Effective human resource management in the steel industry

Abstract

Iron preceded steel in the history of the metal industry. It was used for over three thousand years, and when the British settled in North America, the first iron works was set up at James town, Virginia, in 1621. By the time of the American Revolution, the colonies were producing one‐seventh of the world’s supply of pig iron at thirty thousand tons. Steel is made by alloying iron with carbon to produce a hard, strong metal. It was expensive to manufacture and the United States imported most of its steel until after the Civil War. The steam age provided much growth to the iron industry in the 1800s, with enormous demand for iron rails. Pennsylvania, with its large deposits of anthracite coal, was the nation’s leading state in the iron industry. Aided by the great iron ore deposits in the Great Lakes area and cheap water transportation, the production of iron and steel drove the Industrial Revolution, and the Mid west became the centre of American heavy industry. Developments in steel processing during the mid 1800s lowered the cost of steel production and allowed the use of steel for rail roads, construction, and other industrial uses. By 1883, approximately twenty years after the Civil War, the United States produced nearly 115,000 tons of steel and the Iron Age disappeared. The American steel industry continued to grow rapidly and by 1910 it produced more than 24 million tons, which was the greatest of any country. One of the high lights of the steel industry was the establishment of United States Steel Corporation in 1901 led by J. Pierpont Morgan and Elbert H. Gary. The corporation was valued at $1.4 billion and controlled more than 60 percent of the US market. The strength of America’s steel industry continued after World War II and peaked in 1969 at 141,262,000 tons. At this time, competition from steel plants abroad with lower labour costs and newer mills started edging in on the US market. By 1975, US steel production declined to 89 million tons, but rebounded slightly in the late 1980s (Gordon). The American steel industry would not be central to the economy as it had for the previous 100 years.

Citation

Andresen, K. and Kleiner, B.H. (2005), "Effective human resource management in the steel industry", Management Research News, Vol. 28 No. 11/12, pp. 32-43. https://doi.org/10.1108/01409170510785219