americans weren’t affected by World War II and having to rebuild infrastructure. Everything was slowly replaced overtime, sometimes more rapidly sometimes slower. Yes the average American has much less kids than they did in the 50s, but that still wouldn’t explain why replacements for old infrastructure, or building different skyscrapers wouldn’t have needed steel.
With 4000 employees why didn't the employees buy and operate the plant themselves? If you devide 72 million among 4000 that's only $18000 per person as an investment
Why can't the government leaders like Trump come out and be honest with the people and say look we're not going to be able to have the super steel gravy jobs with Big pay and big benefits at first and could never be grave jobs and unions can and will kill jobs and a country
It's easy to say unions and China very very easy to point fingers after all China has today 260 blast furnaces according to online sources and we all know about the price of labor there and conditions and free trade leading to unfair imports. However, we must not forget other reasons the USA has the largest cement making facility in the world in Michigan and today most bridges and buildings are made from Cement products and not just steel as they were in the past so Cement grew at the losses for steel. Other reasons include massive and I do mean massive Government spending on the 1970s space race, nuclear weapons and missiles and space programs all drained the pockets of uncle sam that would otherwise go to new infrastructure and military spending on large ships also the USA lost the ship building competition to countries like Korea and Japan and this needs to still be reverted back here to the USA. Overall the USA has sacrificed itself to open the doors to global trade and peace until now anyway, and this world order will eventually come to an end and we will need to bring back home everything, factories, steel, ship building, and if you think we have a choice well, it's China's choice now, if they go to war with us then the game is over.
Not mentioned in your reply..... the extreme dangers of the work. You also didn't mention working weekends, nights and holidays. There were sacrifices for that paycheck.
