As Goes Bethlehem: Steelworkers and the Restructuring of an Industrial Working Class

By Jill A. Schennum

The steel industry played a central role in building post–World War II economic success in the US and in defining the parameters of the post–World War II social contract. As these long-term processes both preceded and contributed to the Great Recession, a new capitalism—one in which banks and the credit system took precedence over industrial production—changed the lives of many American workers, including steelworkers. As Goes Bethlehem raises important questions about why workers and their unions were not able to successfully contest this attack on industrial labor, instead settling for best navigating a long downward trajectory.

Through the experiences and reflections of steelworkers, Jill A. Schennum demonstrates the significance of work, and particularly of industrial work, in giving meaning to people’s lives, identities, and sense of worth. She uses workers’ narratives and voices to show the importance of work space, time, and social relations, rejecting dominant interpretations of blue-collar workers as alienated from their work but well-paid and co-opted by a middle-class standard of living. Schennum covers thirty-five years of investment and disinvestment, managerial initiatives, transfer decisions, layoffs and downsizings, external transfers, the eventual bankruptcy of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, and movement into retirement, unemployment, and new postindustrial jobs.

The very solidarities, rights of citizenship, and rule of law forged in the mill and built on by the union were constructed, in part, through exclusions based on race, ethnicity, gender, and region. These lines of fracture were mobilized to undermine working-class strength in the postindustrial period. Through the experiences of African American, Puerto Rican, coal country, and women workers in the steel mills, this book explores these issues of fracture and solidarity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780826505903

Book preview

AS GOES BETHLEHEM

As Goes Bethlehem

Steelworkers and the Restructuring of an Industrial Working Class

JILL A. SCHENNUM

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS

Nashville, Tennessee

Copyright 2023 Vanderbilt University Press

All rights reserved

First printing 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schennum, Jill A., 1956– author.

Title: As goes Bethlehem : steelworkers and the restructuring of an industrial working class / Jill A. Schennum.

Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023012307 (print) | LCCN 2023012308 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826505880 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826505897 (hardback) | ISBN 9780826505903 (epub) | ISBN 9780826505910 (adobe pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Iron and steel workers—Pennsylvania—Bethlehem—History. | Work—Social aspects—Pennsylvania—Bethlehem—History.

Classification: LCC HD8039.I52.U6 S346 2023 (print) | LCC HD8039.I52.U6 (ebook) | DDC 669/.1097482—dc23/eng/20230624

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023012307

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023012308

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. Bethlehem: The City, the Corporation, the Mill

2. The Labor Process at the Works

3. The Moral Economy of the Works

4. Shaping the White Working Class: Uneven Exclusions in the Works

5. Closing the Plant, Killing the Corporation: Shifts and Shocks

6. The New Economy

CONCLUSION

Notes

Index

Introduction

On a warm day in late autumn of 2012, I finally met Jack Franken, a steelworker I had spoken to many times by phone.¹ Sitting in a cluttered ranch-house kitchen, I was aware I was in a bachelor’s home—the kitchen was piled with dirty dishes, the spare rooms filled with junk, and the yard slightly unkempt and overgrown. Jack, a thickly bearded, messy-haired bear of a man, had recently returned to his family home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, after a career as a steelworker, first for twenty-three years at Bethlehem Steel’s flagship mill, then for fifteen years as a transferred worker at the sprawling mill in Sparrows Point in Baltimore, commonly called the Point. Jack had just been laid off from his steel job in Baltimore when the Point closed. The afternoon I sat with him, he was living with his brother.

Jack’s story is hard to hear, although he tells it without regret, shunning sympathy. After all, according to him, there are many workers in worse situations than his. After twenty-three of what he describes as rewarding years working in Bethlehem, he lost his job with the closing of the combination mills; the date, March 22, 1997, is engraved in his memory. He was forty-one years old.

Jack tried other jobs in the area, but either they were too low-paying, degrading, and demeaning, or they were downright dangerous. So when he received a letter proposing transfer to the Bethlehem Steel mill at Sparrows Point, he picked up and left for Baltimore, a three and a half hour drive from home. When he started work at the Point, he first lived in his camper, and then rented a basement apartment, commuting home when he had days off. His wife and stepchildren stayed in Bethlehem. Transfers caused many divorces, Jack told me. Absence does not make the heart grow fonder. It didn’t take long for him to feel alienated from his family on visits home and in long distance phone calls. He and his wife argued, mainly about the kids, who were teenagers. She wouldn’t let me put a handle on those kids . . . long story short, that’s what started the divorce, he recalls.

With his marriage in shambles, Jack threw himself into work. He put in long hours, worked overtime, and took extra shifts, making money while he could. This gradually led to better jobs at the Point, and the path seemed clear for completing the thirty years he needed for his pension.

Unfortunately, work was not easy in the new mill. Jack initially lost his seniority and found himself back in the grueling manual jobs that he had started in as an eighteen-year-old novice. His pay plummeted, he missed the camaraderie he had with his Bethlehem co-workers, and although he is white, he was shocked by the racism he encountered at the Point.

Jack’s goal of working toward his pension ended abruptly on the day Bethlehem Steel entered the bankruptcy court, handed over its pension program, and sold what was once the second largest steel company in the world to a new upstart, International Steel Group (ISG). Jack had to decide whether to take a buyout from the mill’s new owner or stay with ISG. Now divorced, he decided to stay and work in steel. ISG seemed a good company, and the pay was fine now that Jack had moved into a better job at the Point. But his stint with ISG was short-lived, as a series of sales and acquisitions of the Sparrows Point mill followed. ISG sold to Mittal, Mittal sold to Severstal, and Severstal sold to RG Steel. Finally, in 2012, RG put the mill on the market for scrap, ending more than one hundred years of steelmaking. In the fifteen years Jack worked at the Point, he had five different employers, a point he made clear to me when he lined up five hard hats on the kitchen counter, each with a different logo.

On that fall afternoon, Jack was still hopeful that some last-minute deal might be patched together to save the Sparrows Point mill and call him back to steel work. After all, it had happened before. Nonetheless, he admitted it was most likely a false hope, because just two months earlier he remembered encountering a stranger walking around the mill. I looked at his hat and it said Art Brandenburg. And I got the chills. This is the guy that friggin’ tore down our mill. I saw his name and I thought, oh my God, here we go.

Brandenburg was a demolition company that had torn down the steel-making buildings in Bethlehem and sent them out for scrap. They shipped the machinery to steel mills from Wisconsin to China. If the same thing happened at the Point, Jack told me, the mill would never make steel again. And Jack was right; there is no more steel made at the Point. The mill was sold for scrap, steel jobs ended, and another steelmaking community fell into disarray.

Some might think of Jack’s story as passé, an old story about US deindustrialization, a history of the 1980s. Or that it is about just a small sector of America—the fading and obsolete industrial working class. But today these many complex processes—shutting down plants, downsizing corporations, merging and acquiring businesses, outsourcing factories, using bankruptcy to strip away workers’ assets—have resulted in increased insecurity, downward mobility, and a general erosion of life circumstances for many working- and middle-class Americans. It is devastating for workers to realize how little control they exercise over processes that affect every corner of their lives. To cope, they construct hindsight, a contradictory psychological process in which they build the appearance of control through second guessing; they strategize as individuals and households to attempt to stretch time and access union-negotiated benefits; and they manipulate retraining systems for their own ends. But these individual and household strategies are not highly effective within a context of broad socioeconomic forces. Indeed, they often result in an individualizing of blame, an internalizing of anger, and an undermining of collective response, even as the legal system wipes out those benefits they managed to secure. Middle- and working-class Americans, much like Jack, struggle to find their footing in this new postindustrial landscape.

It is not just the loss of a suburban, middle-class lifestyle that many workers, including steelworkers, mourn. They miss the camaraderie and fulfillment built on the floor of the steel mill and the respect that US society gave them when steel production was seen as important to US economic strength. Bruce Ward, a former beam yard worker and rigger, summarizes the feeling: What it meant to be a steelworker was a great deal of respect, not only received, but given. I think that respect was on both sides. Both for the fellows that I worked with, for the people that ran the plant, and for the people in the community. I think that that respect was what made it worth being a steelworker.² This satisfaction came from doing a job recognized by peers and management as difficult and well done, working in a role accepted by the country as central to production, and living as a responsible and dignified member of the community.

This book examines the decades-long period of transformation in the US, the steel industry, and at Bethlehem Steel, during which class relations were reshaped in the shift from a Fordist to a post-Fordist order. Through a focus on one cohort of ex-Bethlehem Steel workers (those hired in the period from 1963 to 1979), this book examines how these transformations played themselves out in the everyday spaces of people’s lives and work, contributing to strategies of adaptation as well as changed understandings, values, and discourses related to class identity and class relations. These workers started work at the steel mill as young adults in the Fordist period of expanded expectations and opportunities. They then lived through a long period of downsizing and deindustrialization at the mill, and eventually they found themselves ejected from the mill into a new post-Fordist landscape. Workers struggled to hold on to hard-won Fordist rights and recognitions, even as they were being schooled in the new norms and morality of the post-Fordist order.

Over the past two decades, with the bursting of the new economy bubble followed by the shock of the credit collapse, the Great Recession, and then the Trump era, social scientists are showing a renewed interest in class analysis. For much of the late twentieth century, it was argued that class analysis, in the US, was increasingly irrelevant. Working people were often understood as either coopted into an affluent and quiescent Fordist middle class or defined as so undermined by post-Fordist processes as to have completely disappeared as a political force in the US. The first approach misrecognizes working-class power and possibilities of the 1960s and 1970s, and in doing so fails to recognize solidarities and dispositions that generate potentials for contemporary working-class critique and resistance. In the twenty-first century, new studies refuted approaches that downplayed or ignored the importance of class, using class-based analyses to understand the dramatically growing inequalities within the US. These analyses repudiate arguments that posit the end of class by documenting a very large, although changing, US working class.³ Social scientists have examined the recent resurgence in organized working-class actions, they have analyzed changing working class participation in the political party system, and they are studying new sectors of a re-forming US working class, particularly women, new immigrant workers, and workers of color.⁴

With the election of Donald Trump, social scientists and the media became fixated on one fraction of the working class: white blue-collar workers. There are many conflicting explanations as to the extent of the white working-class contribution to Trump’s presidential win, the reasons that some white working-class men voted for Trump, and how processes of deindustrialization contributed to this. The aging steelworkers who I spend time with overwhelmingly liked Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election. They were dismayed by traditional party candidates, including Hillary Clinton, whose husband symbolized the passing of NAFTA, a free-trade agreement that they understood as encouraging corporations to move industrial production out of unionized industrial areas to access cheaper, less powerful labor in the global South. Both Sanders’s calls for a more egalitarian America, more protectionist trade policies, and regulated campaign financing and Trump’s critique of free-trade agreements and argument for a strong infrastructural program that would create jobs appealed to them. While most of the steelworkers I knew ended up voting for Clinton, some simply didn’t vote, and a significant minority voted for Trump in 2016. Trump won in Northampton County as the county flipped from voting for Obama twice.⁵

There has also been much recent discussion of the skyrocketing class-based inequalities within the US. This attention has focused on class stratification and the growth of inequality as measured through disparities in income, wealth, and educational achievement.⁶ This book moves beyond static, stratification-based theories of class that enumerate characteristics through which classes can be defined and identified, to examine class as a fluid and dynamic social relation through which power is practiced and struggle enacted. Class relations are formed and exercised in social struggles in the factory, at the point of production, as well as in the community. They are embedded within broader cultural and political meanings and interactions, both on the shop floor and outside of it. These class relations generate shared ways of life, dispositions, and moral economies that can, at times, produce collective action.⁷ This one cohort of steelworkers, experiencing a protracted process of deindustrialization, encountered what many contemporary working-class Americans are experiencing today—ongoing processes of class formation, dissolution, and re-formation related to the way in which flexible accumulation unevenly absorbs and expels fractions of the working class.

In this analysis, understanding class as embedded in relations of power in which capitalists expropriate the creative labor of the worker, thereby establishing class relations in which workers are situated in broader processes of capital accumulation and circulation, class politics and power are not understood as restricted to the workplace but are also related to distributions of appropriated surplus labor as well as the form and extent of the appropriation.⁸ Although my study focuses on work and people’s understandings and experiences of life in and after the mill, work is only one site for the formation, dissolution, and transformation of class relations. Class relations are never static; they are constructed and deconstructed, reproduced and contested in the interactions of workplace, home, and community, and new relations are superimposed on and developed out of previous social and cultural formations.⁹ Steelworker class identity, solidarities, and ways of life change as work relations are transformed through restructuring inside the Bethlehem mill; in the context of transfers to other mills; and as steelworkers moved out of the mills into post-Fordist flexible milieux of contingent labor, despotic management regimes, and insecure work. But steelworkers do not simply abandon prior social and cultural formations, habits, and sensibilities. Instead, these are incorporated into and challenged by new formations, generating critiques as well as fueling contradictions in workers’ understanding and experience of the post-Fordist social order.

Class relations themselves include multiple individual and intra-household positions, both inside and outside the steel mill. For example, while white, male steelworkers held strong working-class identities at work, at home in suburban, middle-class neighborhoods, home ownership and mixed-class neighborhoods led to self-definitions for a significant period as middle class. These middle-class identities are then challenged in the contemporary era, as processes of dispossession and disorganization erode middle-class positions. These transformations affect the class categories we have inherited from the Fordist past—of an affluent industrial working class in contradistinction to a poor or underclass.¹⁰ We see that assumptions of a co-opted, affluent industrial working class were never entirely accurate—neither in the Fordist period nor, certainly, today. The industrial working class is situated within long-term historical processes that affect how steelworkers experienced and understood deindustrialization and the transition to a post-Fordist order over the past thirty years. Contradictory positions were generated both within and outside the mill, and solidarities and identities were built in part through exclusions that then became obstacles to collective action. It is through understanding the contradictions and continuities, as well as the solidarities, involving shifting inclusions and exclusions, all part of class shaping and reshaping, that we gain insight into both possibilities for and barriers to progressive collective action and identities.

Clearly, the institutional arrangements—inside the mill, within the company, and in the larger legal and institutional structures of citizenship rights and a public-private welfare state—shored up working-class consciousness and power in the 1960s, even as it channeled that power into the appropriate channels of union-mediated grievances, contract bargaining, and formal two party politics. The processes of deindustrialization, part and parcel of transformations in the regime of capital accumulation, undermined institutional supports and ate away at cultural expectations of a more egalitarian capitalism. This reshaped the industrial working class, dispossessing some, creating new pockets of poverty, moving others into devalued jobs in low-road manufacturing or the service sector of the economy, and maintaining a few in high-road, restructured, skilled manufacturing jobs made more insecure by the threat of factory closure, capital mobility, and the surfeit of available workers. These processes produce contradictory identities as they play themselves out unevenly and seemingly arbitrarily across the industrial working class. Workers make use of moral economies forged in the Fordist workplace to evaluate and critique post-Fordist milieux, even as they also come to understand post-Fordist practices as a new social and economic reality. In apparently contradictory ways, processes of accumulation by dispossession heighten worker criticisms of corporate and governmental power while simultaneously directing anger inward, building resentment that may be harnessed by increasingly autocratic right-wing leaders and creating new fractures and hierarchies within the working class.

The golden age of the post–World War II period, while shorter and more fragile than often represented, embodied real progress for workers. Steelworkers like Jack Franken remember entering the mill in the 1960s and 1970s, when their work rights were codified and protected and their retirement seemed secure. Steelworker Ernie Lang describes his dad telling him to go to work at the Steel in 1972 because it afforded us the opportunity to buy my house. It afforded us the opportunity to buy a new car every so many years, to buy appliances when needed. The biggest thing though was the benefits . . . the health care.¹¹ Carol Henn, who grew up in the 1960s in a steelworker family, says one of the reasons Dad worked at Bethlehem Steel was to earn money that he knew would support his family and enable me to go to college. And certainly the benefits that unions won through the years added to the quality of life. It made a lot of things possible.¹² Within the community, steelworkers built a good life and secure future for their families. On a national scale, according to blast furnace worker Nick Darkach, in the mid-1970s the steel industry was so big and so many people worked there that the whole country evolved around the steelworkers’ pay. When we got a raise, other people got a raise. That this mature industrial working-class power posed a real threat to capitalist elites became increasingly evident in the 1970s and elicited a strong counter attack that undermined union power and displaced and devalued steelworkers.

The city of Bethlehem was a central place in Fordist America. It was the headquarters of a huge multinational corporation—the second largest steel company in the world. It was the steelworkers’ community and the site of their home plant, the historic flagship mill where the Bethlehem Steel Corporation began its existence in 1904. They defined their mill as crucial to the success of the company, its contribution to national hegemony, and to the prowess of the city of Bethlehem. Workers lived in this small global city, making steel products used in the war materiel, infrastructure, skyscrapers, and autos that built American hegemony globally. They cite lists of the iconic sites built by Bethlehem Steel: the Golden Gate Bridge, much of the New York City skyline, and the George Washington Bridge, to name a few. By 1965, mill workers exercised power based on their predecessors’ battles for union clout in the strikes of the 1940s and 1950s, power that was recognized by the formal institutions of the wider society—the courts, federal government agencies, the Democratic party. An entire private-public system of benefits had been legislated and enacted to ensure work stability and worker retirement (Medicare, Social Security, an expanded college and university system, employer-provided health plans, employer-provided pension plans, unemployment payments, supplementary unemployment pay). Workers entered the mill with confidence in their skills, the importance of their work, and their political power.

The Fordist Compromise

The fifteen-year period in which this cohort of workers entered the Bethlehem mill, from 1963 to 1979, came at the height of the Fordist compromise during which the US achieved global political and economic hegemony driven by a rapidly growing manufacturing sector characterized by large, vertically integrated corporations.¹³ Fordism was organized around expanded reproduction, in which profits were plowed back into industries that were structured through a detailed division of labor, flow-line assembly, a rationalization of production, and a division of mental and manual labor that efficiently produced a variety of goods. Economic growth was fueled by an expanding domestic consumer market stimulated through suburbanization, government infrastructural investments, a robust welfare state, and a labor-capital accord leading to increased wages. In this Fordist system of accumulation, regulation theorists argue, the contradictions of capitalist accumulation were balanced through a set of Keynesian social and political policies that ensured a degree of stability in which a rising standard of living was defined as an economic and social good.¹⁴

The steelworkers I spoke with were the first cohort to work at the mill under a regime of middle-class wages. When entering the mill, a male steelworker anticipated making family-breadwinner wages in a life-long career that would enable him to live what he defined as the good life. Millwright Sam Stevens said, Most people who worked there had a job for life. There were lulls, you were laid off, but it paid well with benefits. A worker’s wife could stay at home while the children were young; the family could purchase a house in a middle-class residential neighborhood; they would have good medical and dental care and financial security even in health crises; they could send their children (should they so desire) to college.¹⁵ The worker could buy a new car when needed, his family could vacation together, and he could look forward to a secure retirement in his old age. Workers understood the middle-class consumption their wages afforded them as contributing to the economic vitality of their community and country. Craft worker Jerry Schneider said, "We had a reputation. We tipped the highest, we bought the best, we were generous to charities, we spread the money around. The economy of the Lehigh Valley counted on the steelworker, not the steel company. In the 1960s, for the first time this cohort of workers was better protected against the cyclical nature of the industry, as union-negotiated supplementary unemployment benefits ensured temporarily laid-off workers a living wage, and no-strike contracts seemingly ensured stable work. These protections enabled them to believe they could plan a linear life narrative" that would not be knocked off course by periods of strike, layoff, and unemployment.¹⁶ Carol Henn eloquently reminisces about what this meant to her, coming of age in the South Side neighborhood of Bethlehem in the sixties, in a steelworking family. She reflects that with

the security provided by Bethlehem Steel and other employers, we had a kind of safety net that I didn’t even recognize as such. There was a basic security in life. . . . We were free to be children, adults, parents, community. We had a freedom that we probably didn’t appreciate or recognize at the time because it was just the norm for us. Half a century later, we look back and say aha, there was a golden cast to those days.¹⁷

Although the terms Fordist and post-Fordist are prevalent in the literature, for the most part, the steelworkers that I spoke with did not know or use these terms. Instead, they described a more egalitarian period when they began work at the Steel, contrasting it sharply with the contemporary political economy. Steelworkers contrast the era when they could choose among secure jobs at a variety of large local industries where they could anticipate a lifelong career, experience internal mobility, support a family, have a middle-class standard of living, and expect to be cushioned from the vicissitudes of layoffs, illness, and injuries.¹⁸ This choice of secure jobs among a few core industries may have been mostly restricted to men, but it did provide a real choice of stable, good-paying options. In addition, many of this generation could have considered college as their working-class parents began to realize the gains of the Fordist compromise. Many of these workers did not choose the college route. Some had started college and then dropped out due to marriage (often related to pregnancy), guilt over the cost for their parents, or not finding college fulfilling and engaging. Others eschewed college due to not being personally interested in it, often combined with limited parental expectations for higher education. For others, college was not a viable option—those whose families were more impoverished (by divorce, illness, or a spouse’s death), or whose family circumstances led to greater barriers to higher education (as for the sons of first-generation Puerto Rican immigrants whose less-lucrative jobs combined with the Bethlehem School District’s ethnically related tracking). For these, the possibility of fulfilling work and financial security in industrial jobs offered a viable career path.

Industrial labor is often characterized as highly alienating, deskilled work, an instrumental bargain enacted by workers in exchange for middle-class wages and benefits. But steelworkers refute this characterization. They describe much of their work as skilled, involving complex collaborative social relations, and generating dignity and meaning. For example, steelworker Ted Smith expressed pride in his productive maintenance work, This is what I did. Everything is straight, it’s plumb, it looks good, it works . . . they’re good welds that’ll hold up. That was fulfilling. He found satisfaction in the camaraderie I had with the other men . . . I don’t think I’ll ever have that again in my life, and he found fulfillment in learning the complex skills he used as a senior maintenance worker. One thing I learned in my life, no matter what I learned and did working here [at Bethlehem Steel], everything came in handy later. There was nothing I learned to do that didn’t benefit me later with the knowledge bank I acquired.¹⁹ A powerful moral economy of the mill gave value to labor. Work is important to Americans, and working-class culture is built, in part, through the habits, social relations, and material world of the work place.

As Antonio Gramsci points out, the Fordist regime is shaped not only through economic and political relationships, but also through the construction of a broader moral ordering that includes family relations, social behavior, understandings of self, and even forms of sexuality.²⁰ For many steelworkers, this more egalitarian regime molded individual dispositions in ways that contrast dramatically with today’s post-Fordist flexible work. Tim Fuchs, an ex-steelworker currently employed as a skilled electrician, says, When I worked at Bethlehem Steel, I made good money. You went to work and when you were at work you were in a good mood. You were at peace with yourself. . . . You came home, you were in a good mood, always. You weren’t always worried like you are now. The stability and security of work produced fulfillment, freedom, and confidence.

This newly confident cohort of workers contrasted themselves with many older workers who were more reluctant to challenge authority, less assured of the protection of the union, and who held on to many practices that preceded unionization.²¹ Curt Papp, who started at the Bethlehem plant in 1964, describes this: Our forefathers, my father, worked in the blast furnace. Most of those people were under the conditions that nobody would want to work, and they survived. Because of them, when we came in—they called us the hippie generation—we started taking on all these issues: the safety . . . and we had arguments. Let’s do it right this time—the 1970s. Historian Jefferson Cowie, in his study of working-class activism agrees, quoting a Lordstown plant union treasurer as saying in the early 1970s, it’s a different generation of workingmen. None of these guys came over from the old country poor and starving, grateful for any job they could get. . . . They’ve been exposed . . . to all the youth movements of the last ten years. . . . They’re just not going to swallow the same kind of treatment their fathers did. They’re not afraid of management. . . . They want more than just a job for thirty years.²² The attitudes of this younger generation of workers, coming of age in the youth and civil rights movements and walking into a mill with strong and assertive union representation, were different than those of their fathers.

Ironically, these accounts of older, more quiescent workers are not describing pre-union workers. When the older generation was hired, in the early 1950s, the Bethlehem plant had been unionized for more than a decade. But the union was not as strong in some parts of the plant as it was in others, and the power of the union had not grown to its full extent within the entire plant.²³ While Bethlehem Steel recognized the union and signed its first union contracts in 1942, those initial agreements did not initiate tremendous growth in wages and benefits for steelworkers. Salary increases, as well as improved working conditions, had to be fought for through a series of steel strikes in 1946, 1952, and 1956, ending with the famous nationwide 116-day steel strike in 1959. Although each strike resulted in wage and benefit improvements, it wasn’t until the 1960s, after the cost-of-living increases of the 1956 contract, that for the first time union workers got wages that took them out of the working class into a decent quality of life and gave them the promise of cradle-to-grave security.²⁴ In the late 1960s and 1970s, steelworkers’ moved firmly into a middle-class standard of living, and their security during layoffs, family health crises, and in retirement (through improved pension benefits) was assured.

Jack Metzgar, whose father was a steelworker, describes the 1950s as a period in which steelworkers had faith in the direction we were going . . . a rising tide was lifting all boats, raising everybody’s prospects and expectations.²⁵ In contrast, the next generation, the ones I interviewed, understood those possibilities as established social reality, a newly recognized social order. The most senior of these workers, hired in 1963, entered a work environment that for the very first time promised stable employment, a middle-class standard of living, and strong protections overseen by the union. They were welcomed in the mill, benefited greatly from the mentoring of older, more experienced workers who understood not only the skills and jobs in the plant but also the political system of the union, and they anticipated a career trajectory on the shop floor. Lester Brickly, who started as a laborer at the ingot mold foundry in 1966, said, I came to Bethlehem Steel because I was told by different people that if you start at the Bethlehem Steel, you’ll have a job for life. You will never need to worry about going somewhere else.²⁶ Lester was poised to learn new skills, bid into better positions, and see his collectively bargained wages, benefits, and working conditions continue to improve.

Crisis in Fordism: Restructuring the Mill

Researchers and the popular media have long represented blue-collar workers of the 1960s and ’70s—including steelworkers—as ignorant, passive, and conservative, a working class co-opted by their own affluence. However, more recent analyses disagree with this representation, describing instead the many ways that large portions of this cohort were engaged, mobilized, connected to each other, and motivated not just by wages and working conditions but by belief in expansive versions of industrial and union democracy.²⁷ These analyses show that this confidence and power threatened corporate elites, eliciting a strong corporate offensive in the period of 1965 to 1973 against which, in response, the younger generation of workers, who challenged bureaucratic unionism’s focus on wages and benefits and its acceptance of management control of decisions related to disinvestment, fought back. These workers pushed for more democratic working conditions.²⁸ These studies examine progressive rank-and-file movements, including Ed Sadlowski and the Steelworkers Fight Back campaign of 1977 that drew strong support from many workers in the Bethlehem mill’s 1963-64 and 1973-74 cohorts. Sadlowski’s campaign was run on a platform that was anti-war, anti–no-strike clause, and supportive of rank-and-file issues. The political power of an emboldened new generation of industrial workers clearly presented a political and economic problem to be confronted by corporate power, in part because those workers expected and believed in the promises of the Fordist compact of a new, more egalitarian capitalism. However, the post-Fordist strategies implemented by corporate elites were already beginning to undermine labor’s gains. Workers hired in 1963-64 enjoyed only ten years of this order before processes of deindustrialization in steel became evident.

The Fordist period is often represented in the social science literature as a stable time during which an accord between business, labor, and government ensured a steadily growing economy. This shapes our understanding of the postwar US period as more solid than it actually was. Alternative analyses point to contradictions and contestations within the labor-capital accord. Davis, for example, describes it as an armed truce between business and labor (mediated by government), Winslow represents it as a truce between business and business unionism that was partial and temporary, and Lichtenstein characterizes it as a limited and unstable truce.²⁹ Ethnographers in the 1980s documented the fragile affluence of the industrial working class and the erosion of the labor-capital accord.³⁰ Historian Jefferson Cowie, in his study on RCA, argues that even in the 1940s industry’s movements of capital show that management may have been significantly less committed to its end of the [Fordist] bargain than is commonly represented.³¹

US steel manufacturing was a core Fordist industry, but it also became a trendsetter in processes of deindustrialization paving the way for the emerging post-Fordist order. From the mid-1970s on, the steel industry attempted to restore high rates of profitability through reorganizing plants, restructuring labor relations, undermining union strength, extracting concessionary contracts, pursuing capital mobility, closing mills, arranging partnerships and mergers, and using bankruptcy strategies. As David Harvey points out, the emerging post-Fordist regime relied heavily on processes of accumulation by dispossession, accumulation based upon predation, fraud and violence, including, at Bethlehem Steel, the shedding of jobs, the shredding of pension and health care commitments, the destruction of life insurance policies, and the devaluation of worker-held company stock.³² Bethlehem Steel ultimately entered the bankruptcy courts to eliminate working-class assets and then sold its remaining steel mills to a vulture investor, who re-sold these leaner and meaner mills to Mittal Steel for a hefty profit. While these processes restored profitability to a transformed sector of the vertically integrated steel industry, they wreaked havoc on the lives of steelworkers as plants like Bethlehem closed and companies like Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt.

For many steelworkers in this cohort, while some of the real benefits of this period continued to be realized long into their work lives (the health care, decent wages, and the expectation of a pension), the imaginary that these were societally recognized entitlements—that their position in US society was secure, that their gains in the workplace were solid, and that this more egalitarian social order was realized and institutionalized in the US—began to be eroded and reshaped very early on. Workers’ expectations of a secure lifelong career in steel came under attack within ten to fifteen years, at the most, of being hired. The benefits and working conditions they earned, as well as the available jobs, began to be whittled down as concessionary contracts, work restructurings, and department and plant closings ate away at worker power, devalued and depleted worker assets, constricted worker rights, transformed an understanding of worker position in society, and eroded workers’ sense of possibilities. Within fifteen years of being hired, those workers hired in 1963 were already confronting a corporate offensive directed at transforming the steel industry and reshaping class relations in the US.

Contrary to popular representations, the post-Fordist regime has not been a successful or inevitable strategy for robust economic development.³³ Instead, it has been a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore [and in some cases create] the power of economic elites, and deindustrialization has been inextricably tied to the growth of finance and merchant capital.³⁴ Within the steel industry, corporate elites struggled to maintain profitability in a broader political economy that favored the financial sector over heavy manufacturing. A steel industry threatened by increasingly ruthless competition aggressively restructured itself through practices that included shedding product lines, departments, and entire plants, pushing labor for wage reductions and speed-up and pursuing mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, and bankruptcy. Known as rationalization, these large-scale processes of restructuring and deindustrialization played themselves out in waves of dislocation affecting varying industries and regions at different times and paces, manifesting disparate corporate strategies (which will be described in Chapter 1), and using tactics that play out unevenly even within specific communities and labor forces. Management structures, or factory regimes, develop and are implemented unevenly within the