Is it really that tough out there ? FIRED !

tax

Instead,

business

sell

That is absolutely not correct. They bought businesses that had nothing whatever to do with steel manufacture, and failed to upgrade their infrastructure.

Of course it does. Facts are facts. What you have is speculation or something. Since you are unable to be specific, for all I know you may just be casting about for nasties because you don't like and don't understand, unions.

Armco spent wads of money to maintain the Middletown plants, and managed to exceed the design specs for online time between rebuilds. Also, it was around that time they started to develop the technology to manufacture graphite composite materials to add new products to their metal building division, as well as to sell to their regular Steel customers. They developed a lot of custom steels over the years, including the special stainless used by Aeronca to make the original honeycomb steel heat shield for the early space program. The other was the aluminized stainless they developed for catalytic converters. Their corporate research center was in Middletown, and the old mill was used to make specialty steels, while the newer, automated mill made steel for the big three auto makers, and most of the white goods manufacturers. They had a huge slag pit where a subsidiary dumped the cargo from a steady steam of slag haulers and train cars from the Hamilton, Ohio plant. The slag was used to build road beds all over SW Ohio.

They also had coke plants, to convert coal to coke. They recovered as much unburnt gas as they could, and burnt it in the blast furnaces. and used so much liquid oxygen that the supplier had to build a new oxygen reduction plant. It was assembled in large sections in England, shipped to the Mississippi, where it was transferred to barges and hauled to the Ohio river, and finally to a dock in Delhi TOwnship, just outside of Cincinnati. The sections were put on a 40 axle, 4000 HP crawler with a top speed of 5 MPH. it took days to move it to Middletown. A lot of cable TV, telephone and power lines had to be temporarily raised, or disconnected for the crawlers to pass.

They wanted to update their other plants to the level of automation of the Middletown plant, but the union didn't want it to happen.