Using the global steel industry's status in the 1980s as a context, this study follows its evolution from booming business to a precipitous decline, comparing it to the current changes unfolding within the Canadian steel industry. The chronicle demonstrates how management demanded workers' augmented participation in increasingly temporary and insecure labor. Workers at the flagship Stelco plant in Hamilton, Ontario, are interviewed, and new management strategies as well as the unionized workforces' responses to them are documented. Illustrating the effects of the industry's decline on the workers' communities as well, this series of investigations reveals how the insight of today's steelworkers is being dismissed in favor of an undermining academic knowledge.

Presented in a straightforward, non-technical manner, this book describes how one strategic industry has adapted to powerful technological and structural changes, ushering in a new phase in the global steel business.--Daniel Madar is a professor of political science at Brock University and the author of Heavy Traffic: Deregulation, Trade, and Transformation in North American Trucking.--"Big Steel explores an industry that has been in near continual transformation for a generation or more and captures the shape and structure of these changes. Perhaps even more significantly, it makes the case that developments in the new millennium denote a new phase in the global steel business, which portends even more dramatic changes of behaviour and performance." - Peter Clancy, author, Micro-Politics and Canadian Business: Paper, Steel and the Airlines.

Named one of the fifty best books of 1992 by Publishers Weekly More than a century has passed since the infamous lockout at the Homestead Works of the Carnegie Steel Company. The dramatic and violent events of July 6, 1892, are among the mst familiar in the history of American labor. And yet, few historians have adequately addressed the issues and the culture that shaped that day. For many Americans, Homestead remains simply the story of a bloody clash between management and labor. In The Battle for Homestead, Paul Krause calls upon the methods and insights of labor history, intellectual history, anthropology, and the history of technology to situate the events of the lockout and their significance in the broad context of America's Guilded Age. Utilizing extensive archival material, much of it heretofore unknown, he reconstructs the social, intellectual, and political climate of the burgeoning post-Civil War steel industry. The Battle for Homestead brings to life many of the individuals -both in and outside Homestead- who played a role in the events leading to July 1892. From the inventor of the modern Bessemer steel mill to the most obscure immigrant workers, from Christopher L. Magee, the "boss" of Pittsburgh machine politics, to Thomas A. Armstrong, the tireless editor of the National Labor Tribune, from the "Laird of Skibo" himself (Andrew Carnegie) to the labor leader and mayor of Homestead, "Old Beeswax" (Thomas W. Taylor), Krause shows how all these lives became intertwined, often in surprising and unpredictable ways, as the drama of the lockout unfolded. As the nineteenth century was drawing to a close, the Homestead Lockout dramatized the all-important question: Can the land of industry and technological innovation continue to be "the land of the free"? Can material progress, with its inevitable social and economic inequities, be made compatible with the American commitment to democracy for all? Twentieth-century history has demonstrated all too clearly the intesity of this dilemma. In addressing some of the thorniest issues of the last century, The Battle for Homestead demonstrates the enduring legacy and relevance of Homestead over a century later.

Steel companies were at the birth of the modern business corporation. The first billion dollar corporation ever formed was US Steel in 1901. By the mid-Twentieth Century the steel mill and the automobile plant were the two pillars upon which the Twentieth Century industrial economy rested. Given the scale of capital and operations, vertical integration was seen to be pivotal, from the raw materials of iron ore and coal on one end of the supply chain to the myriad of finished products on the other. By the end of the century, however, things had dramatically changed. The dominance of the steel industry by the United States was being challenged by competitors abroad. Perhaps conceding defeat, U.S. Steel companies spun off assets and businesses in order to focus on core operations. Even more critical, a common assumption had arisen by then that, moving into the new millennium, the growth of the U.S. economy would be less reliant upon manufacturing and more reliant upon services and information. It was widely perceived that the country was moving from an industrial age into an information age, driven by high technology.That process is now being reversed. It now appears that the death knell of the manufacturing economy in the United States was premature. A rejuvenation of the steel industry is underway and that rejuvenation is of global proportions. For the first time, steel companies exist that are truly global in scope; and because steel and manufacturing are inseparable, the fate of the North American steel industry depends on whether the United States and Canada conclude that manufacturing matters. At the center of the current financial crisis is the imbalance between the trade surplus countries (China and Germany) and the deficit countries (most everybody else). The financial uncertainty persists. What is certain is that a rebalancing of the world economy will require a rejuvenation of advanced manufacturing.The proposed book will offer a concise history of the steel industry; a presentation of the economics of the industry; an overview of how the industry operates and the environment in which it operates; a discussion of regulation of the industry; a documentation of the reasons why a rejuvenated steel industry will be critical to the economic health of the United States and Canada; and a rationale for the reemergence of the steel industry in particular, and manufacturing in general, as a vital force in the North American economy of the new millennium.

From prehistoric times until late in the twentieth century iron was vital to the livelihood of those who lived and worked in the Forest of Dean. From Roman times onwards iron from the Forest was also vital to the national economy. This is the story of the Forest's iron industry.

By applying their abundant natural resources to ironmaking early in the eighteenth century, Americans soon made themselves felt in world markets. After the Revolution, ironmakers supplied the materials necessary to the building of American industry, pushing the fuel efficiency and productivity of their furnaces far ahead of their European rivals.

In American Iron, 1607-1900, Robert B. Gordon draws on recent archaeological findings as well as archival research to present an ambitious, comprehensive survey of iron technology in America from the colonial period to the industry's demise at about the turn of the twentieth century. Closely examining the techniques -- the "hows" -- of ironmaking in its various forms, Gordon offers new interpretations of labor, innovation, and product quality in ironmaking, along with references to the industry's environmental consequences. He establishes the high level of skills required to ensure efficient and safe operation of furnaces and to improve the quality of iron product. By mastering founding, fining, puddling, or bloom smelting, ironworkers gained a degree of control over their lives not easily attained by others.