Word: steelmen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There are good reasons for cutting back in Youngstown while expanding elsewhere. The mills lining the Mahoning River are so old that some steelmen describe them as antiques. Bringing them up to modern standards would be an expensive job, and it cannot be put off. A few days before the Sheet & Tube decision, the Sierra Club won a federal court ruling ending the exemption that eight Mahoning valley steel plants had won from meeting federal clean-water standards...
First Feelers. Even before his Inauguration, Carter put out the first feelers. When steel mills in December raised prices 6% on the flat-rolled metal that goes into autos and appliances, Carter discreetly asked through intermediaries if executives would be willing to reduce the raise. Steelmen refused but got the point for the future. In mid-January, U.S. Steel Chairman Edgar B. Speer visited Bert Lance, who was about to become director of the Office of Management and Budget, to tell him that a raise on tin plate was coming. Lance asked him to return to Washington to talk about...
John Kennedy had been a bona fide war hero, but he was concerned a great deal about showing his manhood. He delighted in the story of how he called the big steelmen "s.o.b.s," and in fact it was he who leaked the story. In the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, an evacuation plan was devised for key people in Washington. It meant that if the crisis grew, the select group would be taken by helicopter to the special command post under a Virginia mountain. Kennedy pondered a short while, then confided to some of his closest aides that...
...biggest reason for the profit surge was the rapid series of price hikes that steelmen imposed after Government controls were lifted in April 1974. In the steel executives' view, those boosts were needed to make up for years of low earnings. Last December, after U.S. Steel announced price boosts of 8% to 10% on about two-thirds of its product line, President Ford's Council on Wage and Price Stability asked the company to justify its action; U.S. Steel then trimmed the increase to 7% to 8%. Nonetheless, steel prices at the end of 1974 averaged 40% higher...
...capacity and growing numbers of workers are being laid off. In a recent report, Steel Analyst Robert Hageman of the Wall Street brokerage house of Kidder Peabody reckoned that steel shipments this year will fall to about 87 million tons, off 25% from last year. Though some steelmen have been talking up additional price rises later this year, when labor costs will go up under a long-term contract, any boosts will be difficult to sustain; indeed, some mills have quietly begun discounting prices. The industry also faces stiffening competition from European and Japanese firms that are offering steel...