Posted on 09/19/2023 9:36:35 AM PDT by canucksvt
CLAIRTON, Pennsylvania -- The first steel plant located here along the Monongahela River just over 20 miles south of Pittsburgh was built in 1901. By 1903, the borough of Clairton formed around the industry, and by 1904, U.S. Steel acquired the plant from St. Clair Steel, and the industrial base of America began its reign here in Western Pennsylvania.
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UAW please take notes.
I wonder if the Gary Indiana steel works still make any noticeable amount of product nowadays?
Toward the end of my career, it was primarily chinese steel.
I remember the summers riding thru Clairton as a child at the peak of steel production there—the think cloud of sulphur smelling smoke coming from the mill was so bad we had to roll the windows up in the car because of my mom’s asthma. I drove thru there 20+ years later in it was a ghost town—nothing but ramshackle houses and shuttered buildings.
After he has shut off the gas.
On one Thanksgiving Day, I was paid 2.5 times my rate for sleeping 8 hours in an overhead crane that never moved an inch.
I knew then that the steel industry was in big trouble.
UAW stop dreaming of jobs. No jobs without fossil fuels.
Parents, stop telling your kids to do well in school so that they will succeed in life. There won’t be enough energy without fossil fuels and there won’t be life without energy.
yep...
The pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Before the mills were unionized, workers were treated horribly. Seven 12-hour days were common. No days off, ever. And an injured worker was simply fired.
Fast-forward many decades. I worked for almost five years in a union steel mill. It was as you noted. The rules and quotas were so lax that it was unusual to see anyone put in a full eight hours. The mill met its quote for the shift, then everything shut down.
The workers went and hid. The plant supervisors got in their cars and went home.
Meanwhile, foreign plants were modernizing. I worked in a rolling mill. One huge piece of rolling equipment had the Kaiser’s crown stamped on it. While foreign plants were modernizing, we were using machinery bought before WW 1! That’s when I knew we were done.
Interestingly, the demise of the U.S. steel industry accelerated rapidly in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the result of one particular massive building project: the construction of the World Trade Center in NYC. The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, as a quasi-public agency that operated somewhat autonomously from the two state governments, refused to pay the prices of steel that were inflated by a bidding process that was basically rigged due to the role of the federal government in pushing the unions and steel companies into uniform labor contracts.
The agency rejected the lowest bid from Bethlehem Steel (U.S. Steel was the only other bidder), and broke the project up into 15 smaller contracts. Many of those suppliers ended up using foreign-made steel, and the owner saved about 30% on the cost of the steel for the buildings.
Not a fan of DeNiro anymore but I saw the movie when it first came out and felt the cast did a great job of portraying what life was like in Clariton and the surrounding townships and boroughs during the Vietnam war, even though the scenes weren't filmed there.
In 1945, the USA produced 57 percent of world steel output.
Today it is 5 percent
Our steel industry declined for one big reason: the three major waves of steel consumption ended — railroads (mostly built out by the 1920s), highway bridges (during the construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and 1960s) and automobiles (from the 1950s until the 1980s when much of the steel was displaced by lightweight plastics and composite materials in cars).
I grew up in Western PA in the 1970s. As a youngster, I attended any number of family weddings and the reception scene was like so many I remember.
“In 1945 the U.S. was the only major country in the world whose infrastructure and industrial capacity was unscathed by World War II.”
And the government and unions thought the good times would never end. Surprise!
Gonna be pretty easy for some communist invader to whup us when when we can’t even make our own steel.
All part of the plan.
Yeah, same here. I've lived in FL for the past 30+ years and never have attended a wedding like the ones we had back there in those days.
Nucor/Yamato is probably the largest steel mill left in North America.
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