Word: steels
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...primary role as a museum, a turkey. It differed from most other architectural turkeys by wearing its entrails outside its skin. Its architects, Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, had festooned its four sides with such a tangle of ducts, pipes, risers and shafts that it became the first steel-and-glass building to exclude almost all natural light from its cavernous interior. Since Beaubourg was meant to be (in the jargon of the day) a culturally transparent, non-elitist, participatory, anti-hierarchical, modular omnisensorium, it had no walls to speak of: walls were for palaces and prisons. Instead...
...news just keeps coming. A leading shipbuilder announces that nearly 40% of its workers will be laid off, and those who keep their jobs will have to take 10% salary cuts and a 50% slash in their usual year-end bonuses. Thousands of steelworkers are idle, as mammoth steel furnaces stand silent. Coal mines are closing, and even some automobile assembly lines are shut down...
...grow by just 2.3% for the fiscal year ending in March 1987, the lowest level since 1974, when GNP dropped by .4%. Even the promise of lifetime employment, a cornerstone of the country's social structure, is crumbling. Says Toshio Isago, an executive vice president at Nippon Kokan, a steel and shipbuilding conglomerate: "We have experienced hardships in the past, but nothing on this scale...
Still, not all Japan's troubles can be traced to the yen. Some of the country's older industries, including steel, shipbuilding and coal mining have been declining for the better part of a decade. One reason: they face fierce competition from what economists call the newly industrialized countries, like South Korea, Taiwan and Brazil. The NICs compete largely by paying lower wages. The average hourly salary of a South Korean steelworker, for example, is one-sixth the level of his Japanese counterpart...
...Japan's steel manufacturers, who played such a vital role in the country's postwar resurgence, now find themselves besieged by foreign competition. Among the fiercest rivals are South Korean and Brazilian steelmakers. Japan's five largest producers could lose some $2.3 billion this year. In the coming years, some 40,000 workers could lose their jobs. Says Yutaka Takeda, president of Nippon Steel: "This is the worst crisis we've faced since we started making steel...