16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sad, true, and cautionary, August 13, 2001
This review is from: And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline and Fall of the American Steel Industry (Pittsburgh Series in Social and Labor History) (Paperback)
I read this years ago, and I thought it was an excellent analysis of the collapse of the steel industry in Pittsburgh, filled with compelling tales of individual people.
The books feels like a Greek tragedy, in which the protagonists are doomed to a slow slide towards the edge of a cliff. Institutionalized conflict overcomes the efforts of people from both labor and maangement to halt, or at least slow the inevitable slide.
For people who think that the current dot.com crash is a serious downturn, this book offers a very good counter-perspective. When an area loses 100K jobs in 10 years, and whole towns essentially close, that's a *real* downturn.
On the other hand, there's always hope. Pittsburgh has bounced back, and has a much more diversified economy. The last time I visited, I could see the sky, which was more difficult in the steel days. To grasp those days, either see the early Tom Cruise movie "All The Right Moves", or for depth, read this book.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
... and it ate voraciously and completely, like an avenging angel., June 14, 2008
This review is from: And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline and Fall of the American Steel Industry (Pittsburgh Series in Social and Labor History) (Paperback)
This is a detailed and heartbreaking story of the failure and collapse of the American steel industry. Sometimes the details are more than one needs to know, but this book will serve as an excellent case history on the underlying reasons for the transfer of the "rust-belt" jobs overseas, and now America's reliance of foreigners to produce the goods we use, in return for pieces of paper (Bonds) giving them claims on American wealth.
Mr. Hoerr tries to write a dispassionate history, but it is difficult in the face of such monumental stupidity and greed. "A vibrant forty-six mile stretch of river valley, providing primary jobs for over thirty-five thousand steel employees... would be devastated and expunged from economic memory in less than five years." "After that, the opportunities are limitless... from here to there where McDonald's needs someone to serve the one-trillionth burger." (p12-13).
The author was a reporter during this period, and apportions blame to both the steel company management and the unions, but clearly reserves his primary animus for management. They saw labor as an undifferentiated mass of dumb "hunkies", the pejorative term for people of Slavic origins, who only needed to take orders. That attitude was repaid, as Mr. Hoerr says: "I have known only two major corporations that actually engendered feelings of hatred among their employees, GM and US Steel." (p206) Management eventually acquiesced to the form, but not the substance of labor participation by forming "Labor-Management Participation Teams," but usually ignored their recommendations. There was also a willful neglect in spending the capital to modernize the operations - USX finally proposed building the first continuous caster plant in the Mon Valley in 1986! - at the very end. (p550) Instead it infuriated the labor force by spending its capital in buying Marathon Oil.
The author had access, and draws telling portraits of the principal actors involved, from the USW's I.W. Abel, Lloyd McBride, Lynn Williams, Bernard Kleiman and Edmund Ayoub. On the management side there was David M. Roderick, Thomas Graham and David Hoag.
I worked in US Steel's Homestead Works for two summers during my college years - '65 and '66. At the time I thought this work was the most "real", and those mills would be eternal - America would always need steel, and would obviously need to produce it. Fortunately the avenging angel passed me by, as I decided this work was not for me. Once again another "wolf" has finally come to America - this time high (and higher still) gas prices, which will force more economic dislocations that prudent planning could have avoided. Will American society be able to organize its economy prudently, to truly meet the real needs of its citizens, and minimize massive dislocations? This book is an excellent story of previous follies - can we learn from them?
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
good book, July 20, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline and Fall of the American Steel Industry (Pittsburgh Series in Social and Labor History) (Paperback)
This is an excellent book for anyone who wants to learn about what went wrong in this basic industry. Not only a study of the collapse of the steel industry in the Mon Valley, the book is also a study of the pain of postindustrialization that swept the country in the 1980's. Esentially, the author is writing about a national trend, but focuses on the Pittsburgh area, which is really a microcosm. It is also a good look at what happens when unions and management can't get their acts together.
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