Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/490948
I DA U N I V E R S A L M a rc h -A p r i l 2 0 1 5 35 too high, and the American worker just cost way more than the Chinese worker, and that's the reason steel le . I hear that all the time. REUTTER: Well, eventu- ally that became the case. But let's go back. Back in the 1950s, there was also the very strong steel- workers union, which came out of John L. Lewis and the coal miners. And they became known in the '50s under their president, McDonald, as the business union. ey were always compared to Walter Reuther and others and coworkers. Gee, those guys go on strikes, they have progressive ideas, but the Steelworkers are a business union, it's all meat and potatoes, dollars and cents. At the same time, the steel industry would raise its prices year a er year in lockstep. ey would give raises to the steelworkers union. And the two of them really worked in collusion, because both of them believed that steel was essential and that it would never go away. e fi rst challenge to the supremacy of Sparrows Point came in the 1960s. And it came not from – well, China didn't have a steel industry then. It didn't even come from Japan or Europe. It came from a company in Richmond, Virginia, called Reynolds Aluminum. Reynolds devel- oped a new type of orange juice can using aluminum and extruded an aluminum that, while much weaker than steel, had certain properties that bottlers or canners, National Can and Continental Can, had been asking steel to do for years, and Sparrows Point said, "Tough, we're going to do it the way we've always done it." Sparrows Point lost the orange juice bottling or canning market. en they lost the so drink, Coke, Pepsi canning market. en they lost the beer canning market, which was the very market that was of extreme importance to Sparrows Point in getting it through the Depression in the 1930s, where they had done some innova- tion and gotten large quanti- ties of cans to be produced a er the end of prohibition. So there really was a huge techno- logical side. Continued on page 37