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This goes all the way back to WW II. We demolished the Japanese and German steel industry so they had to rebuild with the latest technology. Our own steel industry was of course intact but was old tech. For some reason our own steel industry had to continue with old tech, it being too expensive to update. It continued to be too expensive to update all along right up to now. Then environmental requirements made operations even more expensive and a lot of steel has gone into bankruptcy. They aren't even able to operate, not to mention modernizing. It's the story we were told in gradeschool in the 50s, it's the same story now. Looks like the only solution is to bomb our own steel industry to rubble.

I've been in the steel industry all of my adult life (I'm 55). Mgmt. and labor is what destroyed the domestic steel industry. Mgmt. squandered big bucks, and they also caved to labor.

I was in the hospital in Pittsburgh for a couple days some years ago, and the guy sharing the room was a retired steelworker. He had already lost one leg to diabetes, but he was huge, very overweight and about to lose his other leg. He said that all the time he was working he was around the furnaces and he was big then but never overweight. Once he got away from the heat and exertion he couldn't control his weight or metabolism anymore. He wasn't so old, maybe 60.

Anyway, the gov't hasn't done much to address the basic problem of modernization, but those directly involved haven't done it either. It's like nobody has taken an interest in the long-term, just trying to get by year by year while the whole American steel industry fades into history, first one leg, then the other. Union and management have worked together in this way, fighting each other until there's nothing left to fight over.