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Book Review
| Mark Reutter, Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might, University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 2004. pp. + 533. US $21.95 paper.
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| This is an extremely valuable book. It charts the history of the Sparrows Point steel plant near Baltimore Maryland from its inception in 1887 to the formal dissolution of its longstanding owner, Bethlehem Steel in January 2004. Sparrows Point is a promontory jutting out into Chesapeake Bay, which meant the plant had direct sea access for both inputs and outputs. At its peak, Sparrow Point employed 30,000 workers. Mittal Steel still operates the Sparrows Point plant, which is only a fraction of the former plant in terms of size and employment. |
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The book successfully combines both business history and labour history. The book is narrative history and does not draw upon any theoretical framework. It provides excellent insights into steel manufacturing at the plant and the company town it created. It also highlights the global dimensions of plant. It examines the relationship between the plant and its sources of supply for iron ore, which included Chile, Venezuela and Cuba. This plant also exported its products to many countries such as Australia, which received steel rails and tin plate. Another link with Australia was that David Baker, who was the first manager of BHP's Newcastle plant, worked there. |
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Three examples of interesting issues in the book are executive remuneration, employee representation plans or company unions and scientific management. Internationally there is a view that executive remuneration is only an issue since the 1980s, but this book highlights an historical amnesia on the issue. The high salaries, bonuses and share options of the executives of Bethlehem Steel created a public outcry in 1930, with shareholders taking legal action against Chairman Charles Schwab on the grounds that the bonus program was 'an illegal and fraudulent misuse of public funds' (p. 200). |
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The book also raises questions about the value of employee representation plans or company unions for employees. Given the current enthusiasm of some industrial relations academics for reinventing company unions to provide a voice for workers in a climate of low levels of unionisation, the book reminds us why the 1935 National Labour Relations Act outlawed the plans. As Reutter noted, the significance of the Bethlehem employee representative plan 'lay not in what it did, but what it didn't' (p. 153). The representatives could not bargain as equals and lacked the ability to sign legal enforceable agreements. The right to strike was not recognised (pp. 153–154). One of the most uplifting parts of the book is its discussion of the National Labor Relations Board election in September 1941, which saw the United Steel Workers of America win the right to represent the workers at the plant and the end of the representation plan (pp. 296–298). |
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Finally, there is the issue of scientific management. While Taylor did not conduct his time and motion studies at Sparrows Point, he did at the Bethlehem Steel's plant at South Bethlehem. However, Charles Schwab dismissed scientific management techniques as getting in the way of work, preferring the cost sheet rather than the stopwatch to measure performance (p. 141). |
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I have some quibbles. The book is very long and should have been further edited. The chapter on the efforts by Bethlehem Steel to build submarines for the British Government before the entry of the USA into World War I, while interesting, is an example of what could have been pruned. The use of photographs is disappointing. While the author had access to many good photographs, they could have been dispersed at relevant points in the text rather than placed at the beginning. There are also references to several paintings and photographs in the text, but no illustrations are included. Finally, the chapters relating to the winding down of the plant lack the richness of the earlier chapters in terms of the range of experiences represented. Perhaps the inclusion of more oral histories would have made these chapters livelier from a reader's viewpoint. |
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Overall, this is an excellent book for understanding the history of the steel industry in the US. It also raises many important issues about US corporate governance and labour relations. |
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| University of Sydney |
GREG PATMORE | |
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