September 19, 2024, marked 47 years since thousands of workers, who were mainly men, did what they did every Monday in the valley.
They walked into the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube along the Mahoning River for the early shift.
This from townhall.com.
Campbell, Ohio, and the demise of U.S. Steel
Within an hour of the workers’ shift, Youngstown Sheet and Tube abruptly furloughed 5,000 of them in a single day. Within months, 16 more plants owned by U.S. Steel shut down, including Youngstown-based Ohio Works.
The company cited foreign imports, lack of profitability, aging facilities and the cost of growing government regulations on the industry to explain the move.
Workers mumbled:
It didn’t help that the company hadn’t upgraded their facilities in decades.
The community came together in a way that was passionate and admirable. The late Staughton Lynd, a leader in the 1960s social justice movement, said an emergency meeting was called by the Central Labor Union on the night of the first furloughs. It put a plan together to send petitions to then-President Jimmy Carter, encouraging him to stop steel imports and put an ease on regulations that were hurting the industry.
Lynd said:
Within three days, over 100,000 signatures were collected. Five chartered buses of 300 men, local elected officials and faith leaders went to Washington to deliver them to Carter.
Former Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio) joined them for a rally as they waved signs that read: “Save the Steel Industry.”
Lynd said:
Carter never bothered to send out an aide to receive the petitions when they arrived or acknowledge them.
One worker said:
Honestly, how many times does this story have to be told before someone in power cares about our lives?
Locals said CBS News’ “60 Minutes” did not come to speak with them about the plant closing.
A termination notice can be both economically and emotionally devastating, leaving the mind racing about how to pay for a mortgage or apartment, food, utilities and car payments. Then you question whether your skills are needed anymore.
Steelworkers in the 1970s—and those who worked in industries that supported the plant, such as the machine shops that made the widgets or the mom-and-pop grocery stores they stopped at after their shift—knew their skills were not needed anymore.
Termination is a word heard over and over again from people not just in the Rust Belt but all across the country.
Private-sector America has had to deal with ‘shut down and all gone overnight’ instability in their lives for decades.
The days of job security for anyone not working for the government began incrementally descending in the 1970s. By the 1990s, a Times survey showed:
[T]wo-thirds of Americans believed that job security has deteriorated.
What a recent CBS News episode—which catered to those employed by the government—clearly does not understand is that this episode of “60 Minutes” demonstrated it does not have the same empathy for the millions of people in the private sector in the middle of the country who have experienced the same sharp gut punch of uncertainty.
Cameramen have not showed up to their homes to ask them to tell their stories.
60 Minutes did not do a segment on the steel valley back then when people lost their jobs.
Within a decade, 40,000 jobs in the area were gone. Within 20 years, 100,000 people left the region, leaving a scar. No large news organization came to calculate what the tragedy those job losses would have in Campbell or in Weirton last year.
Experts tell those who lose their jobs to move, relocate, be more mobile and dismantle their families, roots, and tight-knit communities. That is why the 60 Minutes episode rubbed people the wrong way.
They did not tell the government workers the same thing. People say they do not want anyone to lose their jobs. They just wish the national press covered this instability evenly.
The colluding propaganda media, however, are not paid to cover anything evenly.
