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US Steel, once the largest corporation, agrees to sell to Nippon Steel

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Re: US Steel, once the largest corporation, agrees to sell to Nippon Steel

#151

Post by alephnerd »

zbyte64 wrote: post #148
alephnerd wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ignore Nordic unions In Sweden (the largest industrial hub in Scandinavia), unions don't collectively negotiate wages with employers - they collectively set wages across an entire industry with the government and business management (think Syndicalism, which is the primary industrial philosophy in Europe compared to the US). Also, blue collar membership has declined after the 2008 Financial Crisis dealt a killing b…

UAW already went through some reforms which is arguably why they're experiencing a surge in popularity. In particular Shawn Fien was part of UAWD's 1 member, 1 vote initiative: https://uawd.org/ The characterization that they would eschew reform even when it would boost their popularity is not reflected in current events (certainly the managerial friendly unions of the past would avoid reforms)

Those reforms aren't comparable to Swedish (which I'll use as a stand in for Nordic) Unions.

At the end of the day, unions in Europe are much more pro-business management than any union in the US can ever dare.

For example, Swedish unions didn't go on strike when Geely fired thousands of Swedish autoworkers when acquiring Volvo, and German (yes not Nordic) unions haven't fought for salary increases leading to German salaries remaining stagnant since the 2000s, while helping German corporations like Volkswagen, Daimler, etc remain competitive globally.

In the US, unions will go militant and remain independent of the government and management because they are grassroots driven. In Europe, unions are subordinated to the government and management, as Union leaders end up joining both.

Re: US Steel, once the largest corporation, agrees to sell to Nippon Steel

#152

Post by pauljonas »

chaostheory wrote: post #94
pauljonas wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a few decades but I worked for USS as a developer, after attaining a computer science degree. I know it's a tired old adage that labor / labor unions was the reason for American steel manufacturing decline and rise of Japanese dominance. But from the inside, that simply wasn't so -- it was more a case that Japanese mills not only more modern but the entire manufacturing process, from casting to finished pro…

But weren’t the unions also against changing the process?

No.

These factors that I'm speaking of were more along the lines of:

- a slab caster implemented, but there is already a bloom caster and only one crane facility to support both so both ran at less than optimal throughput.

- choosing to prioritize far less profitable slab casting for output to a joint venture plant in CA than very profitable bloom casting (& union definitely not in favor of this)

- buying coke at 10X price they could get elsewhere because old buddy favoritism

Basically, the Japanese firms were built a much more holistic basis -- JIT engineering, so that liquid is pored, slabs created and were delivered right into finished product processing. Whereas, by contrast, in the mill I worked at, slabs would be cast, then would cool in a yard, heated & slitted, then heated again for strip mill processing (it cost quite a bit of energy to heat to 2200/2300 degrees).

I mean, my boss & I would even spitball on how much better the place would run if it was bought out and run by (at that time, late 80s / early 90s) a foreign competitor that made decisions on business sense rather than old boy political network machinations.

Basically, all about: MANAGEMENT, MANAGEMENT, MANAGEMENT.

Re: US Steel, once the largest corporation, agrees to sell to Nippon Steel

#153

Post by riversflow »

FredPret wrote: post #80
verdverm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their fiduciary duty is to the investors first afaiui, perhaps they saw that selling to someone who can run the company better as a net benefit overall? I've heard Japanese steel is pretty great, or at least a common sentiment

Japan supplied sub-par metal for decades and lied about it. Aluminum, copper and steel. Something to think about next time you get anywhere near a car, train, airplane, skyscraper, or bridge. https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/16/news/companies/kobe-steel-s...

As someone who was in the Aluminum business during that time, this is a lot more complicated than it might appear. There was an absolutely insane amount of fraud being committed in the industrial aluminum biz during this time, here’s an article[1], but a lot of my experience isn’t really documented online or has been lost. What made this really troublesome was that ingots aren’t really sold direct to customers, so often times you have a contractor or sub contractor buying extrusions ($xxxxx)from a megacorp like SAPA(an extruder) who in turn is buying from a metal market($M+). The extruders doesn’t want to deal with material defects from Aluminum that was supposed to be to spec, and their customers can’t really play hardball as the industry is pretty niche-extrusion presses are capital intensive and require a fair amount of sophistication to operate.

They were probably being compelled to do that because of the vast amounts of fraud committed by Chinese Aluminum producers. The purity issue was so bad my anodizing shop started recommending our customers demand mil certs from a reputable manufacturer, like Alcoa or Kaiser, and then specifically clarifying to the extruder that they intended to anodize it; being a chemical process anodizing is very dependent on the metal’s makeup and the extruder knows this.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-fraud-idUSKCN1U...

Re: US Steel, once the largest corporation, agrees to sell to Nippon Steel

#154

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

FredPret wrote: post #80
verdverm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their fiduciary duty is to the investors first afaiui, perhaps they saw that selling to someone who can run the company better as a net benefit overall? I've heard Japanese steel is pretty great, or at least a common sentiment

Japan supplied sub-par metal for decades and lied about it. Aluminum, copper and steel. Something to think about next time you get anywhere near a car, train, airplane, skyscraper, or bridge. https://money.cnn.com/2017/10/16/news/companies/kobe-steel-s...

That's a different company.

Re: US Steel, once the largest corporation, agrees to sell to Nippon Steel

#155

Post by FredPret »

4ggr0 wrote: post #150
FredPret wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've barely scratched the surface of the planet, literally. The deepest mines are 4km deep; mineral deposits are likely to get richer as you go deeper. With desalination, nuclear + solar + geothermal, we can feed an essentially unlimited number of people. There are always second-order effects to everything, including growth. But I find it interesting that we have such a huge runway ahead of us, without even consider…

well, you know. climate change is a tiny example of what can happen after you start treating resources like they're limitless. we can use the solar system, of course, but just discarding earth because other planets are available, seems a bit wasteful.

More intensive resource use is also the answer to climate change. The problem is CO2 & friends, not growth itself.

A knee-jerk response against growth is hardly going to fix the situation. We can drastically reduce our footprint while growing the economy even faster by building more nuclear + solar power, and digging deeper, improving our water treatment ability, etc.

Re: US Steel, once the largest corporation, agrees to sell to Nippon Steel

#156

Post by zbyte64 »

missedthecue wrote: post #122
zbyte64 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We always ignore Nordic unions when ever we trash talk unions. If things were as easy as black and white then there wouldn't even be a need to debate, the productive non-union businesses would just slay and everyone would be working for them.

You mean... like tech companies?

A tech unicorn slays, but for how long? I do think the intention of most American tech companies is to financialize some aspect of the market, and that is lucrative and "slays" - but I think such arrangements are moats built with sand. Without that angle, a tech company is just another goods or service and looks less like Uber and more like the gaming industry.

Re: US Steel, once the largest corporation, agrees to sell to Nippon Steel

#157

Post by 4ggr0 »

FredPret wrote: post #155
4ggr0 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, you know. climate change is a tiny example of what can happen after you start treating resources like they're limitless. we can use the solar system, of course, but just discarding earth because other planets are available, seems a bit wasteful.

More intensive resource use is also the answer to climate change. The problem is CO2 & friends, not growth itself. A knee-jerk response against growth is hardly going to fix the situation. We can drastically reduce our footprint while growing the economy even faster by building more nuclear + solar power, and digging deeper, improving our water treatment ability, etc.

what about lowering our usage? or more efficiently use what we have, even if it means less growth for the economy.

Re: US Steel, once the largest corporation, agrees to sell to Nippon Steel

#158

Post by zackmorris »

Kind of ironic to be arguing about capitalism vs socialism while a foreign company buys the means of production out from under us.

This was all predicted by academics in the late 70s and early 80s. Reagan's trickle-down economics was designed to halt wage increases so that capitalists could collect worker productivity and control the money supply. Then invest those capital gains in regulatory capture to install right wing cronies to carry out the amoral aims of corporations to remove all labor and environmental protections to maximize profit. Allowing the national debt (currently $30+ trillion) to be run up above GDP, making it easier to sell the public on selling off public lands and other resources from the commons to pay it off. Eventually undermining democracy enough to form a constitutional convention to restructure the federal government as a patriarchal society like the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale, at the top of a New World Order controlled by wealthy financiers.

The sale of US Steel to Nippon Steel should probably have been stopped due to national security concerns. It's especially troublesome that it happened on Biden's watch. But that's how all of this works. In post-New Deal politics, the economy gets targeted during democratic administrations to undermine it enough that people vote for republicans. Then republican administrations run up the debt further to roll out more of their programs while nobody is looking. The worse things get, the more the public votes against its own self-interest. Rinse, repeat. The public never catches its breath long enough to figure it out, so we're still caught in this dysfunction in 2023.

I only mention this because I believe that this endgame transcends politics, in the way that pushing a Monopoly board off the table transcends the game itself. We're at a point now where the democratic party as it was once known probably no longer exists, and can be thought of as the 1980s republican party, favorable to corporations, gentrification, tax cuts for the wealthy, neoliberalism, colonialism, exploitation, etc. The republican party today works more like a line of succession, where the vice president is the man behind the curtain, and each level below contains leaks through PR and ownership of the mass media to keep the public in the dark while it's being fleeced. So democrats are in the business of losing while republicans are in the business of winning, while both sell out to the highest bidder.

With the Boomers retiring and Gen X not wanting to pursue revisionist history fever dreams, Millennials and Gen Z are in a unique position to stop what seems inevitable now. I could see a return to middle class strengthening, sort of an Atlas Shrugged but from a government captured by capitalism:

https://time.com/6343967/bidenomics-is-real-economics/

A plainspoken take on the dysfunction:

https://www.tiktok.com/@watchfulcoyote/video/731150385197721...

Re: US Steel, once the largest corporation, agrees to sell to Nippon Steel

#159

Post by AlbertCory »

hbarka wrote: post #142
AlbertCory wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet NUMMI failed. https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a5514/4350856/ Then the building became Solyndra, which also failed. GM, of course, is one of the stupidest companies on Earth, so they'd have trouble selling free beer to college football fans. If you want to blame them you won't get any argument from me.

This building (really a massive factory area in Fremont) is now Tesla. NUMMI produced some really good cars under the Saturn brand. GM messed up in this collaboration. GM quitting Saturn is a story in itself.

No, Saturns were produced in TN. See my other post.

Re: US Steel, once the largest corporation, agrees to sell to Nippon Steel

#160

Post by 20after4 »

lumost wrote: post #124
nickpinkston wrote: post #51

I'm interested in how the United Steelworkers thinks about the generally better track record of Japanese companies with labor relations vs. American management. This makes it seem like it was purely an "American First" kind of sentiment, whereas I could imagine this being better for the workers themselves. This then makes me wonder if the Steelworkers is more company union (ie their leaders are bought off / cushy wit…

Anecdotally, US labor union relations have been strained for some time compared to international settings. Plausibly, this is in part due to the size of American labor unions compared to their international equivalents. The Resident Advisors in my dorm were required to be members of and pay union due to the United AutoWorkers of America. The list of industries which the United Steel Workers represents is likewise ...…

wtf, $200/month really? that's pretty ridiculous.

Unions are good in theory, but in practice I'm not so sure.

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