How Stubbornness Killed US Steel

I think I'm in love with this woman

you edit your videos like you have ADHD. Thats annoying. How many people are college grads and want a perky video of you riding your bike to thhe neighbor of nucor steel. You put more facts in here than you can find in a CNBC, bloomberg or any industry video. Thats fcking awesome. if USSteel has unions, and nucor doesn't, and nucor just lap-ped us steel, that means its all about the unions.

Interesting how you blame the unions & pensions right off the bat and don’t mention the bloated executive salaries and retirement packages of those running the company…
Not to mention finally being held a little accountable for all the land laid barren, water poisoned and people killed from toxins and unchecked corporate greed.

Nucor is a leader in the steel industry when it comes to innovation they are clearly the leader. Was a maintenance foreman for an Armco Steel, then AK, yep the child bought the parents. AK claimed to be leaders, while for a short time they were by their cut and slice management. And that came back to haunt them in spades. I saw the train wreck coming and bailed, after dealing with a major lockout for several years. AK failed to grasp basic concepts, they were successful in Middletown OH, so therefore they used the same plan elsewhere. The AK plant in Middletown was a one of a kind rolling mill operation. Due to the layout they could make a coil in about 40% the time as the Mansfield plant, but this was at a cost, their rolling line was faster but at the cost of less profit per roll. If you were running the same product on a huge order it could pump out product very fast, but if the mill was setting idle for more than several hours it suddenly became a money pit situation. Then they closed down ALL of their in house shops and outsourced basically everything. This worked well for them several years as there were numerous steel/iron equipment repair companies desperate for work. AK was famous for their bidding war techniques, eventually they shot themselves in the foot, as companies were slowly bled to death and they closed down. AK had scrapped their inhouse shops, so they ended up with repairs being outsourced at a reverse situation. They did this at Mansfield, and the local machine repair shops were swamped with work and basically told AK to go elsewhere. We ended up sending routine repairs as far as Canada, for things we did in several days inhouse. From what I understand they are not doing all that well today. Industry isn't a One size fits all, in situational operations. Nucor is an icon for innovation and willingness to try an new concept.

Some correct facts, many important facts not discussed

When you spend countless amounts of money on politicians trying to hold onto your power in the market instead of investing it into your company, you’ve already lost

Politicians (the worlds most destructive parasites) killed US Steel.

What does the NA auto industry, steel industry, railroad industry, in fact all failing NA manufacturing industries have in common? Unions that killed them! FACT!

There's nothing more permanent than a "temporary" solution that works

I was in college in the mid-'70s. A professor told us that he usually took students on a tour of US Steel plants in the past, but that US Steel was having problems and did not want to put up with student tours.

Shame

Let's not forget that the unions had a big part in destroying the steel industry because they would not allow them to upgrade and modernize.
It's not just the corporation but the unions are fully responsible partner in the steel industries demise.

We are likely to see iron/steel metal production shift to iron ore export ports - huge solar and wind farms create cheap hydrogen to burn to create heat and make a basic product sold as pellets. The pellets are then exported to electric arc furnaces around the world to make finished steel products.

All steel in a bof is 50% scrap. ALL! Furthermore most bofs run on coal powered steam. EVERY shop i worked at closed it arch furnace due to maintance costs. Ak middletown, rouge dearborn, us great.lakes ecourse. Macloud shut down, arch. I think you missed the big other reasons like enviormental costs.

The EPA, OSHA, overtime, minimum wage, unions and other things that created a healthy middle class in the USA also caused the downfall of most industries in America.
However, these things also boosted demand for foreign goods since Americans had disposable income which is missing in many countries.

Talk to much, say very little.

The real corporation killer was the internal problems we ignored along the way.

Great video.
Telling us how dinos disappeared 😊

Just your usual marxist propaganda. The steel industry, like the automobile industry, was killed by the communists in big labor. The American worker is not competitive with the rest of the world. Overpaid and underproducing.......

Stubbornness and belligerence have pretty much tanked everything in the US.

My father worked for J&L Steel for 30 years.
In the early 70's, the USW union sighted a no strike union contract. My father said this was the end. Because the big money was invested in Japanese Steel. So the Union contract would raise the price of Steel. This raise in price would give Japanese Steel enough profit to cover the cost of their new Steel mills.
Most of the America Steel mills were built during the war, and were mostly paid for

This is the most authentic type of youtubing around lately. Smart girl 👏

I worked at a US Steel plant in the 70's and through to the early 2000's. It was the Geneva plant in central Utah. It was the last one to use open hearth. When USS closed it, a group of investors bought it and did a bunch of modernization including a used BOP system from closed Republic Steel. . Eventually a down cycle in the market closed it. It's gone, with a new gas fired power plant and lots of houses where it stood.

I have worked for ARMCO, NUCOR (The continuous sheet caster in Indiana) , HADEED(Saudi Arabia), and Acelor Mital(Brazil), 45 years in the steel industry all over the U.S. and the World.

Now I wanna know about the quality of the steel via these different methods. Which one produces the best steel, the strongest steel, or the most flexible steel

i used to work for green leaf nursery near tarboro nc. my supervisor at green leaf used to work for nucor steel.

Gerardeau Steel bought out North Star Steel here in MN. They shut down the mini mill North Star owned all because it had union workers

North Star Steel at the mill close to me was a dedicated mill to making rebar.

I steel don't get it

If TSMC behaviors like US steel, never invest on new factory, they will be out of business long ago!

U.S. Steel was referred to as, "Steel."

I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 50's and 60's. I remember our 5th grade class collecting groceries for a girl in our class whose father/steelworker was on a long strike. The union won but it really lost. I used to drive down the Monongehela River looking at steel mill after steel mill on the other side of the river. They are gone. - ALL gone! I lay some of the blame on union greed. I also saw the demise of U.S. Steel in the 70's.

"Coffee percolator", yes, historically, that does come to mind.

My, but I am chatty Cathy. The end product of steel and coal fire is "Red Dog." All over south Pgh were these literal mountains of red dog. Cannot believe we played on top of them. Kind of like fissures in glaciers. For entertaiment my father would drive us down to Elizabeth, Pa. to watch trains dump red hot red dog down the mountain. It was like a 5-star 4th of July. I also remember, two decades later driving by and ALL those red do mountains were gone.

This episode brought to us by Yeti

By the way, I'd be glad to come by and power wash your front steps to remobe the algae. (TMI?)

Economic reality is Monopolies or Duopolies in business stop innovation. This is why anti trust laws exist. Unions made America rich and is the only way for people to improve the lives of the average person and make a country rich and stable. California is a union state and the richest per Capita in the USA, the "right to work" states that ban unions are the poorest by far. Simple proof my friends.

1 month later and there's an article about the Japan Prime Minister urging US approval of the deal

I worked as an engineer for a large US corporation that dominated its market for decades and then suffered from its failure to adapt to changes in tech and the market. My hypothesis is that in a successful company with a history of market dominance, management's guiding philosophy becomes "don't rock the boat". If you change something and it doesn't work out, it's your fault for changing it. If you leave things alone and it doesn't work out, well, it worked before, you didn't change anything, something else must be the cause. Technical advances in manufacturing are usually limited to small changes to what was done previously, because those have low risk; big changes require convincing management that not making the change is the larger risk.

I could say this account for most of the failure of American industries as a whole. I work in the Shipbuilding industries, and we are still building advance ship with 1940 machines that are wore out and techniques, and sometimes just man and women beating heat metal into shape with hammers. we lost a lot of the knowledge due to people with 40+ year experience retiring because company fails to hire new worker in time to learn and replace the retiring work force. The Union protect poor performing employees so well, that I actually know of a guy who sleep at his workstation every day, was write up several time, and the Union say the company need to hire someone to wake him up. I would say that the USA as a country has not developed basic global trading practices since we do not really enter the global market until after WW2, and we pretty just open our doors with no protection to keep industry, jobs, or production in the USA or coming to the USA.

I used to deliver lime stone to the Indiana plant with a coworker in another truck. I miss doing this. I had fun.

I saw at least 4 wiring code violations....

When looking at “ profitability” of a massive infrastructure, I think expensive pensions are a cuvic duty of the producer.

When you make overly simplistic comparisons to Japanese production overseas and mention “more economical methods” do you mean to incluse the 6 and 7 year olds working 16 hour shifts. Maybe consider the fact that strategic terrifs might have kept the US on top rather than allowing the wicked to compete off the abuse of the week. Maybee consider if the box has more dimensions.

Me: manager in UAW and USW plants for 20 years (70s-80s)..."Short term profit maximization" of the American system , vs "market share capture" of Japan and China, where governments were backing industry updates as well as new ventures. There were no robots yet, so it was purely labor cost competition. Even when robotics began to be useful, American old tech companies could not afford the political fallout of throwing employees out on the street and investing in robotics simultaneously. ___ Japan and China, esp China, simply started up whole new companies with the latest equipment, incl robotics. Now, they had cheap labor, robotics, and government backing for 10-15 year market share goals.

I worked in a US Steel mill for 10 years and retired just before they closed most of the mill and laid off most of the employees. It had been an integrated mill, as you mentioned. The BOP was the process that they used. It had been converted from the open hearth many years ago.
They closed down all the metal making parts of the mill as well as the sheet metal producing parts. Gone were the Iron making, steel making and sheet metal parts. They made sheet metal by rolling large slabs of cast steel into coils. The coils were either sold as is or further processed in the galvanizing and pickling mills to customer specifications.
I worked in most areas of the mill in the maintenance dept for the first few months of working there. Then I was assigned to the crane repair dept. where I stayed for 9+ years. So I got the privilege of seeing how it was done without actually working in those departments by looking over their shoulders :) They kept their customer service departments and the galvanizing operations, but most of the production was closed down. Some parts are even gone.
I'm glad to have been a part of it, and I'm sad to see a 100-year-old mill slip into obscurity. Adios US Steel.