The 1970s and 1980s are commonly portrayed as decades of terminal decline for the US steelmaking–a watershed moment that signalled the end of the industrial age, and arrival of a post-industrial age dominated by finance, service, and information industries. There are certainly kernels of truth to this story. Amid the 1970s energy crises, vertically-integrated steel firms cut their production, laid off workers, and shuttered mills across the North American Steel Belt. It is also undeniable that most 1970s and 1980s political elites regarded vertically integrated manufacturing, and steel communities as relics of a bygone era of American capitalism; suitable subjects for elegiac Bruce Springsteen ballads, not for state support. As my paper reveals, however, depicting the energy crises of the 1970s as the final act in a linear rise and fall of US steel, and the industrial age, tale requires overlooking a great deal.
In the final decade and a half of the twentieth-century, smaller steel producers grew at a rapid rate; vertically integrated producers invested in modern production technologies; the business press printed glowing profiles of steel executives; and vertically integrated US steel producers reported profits. This was the result of a massive sectoral restructuring effort sparked by the crises of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The transformation process was decidedly neoliberal in character. Successive presidential administrations, and other political powerbrokers exhibited only rhetorical concern for the industry’s plight and rejected various measures proposed by both activists and federal government taskforces to aid the industry. Not only did they reject aid packages, but political elites did little when steel workers were thrown out of work, or compelled to accept lower wages or benefits. Because of this, it was corporate executives, not organized labor or the state that controlled the sector’s post-energy crisis restructuring. The products that the industrial and post-industrial US steel industries produced were the same, but almost everything else -- the production process, the broader industrial landscape, and power relationships -- was different.