Word: steeles
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...rusting Hulks of Bethlehem Steel's blast furnaces and coke ovens cast a long shadow over the Lehigh Valley. "Bessie" once employed 30,000 people in its namesake town in northeastern Pennsylvania. The company survives elsewhere, but what's left of it here has been all but abandoned. The windows of the redbrick warehouses are cracked and clouded. A portion of train trestle stands idle, neither end connected to anything. Such sights would have been unimaginable 30 years ago, when the valley roared with the fires of open-hearth furnaces...
Take a tour of the valley--the very one Bethlehem Steel once symbolized--and you'll find that American manufacturing hasn't disappeared; it is reinventing itself. As Bessie and many of its fellow titans have marched slowly into bankruptcy, a new breed of manufacturing company has quietly emerged in the Lehigh Valley and in cities across the U.S., even amid one of the worst manufacturing purges in recent memory. More than 2 million of the 2.5 million jobs lost over the past two years were in the manufacturing sector, and many are gone forever. But the U.S. economy...
John Jones, CEO of Air Products & Chemicals, remembers what it was like to be a young engineering graduate in the 1970s, when Bethlehem Steel was king of the valley. "When I was getting out of school, that was one of the places to go," he says. "When people asked me where I was working, and I'd say Air Products," he says, the usual response was pity. "They would go, 'Awww.'" Today Air Products, with 4,300 workers, has replaced Bessie as the valley's largest industrial employer...
...revenues have grown from $300 million to $6 billion and its overall work force has more than doubled, to 18,500, thanks mainly to job expansion overseas. Jones interprets this not as a sign of weakness at home but as evidence of well-planned, well-executed growth. The U.S. steel industry was once its largest customer, but as Japan, Brazil, South Korea and eventually China became major players in steel and other heavy industries, Air Products followed those markets. Industrial gases are an intensely localized business--it is difficult and expensive to ship volatile compounds over distances--so Air Products...
...valley to 2,500. Although Agere has made a commitment to keep its design and testing operations in the area, recently bringing 600 of those jobs to Allentown, the factory's closure left its mark--a lingering suspicion that semiconductors would abandon the valley the same way that steel did. "There's possibly a little bit of nervousness," says Peter Kelly, Agere's executive vice president for global operations. "You can't go through the transformation that we went through and not have...