| Once-Mighty
Bethlehem Steel Fades Away |
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| When an 18-year-old Jerry Green started working for Bethlehem Steel as a bricklayer's helper in 1973, he thought he was part of an unshakable, behemouth industry. In better times, he said, it was a great source of pride. But on Wednesday, an American industrial icon that employed 300,000 people during its World War II heyday faded into history. "When I first starting working there, I felt like the whole industrial world revolved around steel. We were proud to be steelworkers," said Green, who rose to be president of his union local. "When you went to the
banks, when you went to the restaurants, or anywhere in town and
told them you were a steelworker, they looked up to you." The bankrupt steelmaker's executives and lawyers began signing paperwork Wednesday transferring ownership of the company's mills to International Steel Group, a new company based in Cleveland. Once the paperwork is complete _ a tedious process officials said could take until May 6 _ the company will retain a small secretarial staff for a few months, then vanish. Its 11,000 steelworkers kept their jobs as ISG took control at Bethlehem' s plants, but about 450 managers and executives were laid off, said Bethlehem's chief executive, Robert Miller. "This is a bittersweet day for Bethlehem Steel," he said. "It's the end of an era."
Industry consolidation, overseas competition, and Bethlehem Steel' s own legacy led to the company's demise, he said. Until the $1.5 billion sale, the company provided pensions for more than 100,000 retirees and their dependents, far more than it could support. The ownership change will mean little in Bethlehem, the small city about an hour's drive north of Philadelphia. The massive blast furnaces on the banks of the Lehigh River went cold in 1995. The beam yards shuttered in 1996. The last coke oven closed in 1998. Even longer ago, the bulk of Bethlehem Steel's operations shifted to more modern plants in Burns Harbor, Ind., and Sparrows Point, Md. Those plants kept operating Wednesday. |
Green, who worked at the company's Bethlehem plant until it shut in 1998, said the demise left a generation of workers bitter. "We feel betrayed," he said. Bethlehem Steel was never the country's largest steelmaker, but it was always one of its most influential. The titan's lineage dates to 1857, when the Saucona Iron Co. opened on Bethlehem's south side. Those facilities were absorbed by Bethlehem Steel Corp., formed in 1904 by industrialist Charles M. Schwab. The company enjoyed explosive growth in the era of skyscrapers in the 1920s and 1930s, and it acquired mills, shipyards and iron and coal mines nationwide. The company's greatest contribution may have come during World War II, when it forged cannon, made airplane cylinders, rolled armor plate and built 1,121 ships. "They were an astonishing company, and technologically, they set all sorts of standards," said Steven Lubar, curator of the history of technology at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of American History. He said Bethlehem Steel was among five or six companies whose industrial output most helped the country win the war. The good times, though, didn't last. As imported steel grew more popular in the 1970s and 1980s, the company closed mills nationwide. Bethlehem Steel declared bankruptcy in 2001, one of dozens of American steel companies to do so in the past 10 years. Its stock was removed from the New York Stock Exchange last June. "In some ways, it is a sad thing for a company to last for 100 years then disappear," Lubar said. "But the folks at Bethlehem Steel will always be able to point to the New York skyline and say, `We built that. Those are our buildings.'" |
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