I. Concentration and Competition in Steel

September 25, 2007

In 1901 a series of high-level mergers effectively terminated the era of active competition in the U.S. steel industry. The United States Steel Corporation, or "Big Steel," as it came to be known, was the powerful progeny of three of the largest financial groups of the time: the Andrew Carnegie group, the J.P. Morgan group and the W.H. Moore group. In a single action, a "combination of combinations," more than 65% of the nation's steel capacity was united in one firm.(2) Morgan and the others argued that the giant company would allow for more efficient production, greater technological advances and lower costs. More than one congressional committee, would later take exception to these arguments, finding instead that the intent to monopolize and eliminate competition was, in fact, the apple of the financiers' eye.

It wasn't long before the new-born behemoth had its hooks into the essential problem faced by capital: price competition tends to reduce profits. Indeed, even as U.S. Steel scrambled to snatch up all available coal mines and iron ore deposits, a business panic in 1907 had reinserted price competition into the industry. To calm these troubled waters, Judge (Elbert H.) Gary, the president of U.S. Steel, instituted his "Gary dinners," social gatherings to which he invited nearly every steel producer in the country. In the words of economist Walter Adams:

He exhorted them like a Methodist preacher at a camp meeting to follow the price leadership of U.S. Steel. There was no need to force a group of reluctant competitors into a cooperative arrangement. U.S. Steel merely assumed the lead incumbent on a firm its size; its rivals followed, fully realizing that cooperation was more profitable than competition.(3)

This practice of "friendly competition" allowed U.S. Steel to avoid the trust-busters and maintain industry discipline over pricing for decades.

Although a lengthy series of mergers among top steelmakers produced for U.S. Steel some playmates of its own size, they also produced a severely monopolized industry. While many factors pushed for a highly centralized industry-such as the monopolization of raw materials in the hands of a few companies, or the increasing cost of building steelmills-the U.S. government served as a particularly important catalyst in spurring the monopolization of the industry.

Through the War Assets Administration, the government spent $770 million to build the steel plants it needed to execute World War II. At the end of the war it turned these plants over to the largest steel companies, their wartime managers. The vast majority of these plants were sold at a fraction of their cost. For example, the government built an integrated steel plant (including mining facilities) at Geneva, Utah, in 1942-43 at a cost of $191.2 million. In June 1946 the plant was sold to U.S. Steel for $40million.(4) This single purchase allowed Big Steel to more than double its total capacity in the Pacific coast and mountain states. Two further purchases of government mills in Gary, Indiana, gave U.S. steel one plant-the Gary works-which was larger than the total operations of Jones & Laughlin, National Steel, Youngstown Sheet & Tube, Armco Steel and Inland Steel!(5)

By 1950 twelve firms dominated the industry, controlling more than 85% of blast furnace capacity, steel production and control of iron ore reserves. Today, only eight firms produce approximately 95% of all steel in the United States (while the top two companies, U.S. Steel and Bethlehem, control nearly 40% of output).(6)

THE PRICE IS RIGHT

The monopolization of the steel industry increased its ability to set prices without regard to the golden law of supply and demand. Supporters of the steel pricing system (known as "base point pricing") argue that the system provided price stability which prevented prices from rising rapidly in times of high demand.(7) Opponents of base point pricing, including the Federal Trade Commission, have stressed that it promoted collusion and the elimination of any price competition.

Regardless of the system, steel prices have risen faster than the national industrial average. Since 1970 steelmill prices have risen above those of all industrial products by 33%.(8) Not even Kennedy's legendary "jawboning" of the steelmakers served to counteract this trend.

But another factor did challenge the industry's ability to collude on pricing: the introduction of a new competitor, foreign steel. Most analysts note that pricing behavior in the domestic steel industry began to change in the late 1950s and early 1960s, with prices becoming gradually more responsive to demand. This has been particularly evident since 1967.(9) As Chart I demonstrates, this corresponds to the years in which foreign imports began to make a serious dent in the domestic market. By 1968, foreign imports were absorbing nearly 20% of the market. For the first time since 1907 when Judge Gary sat down to dinner with the other U.S. steel producers, the domestic industry was forced to eat crow and adopt a more competitive pricing behavior.

The Council on Wage and Price Stability recently acknowledged this critical competitive function of foreign steel. It concluded that the U.S. steel industry "would benefit from a reduction of imports only to the extent that the removal of' competition allows it to fatten profit margins by raising prices."(10) Indeed, when faced with a choice between expanding markets by adopting a more competitive pricing posture or bolstering profits by raising prices when competitive pressures are removed, the industry has consistently opted for fatter profits.(11)

We see, then, that foreign steel, entering the U.S. market in significant quantities after 1959, has forced the industry to compete, a fact that has greatly disturbed them. Our next task is to determine if this competition reflects the lower costs of foreign steel or if, as U.S. steelmakers argue, it represents "unfair" competition, the dumping of below-cost steel.

THE INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIVENESS OF THE U.S. STEEL INDUSTRY

As steelmills faced one of their worst slumps on record in 1977, legislators from the steelmaking state of Ohio argued that, It is imperative that the administration and the Congress understand that it is not better technology and lower production costs responsible for high steel imports at unrealistically low prices, but the deliberate and planned use by foreign governments of the American steel market to gain economic advantage.(12)

This conclusion was bolstered by two studies commissioned by the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI), the industry's major trade representative.(13)

Not unexpectedly, the AISI studies confirmed the steel companies' worst fears:

...Throughout the late 1960s, foreign producers did not have sufficient cost advantages to account for the difference between their prices on U.S. shipments and the price of comparable domestic shipments. The unavoidable inference from this fact is that foreign producers were selling below their full production costs.(14)

Furthermore, the AISI studies identified the Japanese-the major exporters of steel to the United States-as the worst offenders.

Others strongly disagree with the AISI's conclusions. Charles Stern, the president of the American Institute for Imported Steel, predictably called the steelmakers' charges "a fantastic propaganda campaign."(15) Similar conclusions have come from less immediately interested sources such as Charles Bradford, of Merrill, Lynch or Sanford Rose, a noted editor at Fortune, who wrote, "Japan's export success, which is causing such consternation in the United States these days, does not depend to any appreciable degree on such illegal trade tactics as dumping."(16)

Who are we to believe? Each side has mustered its own team of economists to demonstrate through elaborate forward and backward projections that yes, there has, or no, there has not, been dumping-which only recalls Mark Twain's definition of the three types of lies which exist: lies, damn lies and statistics.

To begin to cut through this Gordian knot, we must start with the basic question: Does it cost more or less to produce steel in the United States or Japan, to cite the major foreign competitor? Five major studies have examined the comparative costs of steel production in these two countries. They have concluded that Japanese costs (which include all labor and employment costs plus the cost of raw materials, but not shipping, capital costs or profits) are between 31% and 82% less than average costs in the U.S. steel industry.(17) In other words, it costs Japanese producers approximately $78-133 less for each ton of steel they produce.

Moreover, a study undertaken by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1977 also concluded that the net effects of government subsidies on the steel industries of Japan and the United States were quite minimal, amounting to a 46C a ton advantage for Japanese steelmakers over the 1957-75 period.(18)

Thus, at least as far as Japanese steel is concerned, the two main legs of the dumping argument seem to have been knocked from under it. Costs are lower in Japan and the Japanese government's subsidies to its steel producers are so minimal as to be insignificant.

The next question to ask is: Why are costs so much lower in Japan? To answer this we must look at two important factors in cost: the cost of labor and the productivity of labor, which is a reflection of both the application of technology and the struggle between labor and capital.

WAGES, PRODUCTIVITY AND THE STEELWORKERS

Steelmakers have not always argued that their costs were less than foreign producers. In fact, no sooner did imports begin to win a slice of the American market than steel producers started tackling the cost problem. Their solution was, to say the least, typical. In 1959 the American Iron and Steel Institute counseled steelworkers, then in the midst of contract negotiations with the steel industry, that:

The great advantage of foreign steel producers is that their wage rates are much lower than ours...The narrowing margin of U.S. technical superiority can no longer overcome so enormous a cost disadvantage. This is increasingly true if steel wage costs in the United States continue to rise as rapidly as they have in the past . . The only effective solution is less disparity between the labor cost of steel production in the United States and abroad.(19)

We can be fairly sure that what U.S. producers had in mind was not to raise wages abroad, but rather to lower them in the United States. Needless to say, the steelworkers did not react kindly to a suggestion that they accept a more than 80% reduction in wages in order to reach parity with the Japanese steelworkers and again make domestic steel more competitive on the world market.

As with pricing policy, relations between mill owners and steelworkers underwent a significant change in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Again, the introduction of greater competition in the industry, via foreign steel, was the fundamental reason for this change. Before 1959 the United Steelworkers of America (USWA)--which had organized 90% of basic steel by 1942-was able to boost wages significantly without yielding any ground in the important areas of organization or pace of work. The Steelworkers' refusal to link wage increases to greater output is reflected in the industry's productivity indexes.

Between the end of World War II and 1959, productivity in steel lagged seriously behind the average level for industry as a whole, increasing by an average of only 1.1% per year.(20) Nevertheless, by 1959 steelworkers received an average wage of $3.10 an hour, 0.91$ an hour more than the average for manufacturing and about $2.60 an hour more than Japanese steelworkers made.(21)

In large measure, the steelworkers' success in fighting for higher wages, without "paying" for it in terms of increased productivity, was determined by rank-and-file militancy. Between 1949 and 1959 steelworkers engaged in at least one major strike a year, including a massive wildcat by 400,000 workers in 1955. Yet their success was also tied to the companies' ability to pay higher wages. As we have seen, from the end of World War II until the late 1950s, the steel companies fixed prices without the constraints of price competition, which generated a long period of monopoly profits for the industry. But increasing imports in the 1960s made steel producers far more determined to hold the line on wages and/or tie any wage increase to productivity hikes.

When the contract came up in 1959, management planned, in the words of the industry journal, Iron Age, "to make up quickly what had been bargained away in the past... "(22) Yet the owners' attempt to link USWA wage demands with a threatened increase in imports (which would cost steelworkers their jobs) did not get off the ground. In a letter "to the members and families of United Steelworkers of America, David McDonald, Howard Hague and I.W. Abel (USWA president, vice president and secretary-treasurer, respectively) cautioned that:

while your attention and the eyes of the public have been fixed on the alleged effect of 'inflation' and 'foreign competition,' the steel corporations mapped their plan to atomize and completely undermine your job rights.(23)

In rejecting the industry's 1959 proposal which called for greater productivity at constant wages, the USWA maintained its principle of refusing to yield the controls it had won on the shop floor. The result was a massive 116-day strike which virtually shut down the industry and idled 250,000 workers in secondary industries as well.

Although the 1959 strike ended in a standoff, it has been called "the turnaround between the steelworkers' offensive and management's counteroffensive."(24) As we have argued, the major element in this turnaround was the reintroduction of competition into a monopolized industry. Since 1959, wage increases in the steel industry, while still high for manufacturing as a whole, have declined in relation to what workers were able to win in the 1949-1959 period. Furthermore, particularly in the early 1960s, productivity began to rise in the industry, as the result of speed-ups and other means of intensifying the work process. Between 1960-1965, productivity rose by an average of 4.1% per year.(25)

The post-1959 period also marked the increasing isolation of USWA leaders from the rank and file. According to many union members, however, this lack of democracy in the union and the leadership's ever more conciliatory policies toward capital, did not originate in this period, but merely became more accentuated. Unfortunately, an analysis of internal dynamics within the USWA lies outside the bounds of our present study.

What can be said is that since 1959, USWA leaders have taken the threat of imported steel to mean that a "community of interests" must be established between labor and capital in the steel industry. To that end, the USWA has not led a single national strike in basic steel since 1959. The intended negative effect that such policies have had on wages, however, has not prevented foreign steel from penetrating the U.S. market.(26)

THE TECHNOLOGY OF STEELMAKING

Automation? Depends how it's applied. It frightens me if it puts me out on the street. It doesn't frighten me if it shortens my week... Mike Lefevre, Chicago steelworker.(27)

Japanese and other foreign producers not only enjoy lower labor costs than U.S. producers, but output per employee hour in these countries is also going up much more rapidly than in the United States. In 1956, for example, it took 60.7 employee hours to produce a metric ton of steel in Japan and only 16.3 hours in the United States. Twenty years later it took 10 employee hours to produce a metric ton in Japan and 12 in the United States.(28) An incredible decline, to say the least.

The most significant factor in this reversal has been the introduction of new technology into the steelmaking process, allowing workers to turn out more steel in less time than before. It is precisely in this area that U.S. steel producers have been lagging, and where Japanese producers shine. In this section we will begin to examine the reasons why.

First, what is steel? Essentially, it is iron alloyed with a certain percentage of carbon or other minerals. It is produced by one of two basic methods. The "hot-metal" method requires prior production of high grade molten iron (or "pig iron") by firing iron ore, sinter, pellets or "briquettes" with coke (a high temperature coal) in a blast furnace. The molten iron is then combined with carbon, other alloys and scrap steel at temperatures up to 3000' F. This process first took place in Bessemer furnaces (developed in the mid-19th century), open hearth furnaces (dominant in the first half of the twentieth century), and now, increasingly, in the basic oxygen furnaces (BOF).

The BOF (and its more advanced successor, the "Super BOF") is considered more efficient since it requires substantially less labor power per unit of output-roughly onefifth the labor power of the open hearth process. For example, an open hearth furnace requires 9-10 hours to process a "heat" (load) of steel; the BOF needs only 45 minutes.(29)

The "cold-metal" route obviates blast furnaces and coking ovens by eliminating the pig iron stage and refining scrap steel or other solid-state iron directly into molten steel in an "electric arc furnace." The electric arc furnace has been adopted by two types of producers, those with small supplies of coking coal or iron but with large supplies of scrap steel, and those with not enough space for a fully integrated steel mill. Integrated mills are absolutely immense affairs, containing all parts of the steelmaking process from coking ovens and blast furnaces to heating vessels and rolling mills. Electric arc furnaces have become the mainstay of the "mini-mill", a much smaller and less costly steel mill.(30)

Once molten steel is produced, it must be shaped. The rolling mills which shape and form molten steel are at the heart of most steel plants. In a hot rolling mill, the molten steel is poured into ingot molds where it cools and is then reheated and shaped by a system of rollers. Cold rolling mills reform sheets and other semi-finished forms (produced by hot rolling mills) without a second-heating.

The most important recent advance in the field of shaping is a process known as "continuous casting." It allows molten steel to be poured directly into a caster where it solidifies as it moves, emerging as a solid semifinished slab, billet or bloom. As with the BOF, continuous casting, by eliminating approximately half the steps of hot rolling mills, can produce the same amount of steel with 10-15% less labor power.

How do U.S. producers stack up against foreign competitors in terms of the application of technology advances? In general, most writers have found that U.S. steelmakers have been slow to place in production steelmaking advances.(31) All seem to agree that the largest producers were quite often the last ones to adopt new techniques. "In the majority of cases," writes a Canadian expert, "large establishments, or even major steel producing countries, have not featured as prominently as you might expect in conceiving and originating significant new technology or in anticipating and reacting in a positive way to changing world conditions.(32)

By the late 1960s it was evident that U.S. producers lagged seriously behind the Japanese in terms of installing new technology which could lower the costs of steel production. At the present time over 80% of Japanese steel is fired in basic oxygen furnaces and the rest in electric arc furnaces.(33) In contrast, U.S. producers turn out only slightly more than 60% of their steel in BOFs, and still employ open hearth furnaces.

A similar contrast holds in the case of continuous casting. Thirty-five percent of Japanese output was continuously cast in 1977 compared to 10.5% in the United States.(34) Moreover, the Central Intelligence Agency, in a study of the world steel industry, reported that Japanese blast furnace design and operations are "the best in the world, and the highly efficient basic oxygen furnace operations are the envy of the world's steelmakers."(35) They are clearly the envy of U.S. Steel. The largest U.S. steelmaker recently contracted with Nippon Steel for a team of experts to advise it on design changes in its biggest blast furnace at Gary, Indiana.(36)

Costs of shipping and transport are also much higher for U.S. firms because of their inland locations. As of 1975 only 10% of U.S. steel production was located on coastal sites, accessible to large freighters, compared to 82% of Japanese production.(37) This takes on an added importance as shipping costs continue to rise relative to the cost of raw materials.

Essentially, U.S. steel plants are less productive and more costly than Japanese plants because they were built earlier, before many steelmaking innovations came on the scene. U.S. steel companies had completed their major period of expansion in the early 1950s, shortly before the basic oxygen furnace and the continuous caster were commonplace. In fact, since 1953, domestic steel firms have built only two new integrated plants. These "greenfield" plants (as they are called) are the Fairless, Pennsylvania, works of U.S. Steel (1953) and the Burns Harbor, Indiana, works of Bethlehem. Steel in 1967.(38)

The U.S. steel industry invested almost $35 billion in steelmaking facilities between 1957-1976, an average of $1.7 billion a year.(39) This may seem like a huge sum, but, in fact, it isn't. Steelmaking is an extremely capitalintensive industry, about 2 V2 times the manufacturing average.(40) Moreover, the cost of adding new capacity has skyrocketed. Analysts estimate that steelmakers will have to spend at least $5-6 billion a year just to maintain production at current levels, and over $18 billion a year if capacity is to be increased by 30 million tons in the near future.(41)

Not only have U.S. producers not maintained these high levels of spending but, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, real spending is moving backwards. Capital expenditures per worker dropped at an annual rate of 6.3% between 1966-1972 and BLS data suggest that, given a sharp rise in general machinery and equipment prices, real capital outlays in steel are going down.(42)

Japanese steelmakers, on the other hand, began a major expansion program after most major technological advances had come on stream. Steel companies in Japan built nearly 100 million tons of greenfield capacity in the 1960s and 1970s, as compared with only 10 million tons in the United States.(43)

As a result, U.S. steelmakers are left with several alternatives: They could inject massive amounts of capital into the construction of new, modern mills; they could add new parts to their old plants in a piecemeal fashion (which doesn't yield the same productivity gains); or they could push their old equipment as far as possible without making major repairs:

According to Ike Gittlen, a steelworker in Steelton, Pennsylvania, the companies are following the last alternative:

Foremen (are) urged to operate furnaces in a reckless fashion to get the highest ton-per-hour rate possible and all maintenance is of the patch-and-go variety so that down time is minimized. The furnaces are in a sad mechanical state and suffer an increasing number of small delays. Recently, the foremen took some bad risks and two major breakdowns resulted. These repairs, along with the chronic short delays, made for several months of substandard production.(44)

The upshot, simply, is that it costs less to make steel in Japan both because wages are lower and because output per employee is higher. Accustomed to monopoly control, protected markets and administered prices, domestic producers have watched their most perfect of all worlds slowly crumble as foreign producers enter their competitive ring. By examining what U.S. steelmakers, bankers and other interested parties are doing about this fair competition, we will see how intensified competition reflects a much larger process: the restructuring of production on a world scale. ______________________________________________

REFERENCES

CONCENTRATION AND COMPETITION

1.Harriette Arnow, The Dollmaker (New York: Avon Books, 1954) pp. 354-5.

2.Walter Adams, "The Steel Industry," in Walter Adams, ed., The Structure of American Industry. Some Case Studies. Revised Edition (New York: Macmillan, 1954), pp.148-54.

3.Ibid., pp. 150-51.

4.Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, Committee on the Judiciarv. United States Senate, Administered Prices: Part III - Steel. Hearings, 85th Congress, First Session, October 29, 30, Nov. 4 and 5, 1957 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1958), pp. 991-

5.Adams, op. cit., p. 189.

6.Iron Age, April 24, 1978; Hans Mueller and Kiyoshi Kawahito, Steel Industry Economics: A Comparative Analysis of Structure, Conduct and Performance (New York: Japan Steel Information Center, 1978), p. 7.

7.See, for example, C.R. Daugherty, M.G. de Chazeau and S.S. Stratton, The Economics of the Iron and Steel Industry (New York: McGraw-Hill), 1937.

8.Council on Wage, and Price Stability, Report to the President on Prices and Costs in the United States Steel Industry (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), pp. 19, 41; AISI, Annual Statistical Reports.

9.Federal Trade Commission (FTC), The United States Steel Industry and Its International Rivals: Trends and Factors Determining International Competitiveness (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), Chapter 4; Richard Mancke, "The Determinants of Steel Prices in the United States: 1947-1965," Journal of Industrial Economics (April 1968), pp. 147-60.

10.Business Week, October 24, 1977.

11.See, for example, Forbes, January 8, 1979; Business Week, September 19, 1977; COWPS study.

12.Congressional Record. Senate, October 4, 1977, p. S16257.

13.Putnam, Hayes & Bartlett, Economics of International Steel Trade: Policy Implications for the United States. An Analysis and Forecast for American Iron and Steel Institute (Newton, Mass: Putnam, Hayes and Bartlett, Inc.), 1977; The Economic Implications ofForeign Steel Pricing Practices in the U.S. Market (Newton, Mass: Putnam, Hayes and Bartlett), 1978.

14.Putnam, Hayes and Bartlett, 1977, p. 39.

15.U.S. News & Wobrld Report, October 24, 1977.

16."The Secret of Japan's Export Prowess," Fortune

17.The studies are from Chase Econometrics Associates, cited in Iron Age, May 22, 1978, p. 111; COWPS, op. cit., p. 143; Putnam, Hayes and Bartlett, 1977, pp.31, 35, 36; Mueller and Kawahito, op. cit., pp. 18-9; FTC, op. cit., p. 113.

18.FTC, op. cit., pp. 319-332.

19.Emphasis in original, AISI, "Economic Trends in Iron and Steel Industry," 1959, cited in Richard Betheil, "The ENA in Perspective: The Transformation of Collective Bargaining in the Basic Steel Industry," Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol.X, No.2 (Summer 1978), p.23.

20.Bureau of Labor Statistics, Productivity Indexes for Selected Industries, 1977, Bulletin 1983 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), pp. 94-5.

21.AISI, Annual Statistical Reports; Mueller and Kawahito, op. cit., p. 17.

22.Cited in Betheil, op. cit., p. 7.

23.Quoted in Staughton Lynd, "History of the United Steelworkers of America," Part V, Guardian, April 25, 1973.

24.Betheil, op. cit., p. 7.

25.William T. Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States, V (Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books, 1971), p. 2090; Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin 1983.

26.David Gordon and Joseph J. Perasky, "Appendix 'A' To Plaintiffs 'Trial Memorandum on Hearing for Preliminary Injunction: Economic Consequences on Steel Workers of Strikes and the Right to Strike in the Basic Steel Industry (1949-1970), "mimeographed, 1976; Tom Seidl, "Working Paper on the 'Steel Project': 'Economic Consequences on Steel Workers...', unpublished manuscript. 1976.

27.Studs Terkel, Working (New York: Avon, 1972), p. 4 .

28.FTC, op. cit., p. 115.

29.Bureau of Labor Statistics, Technological Change and Manpower Trends in Five Industries, Bulletin 1856 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 22-3.

30.On technology and the process of steelmaking, see Dale L. Hiestand, High Level Manpower and Technological Changes in the Steel Industry (New York: Praeger, 1975), pp. 10-11; Hogan, op. cit., IV, Chapter 41; Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin 1856, pp. 21-25.

31.See, for example, Walter Adams and Joel Dirlam, "Big Steel, Invention and Innovation," Quarterly Journal of Economics (May 1966), pp. 167-189; H.G. Baumann, "The Relative Competitiveness of the Canadian and U.S. Steel Industries, 1955-1970," Economia Internationale (February 1974), pp.141-156; D. Ault,"The Continued Deterioration of the Competitive Ability of the U.S. Steel Industry: The Development of Continuous Casting," Western Economic Journal (March 1973), pp. 89-97.

32.Ralph Hindson, "The Changing, Map of the World Steel Industry," inJulian Szekely, The Future of.the World's Steel Industry (New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., 1976), p. 78.

33.Business Week, September 19, 1977.

34.Mueller and Kawahito, op. cit., p. 7.

35.Central Intelligence Agency, World Steel Market: Continued Trouble Ahead (Washington, D.C.: CIA, 1977), p. 10.

36.New York Times,January 5, 1979.

37.Mueller and Kawahito, op. cit., p. 8.

38.FTC, op. cit., pp. 53-4.

40.Richard J. Leary, "Economic and Technologic Factors in Steelmaking," in Szekely, op. cit., pp. 107-8.

41.Estimates from David R. Dilley, "Financing Future Capital Expenditures," in Szekely, op. cit., p.128; Business Week, August 21, 1978; Iron Age, May 22, 1978 andJune 5, 1978.

42.Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin 1856, p. 27.

43.CIA, op. cit., p. 10; COWPS, op. cit., p. 16.

44.In These Times, October 4-10, 1978.

Tags: US steel industry, monopoly capitalism, USWA, labor union, technology costs


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