Manufacturing Meltdown

Using the global steel industry’s status in the 1980s as a context, this study follows its evolution from booming business to a precipitous decline, comparing it to the current changes unfolding within the Canadian steel industry. The chronicle demonstrates how management demanded workers’ augmented participation in?increasingly?temporary and insecure labor. Workers at the flagship Stelco plant in Hamilton, Ontario, are interviewed, and new management strategies as well as the unionized workforces’ responses to them are documented. Illustrating the effects of the industry’s decline on the workers’ communities as well, this series of investigations reveals how the insight of today’s steelworkers is being dismissed in favor of an undermining academic knowledge.