Word: ltv
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...many cases are worse than the published data suggest, which becomes evident when bankrupt corporations dump their pension plans on the PBGC. Time after time, the agency has discovered, the gap between retirement holdings and pensions owed was much wider than the companies reported to stockholders or employees. Thus LTV Corp., the giant Cleveland steelmaker, reported that its plan for hourly workers was about 80% funded, but when it was turned over to the PBGC, there were assets to cover only 52% of benefits--a shortfall of $1.6 billion to be assumed by the agency...
...last decade, much of the West's steel industry has been in the doldrums. Sinking prices and flat demand, rising costs and competition from Asia turned steel belts into rust belts as once-mighty American titans like LTV and Bethlehem Steel went belly up. Many of Europe's former communist bloc governments determinedly sold off their dilapidated, money-losing steel mills. Workers around the globe were bounced out of the devilishly cyclical industry in droves. Even bosses were shying away: in 1998, Michael Frenzel, then chairman of German industrial concern Preussag, became so fed up with the smokestack rollercoaster that...
...nickname "the Carnegie of Calcutta," Mittal, 54, has spent much of his career buying run-down steel facilities in far-flung locations like Romania and Kazakhstan and returning them to profitability. But ISG is a different animal. It was formed in 2002 from the guts of the bankrupt LTV steel business. Under the watchful eye of Ross, the firm, which employs 15,000 people, grew into one of the U.S.'s major steel producers by acquiring money-losers like Acme Steel and Bethlehem Steel. (In the planned new entity, Ross will get seats on the board of both the Dutch...
Make no mistake: the reform of which Ross speaks means employees will be working harder for fewer benefits. Bethlehem Steel, along with Acme Steel and LTV before it, off-loaded a total of $8 billion in pension obligations to the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation before Ross acquired it. He then wiped out health-care benefits that had been promised to retirees. For current workers, he installed co-pays and coverage limits where there were none before and replaced the union's defined-benefit pension plan with a less secure defined-contribution plan...
...weeks. The system is working: ISG is now among the world's most efficient manufacturers of flat rolled steel for cars and appliances, producing it for about $348 a ton shipped--about 25% cheaper than French and Japanese steel. In the last six months of 2002, steelworkers at LTV collected average bonuses equal to seven weeks' pay. Now Ross is looking at union rules and wages in the tire and auto industries--both, in his view, due for a similar reckoning...