Ever watched your city turned into a ghost town after the manufacturing jobs were outsourced?

[Igel]

12. Yes.

Both my parents grew up in Sparrows Point, MD. It was a company town. Their parents weathered the worst of the Great Depression there when the steel mill didn't kick out those it had laid off (employment was a prerequisite for living there). It didn't kick them out when they couldn't pay their rent or house payments. In the mid-70s SP was torn down, everything (including the post office and police station) was on company land. The company was in serious financial trouble because of competition.

Boutique steels were cheaper to make oversease and import. Other plants were cheaper to keep going.

They built the L blast furnace where Sparrows Point had been. It would produce huge quantities of lower-quality steel.

It didn't help. The L required fewer people, but the problem was spreading: Suddenly the market was flooded with cheap low quality steel, as well. By '83 it was shut. It opened under new ownership every once in a while, but the town I grew up in was gone.

The loss of the steel mill wiped out Edgemere and altered Dundalk a lot. The buildings were still there, but if people were the place, then the place was gone. Close enough to Baltimore and with the new Key Bridge and Beltway to make access a breeze, it became a bedroom community.

Years later the company was split up and sold off. Finally the pension became a federal responsibility, and my mother still gets that pension from the government.

The jobs were offshored. The US continued to use steel and make things with steel, it just imported it or products made with steel. Beth Steel missed the offshoring boom: Had it lasted a while longer in decent fiscal health, it might have built plants overseas and stayed in business. The US jobs were toast. They were already gone or on the way out and saving them wasn't in the cards. But the management jobs, perhaps some specialty steel jobs, dividend payments and value of the stock, as well as the pension/health benefits would have been preserved if Beth Steel had offshored and stayed afloat. Maybe we'd have lost 95% of the benefits; but as it is, we lost 100%.