The transformation of US steel 1945‐1985: perspectives from the corporation and the union

Abstract

The American economy of the late twentieth century is in a state of transition [1]. Basic manufacturing industries, long the centerpiece of U. S. business, are giving way to the service sector and newer high technology industries [2]. In many respects, the U. S. steel industry is representative of the general state of basic industry in the U. S. in the 1980s and 1990s and, by extension, stands as a symbol of the common concerns about the global competitiveness of the American economy. Both the large integrated steel firms (eg: United States Steel (also referred to as USS and The Corporation) and the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) participated in this transition from an industry which built new capacity to meet increased domestic demand in the 1940s and 1950s, to an industry which in the 1980s faced continual plant closings and a decline in union membership in the 1980's from 1.5 million to approximately 700,000 members [3].This paper explores why the U. S. steel industry changed from being the largest steel industry in the world in 1945 to a condition of near extinction in 1985. In the early to mid-1980s, the popular business press was filled with stories about the decline of American manufacturing, particularly the decline of the once-great American steel industry [4]. During the same period a number of academics, particularly those in the areas of management and economics, were writing about the "decline" of the American steel industry [5]. The approach taken in most of these studies was one of attempting to discover where management went wrong, and why managers did not foresee "environmental changes". This form of explanation provides an external analysis of what went wrong, as well as the ability to recognize that a certain course of action works well in certain conditions. In analyzing and explaining the current state of basic industry in the U. S. this approach is able to place blame for "mistaken" decisions and to point out what went wrong and when [6]. The models developed from this form of explanation provide an analytical framework, but do not provide guidance in how to avoid the mistakes of the past. Knowing that the current state of basic industry is the result of a series of mistaken decisions

A study of resource dependency: the coal supply strategy of the Japanese steel mills – 1960‐2010

“…Moreover, the continuation of high prices to Canadian coal owners masked a sharp change in the situation of the Japanese steel industry, as the global steel industry experienced a crisis of oversupply wrought by not only the large‐scale entry of Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese product into the international market but also by an absolute decline in steel consumption in the world's largest market, the United States. As Newell (1997, pp. 184‐186) indicates, this crisis demanded a strategic reassessment by all steel producers with many United States firms opting to either exit the industry or severely reduce their output after the mid‐1970s.…”

“…For in the post‐1945 world it became increasingly difficult to conceptualize the problems confronting management through a consideration of only national markets. In the case of the world steel industry the saturation of the United States domestic market during the 1970s at a time when Japanese steel exports were growing strongly created a crisis of oversupply that everywhere demanded radical responses from steel producers (Newell, 1997, p. 186). Second, the history of the Pac‐Pacific coal trade allows or a longitudinal test of the famed resource dependency theory developed by Jeff Pfeffer, Phillip Novak and Gerry Salancik (Pfeffer, 1972, 1976; Pfeffer and Novak, 1976; Pfeffer and Salancik, 1978).…”