Please tell us.
I live in Pittsburgh, PA, where more steel was produced here during WWII than in Germany and Japan combined.
I was born here, raised here, and have lived here my entire life. I remember the steel mills when I was a kid in the 1960's
I live in Erie PA., and worked in a steel mill when I was a kid.
What you don't want to understand is that those mills were built in the 1930s. They met their heyday during WW2, and were becoming tired and outdated by the 1950s.
But the investors didn't want to surrender their big profits to building new buildings and updating equipment. They just wanted those big profits to roll on forever. And while they neglected their plants, and fought with their laborers, other countries were building brand new state of the art plants that could produce better steel more cost effectively, and were paying their laborers fairly. And by the end of the 1960s, those plants were producing most of the world's steel, while our old antiquated plants were falling apart.
The foolish owners and investors, of course, blamed everything on the unions because they'd always hated the unions and because they didn't want to admit that it was their own greed and stupidity that brought them down. But the truth is that just as with the auto industry, size and success had created lethargy, and greed supplanted wisdom among the second generation CEOs and investors (who did not build these industries, themselves), and so they fell into irrelevancy while other nations were learning how to do things better and cheaper.
Today, there is ONE steel mill still in operation in the entire county
Oh, you must mean the Finkle Steel Plant in Chicago? They seem to be doing quite well. But then they make specialty steels that the other countries don't have the expertise to produce.
Ask any former steel worker what happened, and they will all tell you the unions ruined it.
I worked at National Forge and Steel in Erie PA. in the 70s when the plant was closing, and I was a member of the union. And I don't recall anyone ever saying that. What I recall was that the plant had not been updated significantly since it was built in the 30s, except for some EPA required changes in the late 60s. And so it simply couldn't compete with the new, efficient, modern plants around the world.
My dad had a white collar job at Untied States Steel. He's knows first hand that the unions are the reason all the steel mills shut down, and are gone.
He was management, so I guess he wasn't biased against the unions, right?