Word: steel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Steel Chairman David M. Roderick called the company's action a "facility rationalization." In fact, its action was a meticulous paring of U.S. Steel's capacity to make, forge and finish steel. Mills, foundries and blast furnaces in such famed Big Steel locations as Gary, Ind., Fairless and Homestead, Pa., and the South Works in Chicago will be shut down. Plans for a rail mill in Chicago were dropped, despite union work-rule concessions and tax breaks from the Illinois state government. Mining and chemical operations will be pruned, along with fabricating facilities in some eastern states...
...Steel also dropped plans to start a steelmaking and fabricating venture with British Steel. The United Steelworkers of America had vigorously opposed the idea, charging that it was robbing laid-off union members of jobs. Roderick explained simply that "terms that were mutually beneficial to both companies could not be concluded...
Last week's surgery was by far the most drastic by a single steel company in an industry battered mercilessly during the past decade by rapidly changing economic forces. Steel has been the hardest hit of America's once proud smokestack industries, and mill business has picked up only slightly with the economic recovery...
...American steel has been pounded by cheaper imports from Japan, South Korea and Brazil, crippled by high wages and inefficient plants, and stunted by management that sometimes seems to have just given up on the industry. Employment has plunged from a postwar high of 620,000 in 1953 to about 250,000 last year; half of that loss has come since 1970. Use of American steelmaking capacity has shrunk from...
...Steel's action should save the company about $200 million a year and help the firm reach its goal of drastically cutting steelmaking costs, which are the industry's highest. The closings will reduce steelmaking capacity from 31.3 million tons to 26 million tons annually and allow the company to make a profit on steel while running at only 50% of capacity...