On a beautiful Sunday nine days before the election, my wife and I decided to hike in beautiful Marshy Point Park, situated between two relatively pristine estuaries of the Chesapeake Bay. On the way, we drove through Essex, Maryland, where we saw possibly a hundred Trump signs, but not a single Clinton sign. Actually, we did see signs devoted to Hillary Clinton — the signs read “Lock Her Up”! I’m sure if we had stopped our car and asked passersbys what they thought of Hillary Clinton, we likely would have heard an invective of hate. But if I had asked, “What do you think of Wilbur Ross”?, I also would have heard an invective of hate. Now this man, Wilbur Ross, is rumored to be Trump’s leading candidate to become Secretary of Commerce. You may be wondering, who is Wilbur Ross?
For an entire century, the steel mills of Sparrows Point, Bethlehem Steel, was Baltimore’s largest employer. The male “bread winners” of families in eastern Baltimore County, including Essex, either worked in the Sparrows Point steel mill, or ran or worked in bars, stores, and other businesses whose customers were almost all steel workers or their families. And Bethlehem employed thousands beyond eastern Baltimore County — I grew up in working class Jewish neighborhoods in northwestern Baltimore City after World War II, and the Jewish dads of many of my playmates were also steel workers at “the Point.” It was at this time, in the 1950’s, that Sparrows Point was the largest steel mill in the world, employing over 31,000 steel workers.
Beginning in the 1960’s, when cola and beer companies replaced steel cans with aluminum cans, Sparrows Point entered a long decline in both production and the numbers of workers employed. Globalization was the leading culprit, as steel barons shifted production overseas to take advantage of the “favorable labor conditions” in Mexico and China and elsewhere. A second culprit was mechanization, as robots replaced people. But the greed of Wilbur Ross played a role too — he and other billionaires sacrificed the working lives of thousands to augment their mega millions into billions. By 2013, the steel mill closed for good, and much of the mills was soon thereafter demolished. More about Ross in a moment.
The death of the steel mills has left the people of eastern Baltimore County embittered, and they have taken their anger out on the Democrats. Until the 1960’s, the steel workers, following the lead of their union, voted almost unanimously for Democratic candidates, and — despite the Republicans’ Southern strategy, a decreasing majority continued to do so into the turn of the 21st century. But in 2014, the people of eastern Baltimore County, blaming the local Democratic establishment for the death of steel mill — for the first time elected Republicans to the state legislature and the Baltimore County council, in addition to voting to elect Republican Larry Hogan as Maryland’s governor.
However, it cannot be denied that race plays a part in this anger. You can ask any African American in Baltimore, from my childhood days in the 1950’s until today, and they will tell you that Essex is a place for black people to avoid. For decades, blacks attempting to move into some of these neighborhoods were risking their lives. Until the 1974 settlement of a civil rights lawsuit — ten years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act — the union supported rigid segregation in the mill, whites worked only with whites, blacks worked only with blacks and generally at lower wage less skilled jobs.
But what did Wilbur Ross have to do with the death of steel making at Sparrows Point? Quoting from the previously linked (but I'll link again) Sparrows Point Steelworkers website:
The global economy, once such a triumph for the steelworkers at Sparrows Point who exported steel around the world, has become - as it has for so many US manufacturing workers - a catastrophe. In September, 2001, after reporting a loss of $ 1.2 billion for the year, Bethlehem Steel hired Robert ' Steve' Miller who promptly put the company into Chapter 11. On October 15, 2001, as part of the bankruptcy, the company dumped its pension liabilities on to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), and cut off health insurance for all retirees and survivors, destroying a social contract that the union had created.
Eliminating these responsibilities - coldly called 'stranded costs' - made Bethlehem Steel an attractive prospect for corporate bottom-feeder Wilbur Ross, who created The International Steel Group (ISG) to scoop up a series of failing steel companies. In April 2003, Ross bought Bethlehem Steel for $1.5 billion, negotiating a controversial union contract with the USWA as part of the purchase agreement. This new union collective bargaining agreement
gutted the Basic Steel agreement that had been in effect since the 1940's, collapsed 35 job classifications into 5, reduced vacation time, tightened discipline eliminated the defined benefit pension plan altogether, offered buy-outs to thousands of workersAt the same time, Ross and Miller promised to keep the Sparrows Point plant open and assured both future investment and prosperity.
True to form, however, Ross - described in The Baltimore Sun as 'a billionaire investor' (6/10/2006) flipped all of his steel companies within an 18-month period, and sold ISG in 2005 to global steel titan Lakshmi Mittal for a profit estimated at between $118-300 million. . . .
True to form once again, Ross invested some of these profits into a new company, the International Coal Group (ICG), which bought up bankrupt coal companies, which had already - do you see a pattern? - dumped their pensions and health insurance for retirees. ICG owned the non-union Sago mine in Upshur County, West Virginia where, in January, 2006, 12 miners were killed by a cave-in while the nation stood a death watch, the worst mine disaster in West Virginia since 1968. Accident rates at the mine were 4.3 times the national average, despite Ross' claims that he never refused money for health and safety.
The former steel workers who have lost their jobs and their pensions after decades of hard work have good reason to be bitter, and it is difficult to look at the linked photos of the long lines of people waiting for handouts of food without feeling empathy, even if their anger has been misdirected at Democrats, Hillary Clinton, immigrants, and racial and religious minorities. Will Wilbur Ross’s appointment as Secretary of Commerce cause them to think, “Maybe we have been had?” Possibly, but I bet the bosses and owners and talk show radio jocks of local AM hate radio here in Baltimore are now planning how to paint this to their brainwashed followers.