by Guest » April 20, 2026, 8:47 pm
john mcgraw wrote: April 20, 2026, 7:10 am
Very, very good news here regarding the USS Gary works re-opening.
This will mean hundreds of good paying jobs restored to that area, including in the shipping industry.
Yes, Virginia tariffs do work, and protecting heavy American industry, which is concentrated in the Great Lakes basin, is extremely important.
For decades, federal administrations of both parties have actively ignored the needs of heavy industry, allowing our steel and iron and coke plants to be devastated by predatory foreign competition. Federal policy actively encouraged the out sourcing of heavy industry overseas, devastating local communities, and destroying jobs and local tax bases. Whether its Gary or South Chicago or Lackawanna the story is the same.
Look for example at the Buffalo area - the massive Bethlehem Steel plant at Lackawanna closed and mostly demolished, causing the loss of 20,000 jobs; the massive Republic Steel plant at South Buffalo, closed and demolished causing the loss of 5,000 jobs; the massive Donner-Hanna Coke plant in South Buffalo closed and demolished with the loss of 2,000 jobs, are just examples of the losses in the GL basin.
US Steel is only restarting their tin mill at Gary which is expected to create 225 jobs.
Those older mills were replaced by non-union Mini-mills in the Southern US. Over 80% of raw steel is now made in the South and less than 20% is made at integrated steel mills.
The fact of the matter is that by the mid-1970s most of the US Steel industry was outdated with too many mills that couldn't be retrofitted into ultra-modern steel mills due to their small footprint and layout. That's why US Steel around 1976-79 was planning a new integrated steel mill (Speer Works) next to their ore-unloading dock in Conneaut, Ohio at that time. By 1980, US Steel thought better of building a new mill and instead invested in Marathon Oil - which in hindsight was a good idea. That's because Marathon Oil could be used as collateral to invest in mills like Gary, Mon Valley, etc with updated or new continuous casters, while other companies found it nearly impossible to get money from banks for investments at that time due to how poor the steel market was at that time.
When the OPEC embargo started in October 1973, it precipitated a severe recession between the years 1973-75 and caused the end of the post-war economic boom. The dominoes started to fall at that time and accelerated with the stagflation of the mid- to late-1970s and early 1980s. I was in high school in the early 1980s and recall the heartbreak of all those mills closing and the impact it had on single industry communities in the Mon Valley, Pittsburgh, South Chicago, Buffalo and other cities and towns.
[quote="john mcgraw" post_id=275121 time=1776687021]
Very, very good news here regarding the USS Gary works re-opening.
This will mean hundreds of good paying jobs restored to that area, including in the shipping industry.
Yes, Virginia tariffs do work, and protecting heavy American industry, which is concentrated in the Great Lakes basin, is extremely important.
For decades, federal administrations of both parties have actively ignored the needs of heavy industry, allowing our steel and iron and coke plants to be devastated by predatory foreign competition. Federal policy actively encouraged the out sourcing of heavy industry overseas, devastating local communities, and destroying jobs and local tax bases. Whether its Gary or South Chicago or Lackawanna the story is the same.
Look for example at the Buffalo area - the massive Bethlehem Steel plant at Lackawanna closed and mostly demolished, causing the loss of 20,000 jobs; the massive Republic Steel plant at South Buffalo, closed and demolished causing the loss of 5,000 jobs; the massive Donner-Hanna Coke plant in South Buffalo closed and demolished with the loss of 2,000 jobs, are just examples of the losses in the GL basin.
[/quote]
US Steel is only restarting their tin mill at Gary which is expected to create 225 jobs.
Those older mills were replaced by non-union Mini-mills in the Southern US. Over 80% of raw steel is now made in the South and less than 20% is made at integrated steel mills.
The fact of the matter is that by the mid-1970s most of the US Steel industry was outdated with too many mills that couldn't be retrofitted into ultra-modern steel mills due to their small footprint and layout. That's why US Steel around 1976-79 was planning a new integrated steel mill (Speer Works) next to their ore-unloading dock in Conneaut, Ohio at that time. By 1980, US Steel thought better of building a new mill and instead invested in Marathon Oil - which in hindsight was a good idea. That's because Marathon Oil could be used as collateral to invest in mills like Gary, Mon Valley, etc with updated or new continuous casters, while other companies found it nearly impossible to get money from banks for investments at that time due to how poor the steel market was at that time.
When the OPEC embargo started in October 1973, it precipitated a severe recession between the years 1973-75 and caused the end of the post-war economic boom. The dominoes started to fall at that time and accelerated with the stagflation of the mid- to late-1970s and early 1980s. I was in high school in the early 1980s and recall the heartbreak of all those mills closing and the impact it had on single industry communities in the Mon Valley, Pittsburgh, South Chicago, Buffalo and other cities and towns.