Word: steeled
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When Manhattan's World Trade Center is topped off in 1974, it will turn part of the run-down lower West Side into a capital of banking, shipping, customs and other international trade services. The twin 110-story towers will require 190,000 tons of steel. Last week steelmen were debating some unusual details of the bidding for that job. More than that, builders were wondering whether the Port of New York Authority's unorthodox contracts for the supply, fabrication and erection of all that metal may lead to a new way of doing business with steel producers...
...with the Offers. Negotiations started routinely enough in 1964. The Port Authority asked only U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel for preliminary estimates, assuming that those two giants alone had the capacity to fill such a huge order. Both companies sent in estimates and draft contracts calling for a total charge of just under $82 million. Two years passed before the Authority sent each company the final specifications for a binding bid. Then U.S. Steel raised its bid to $122.2 million, and Bethlehem came in at $118.1 million...
...Steel executives disclaim any fixing. They argue that the job would have tied up such a large share of the facilities of U.S. Steel or Bethlehem that both companies had to add unusually large contingency costs to their bids. Defenders of the big firms also say that the smaller companies are using much low-cost Japanese steel and that the Port Authority loosened the specifications to enable the smaller firms to bid low. However, an Authority consultant maintains: "The number of tons, the character of the work, the size of the job, and the difficulty of erection were the same...
...Bethlehem refuse to comment. The Port Authority reports only that the intricacies of multiple-contract construction-in some cases seven companies are providing steel for a single floor of the Trade Center-have caused no delays or problems. If so, other steel users may find that parceling out work among small firms is less expensive and more efficient than awarding it to the lumbering giants...
...depend on Japanese-built supertankers to move Mideast oil to them despite the 26-month closing of the Suez Canal. In tiny mountain towns of Western Canada, long-unemployed miners are going back to work to dig the coal needed to fill a new $600 million order from Japanese steel mills. Ideologically impartial, Japanese industrialists trade with Peking and Taiwan, cut timber in Siberia and make 70% of the baseball gloves sold in the U.S. Japanese experts are training rice farmers in India, and fishermen in Ceylon, building drydocks in Singapore and generally doing more than U.S. foreign-aid officials...