AND THE WOLF FINALLY CAME
The Decline of the American Steel Industry
John P. Hoerr
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
689 pp., $39.95
The American steel industry provides fertile ground for journalists. Once the very symbol of U.S. Industrial dominance, it is now viewed as a pitiful, declining giant. Major companies are in Chapter 11 reorganization. Unionized workers have granted their employers wage concessions only to lose their jobs in massive plant closings. Entire river valleys around Pittsburgh and Youngstown are devastated by job losses. The U.S. government is saddled with billions of dollars of pension liabilities from the insolvent steel companies. Even the United Steel workers have been forced to lay off hundreds of their own staff as their membership plummets. And U.S. Steel--Big Steel--has even changed its name to USX.
A journalist's first response to this sad state of affairs is to look for the villain. Who is to blame for the decline of the American steel industry? Why did the wolf finally come?
John Hoerr, Business Week editor and veteran labor reporter, has gone home to the Mon Valley--the Monogahela Valley near Pittsburgh, where steel was once produced in prodigious quantities--and found that the steel industry has left. Although he admits that this decline is due to a variety of economic forces, he chooses to devote most of his nearly seven hundred pages to the tragedy of labor relations in the industry, leaving the erroneous impression that overreaching unions and insensitive management are primarily to blame for the rapid decline of large U.S. steel companies in general and those in the Mon Valley in particular.
Hoerr gives us a poignant view of disappointed workers, dashed dreams, and decaying towns, suggesting that something has gone wrong. Perhaps it did not have to work out this way, he suggests. Unfortunately, he is wrong; it did have to work out this way.
Is Pittsburgh different from Akron or from…?
I must admit to a certain sympathy for Hoerr's reaction to Pittsburgh's demise as a steel-producing center, although he and I may draw different lessons from it. He could just as easily have ventured a hundred miles west to my old hometown of Akron, Ohio, to tell the same story. Throughout the first half of this century, Akron was the "rubber capital of the world," a fact that you could not ignore if you had any olfactory sense at all. The largest tire producers--General, Goodrich, Firestone, and Goodyear--had many plants there, churning out millions of tires per month. Their employees, many recently arrived from Appalachia, earned a very comfortable living, sharing in the large profits that came from exploiting Mr. Goodyear's technology.
During the summers, I often worked in a Firestone plant. The average shift was only six hours, but many employees worked even less than that. There were endless battles in the tire plants over the rate at which machines were set to determine the standard for piecework. As a result, many of these rates were set so low that workers only had to be at their
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