Word: steels
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Such a nationwide walkout would be the first by the U.S.W. in 24 years and would come just as economic recovery is expected to begin boosting steel orders from such big-ticket industry customers as automakers and capital-goods manufacturers. Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors, which alone buys 7% of the steel industry's output, has already warned Lloyd McBride, president of the United Steelworkers of America, that unless wage talks between the companies and the U.S.W. are settled by March, GM will not hesitate to turn to Japanese and European suppliers for its steel. Other big users...
Meantime, low-cost foreign-made steel has kept flooding into the U.S. market, eroding sales for U.S. producers and further tightening the industry's cash squeeze. Last autumn U.S. steelmakers won concessions from European producers, who agreed to limit exports to the U.S. to about 5.5% through 1985. But analysts warn that a slowdown in European exports is more than likely to be offset by rising imports from market-hungry producers elsewhere...
...avoid the sort of calamitous strike that would knock their companies flat as well as send imports leaping. Only after the industry has struggled back to profitability can it have any hope of solving its deeply rooted long-range problems. For now, at least, the challenge facing Big Steel is measured in months, not years...
Making money in the steel business these days is about as easy as rolling an I beam uphill. Nonetheless, at least two firms are still forging profits: Nucor Corp. of Charlotte, N.C., and Chaparral Steel Co. in Midlothian, Texas. In the first nine months of 1982, Nucor earned $13.4 million on sales of $379 million. Chaparral cleared $11 million last year on sales of $160 million...
Nucor and Chaparral are leaders in a new class of companies that make steel in what are called minimills: small, low-cost plants that utilize state-of-the-art technology and, in most cases, nonunion labor. These factories contain none of the costly blast furnaces used to transform raw materials into steel. Instead, they take scrap steel, melt it down and reshape it into new forms. The minimills fashion small, specialized steel products rather than huge beams and sheets. Nucor's steel can be found, for example, in reinforcing rods for concrete walls, traffic barricades and lawnmowers...