I seem to recall back in college learning that the steel industry, rather that invest in modernization (including more EPA regulations, robotics, etc.) put their money into other industries than steel.
Oh - here it is on Wiki (Unions also played a part):
The USX period
In the early days of the Reagan Administration, steel firms won substantial tax breaks in order to deal with imported goods. Instead of modernizing their mills, steel companies shifted capital out of steel and into more profitable areas.
In March 1982, U.S. Steel took its concessions and paid $1.4 billion in cash and $4.7 billion in loans for Marathon Oil, saving approximately $500 million in taxes through the merger. The architect of tax concessions to steel firms, Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), complained that “we go out on a limb in Congress and we feel they should be putting it in steel.”[11] The incident is the subject of a song by folk singer Anne Feeney....
As part of its diversification plan U.S. Steel acquired Marathon Oil on January 7, 1982, as well as Texas Oil and Gas several years later. Recognizing its new scope, it reorganized its holdings as USX Corporation in 1986, with U.S. Steel (renamed USS, Inc.) as a major subsidiary.[12]
About 22,000 USX employees stopped work on August 1, 1986, after the United Steelworkers of America and the company could not agree on new employee contract terms. This was characterized by the company as a strike and by the union as a lockout.
This resulted in most USX facilities becoming idle until February 1, 1987 [six months!], seriously degrading the steel division’s market share. A compromise was brokered and accepted by the union membership on January 31, 1987.[13] On February 4, 1987, three days after the agreement had been reached to end the work stoppage, USX announced that four USX plants would remain closed permanently, eliminating about 3,500 union jobs.[13]
Yup, there’s blame to go around in plenty. The idiot management of the US steel makers contributed to their own downfall - while nicely illustrating another downside of tariffs. When a domestic company gets a protective tariff erected in its favor, they sometimes assume that said tariff will be permanent and slack off instead of becoming more competitive.
The famous Harley Davidson tariff requested and passed by Ronald Reagan, for example, is currently one huge reason why Harley is disintegrating financially today and desperately trying to attract younger buyers. You see, Harley didn’t bother with modernizing their offerings after the tariff was passed - they didn’t significantly upgrade their engines or frames or anything for years and years and years after. Instead, they came up with radically successful new marketing techniques appealing to patriotism, heritage, traditionalism, and fans of old biker movies to enable them to sell the same old 1970s uncompetitive garbage on into the 2000s with only grudging revisions and minimal updates overall.
The problem is that now that all the Baby Boomers to whom that marketing appealed are getting to the age where most of them can no longer ride motorcycles, they’ve discovered that the next generation of potential customer simply isn’t interested in what they offer because it’s so old, antiquated and primitive by the standards of the rest of the industry. Nostalgia marketing doesn’t work with them because they’re not old enough to remember the 1950s and 60s when Harleys were actually reasonably competitive. There are other, better American bikes out now (Indian, for example) that 1. Are better in pretty much every way and 2. Actually use mostly American parts, unlike Harley’s current attempts to keep themselves afloat with Chinese parts so patriotism isn’t an effective marketing tack either.
Harley recently introduced a copy of the 1982 Honda Shadow 500 and 700 in order to regain customers and get non-Boomers interested. These are some of their most advanced machines featuring those exotic 1980s technologies like “water cooling” and “integrated transmission”. Yes, that’s right, Harley has *just* reached the point that the rest of the industry was at more than *34* years ago.
As the median Boomer age passes 80, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Harley go bankrupt - and a lot of it traces back to the Harley Tariff.
The unions played a part in most of our lost manufacturing jobs.