Crises In The Steel Industry

The problems of the U.S. steel industry have been a source of public controversy for over twenty years. The industry has grown substantially smaller since the 1960s and hundreds of thousands of steelworkers have lost their jobs. Some steel firms and many steel mills have shut down entirely,profoundly affecting regional economies based on steel and its related industries. An industrial transformation of this magnitude has inevitably given rise to efforts to identify its underlying causes. This book is a contribution to that effort.

This book examines the current difficulties facing the U.S. steel industry and policy options to tackle them.

This book analyzes the causes underlying the decline of the United States steel industry and the impact of that decline on our institutions of procedural democracy. It locates steel's economic demise in the logic of an economy organized for profit maximization and demonstrates how the industry's economic policies helped open the U.S. market to foreign imports while simultaneously forcing steel officials to turn to the government for assistance.

Originally published in 1989. The international steel industry suffered a major decline after the onset of world recession in 1973, perhaps suffering more plant closures and job losses than any other sector. This book analyses the decline, surveying the various factors which have contributed to it, such as changing production strategies, changes in demand and world trade and changing regional production trends. It goes on to examine the impact of decline on steel-making communities, considering the various local, national and international initiatives to assist the affected areas and the way these initiatives have been devised and implemented. The authors conclude that none of these policies has satisfactorily resolved the crisis in the old steel producing areas and that a major crisis in these areas continues. Finally they discuss the social and political options open to these localities for the future.