It was a decision as cold and hard as the steel bars that rolled out of the mills at Wisconsin Steel. Envirodyne Inc., the last owner of the plant, did not offer the employees any buyouts. It did not notify them of its intentions. When the last shift ended on this date, the corporation locked the gates and tossed more than 3,000 people out of work.
To some, Wisconsin Steel was a symbol of America's shift from making things out of natural resources and human sweat to providing services dependent solely on ingenuity and brainpower. It seemed to be another painful example of the collapse of industrial Chicago, where one heavy industry after another had laid off workers or shuttered plants. The pattern was widespread around the Great Lakes manufacturing states, an area that came to be known as the Midwestern Rust Belt.To others, the darkened blast furnaces and empty lockers were the inevitable result of inept management and strong competition.
International Harvester had owned Wisconsin Steel for 75 years, using it as a captive supplier of steel for its farm equipment. But Harvester did not invest in Wisconsin Steel, sustained years of losses and finally sold it in 1977 to Envirodyne, a California company with no steel-making experience.
Envirodyne had planned to spend $50 million to update the facility, but it never did. The company had purchased Wisconsin Steel just as old-line companies in the industry began to be buffeted by foreign competition and low-cost domestic mini-mills. The plant lost money for three more years until a strike at Harvester, still its best customer, forced it to close.
Wisconsin Steel's demise was a major blow to Chicago's Southeast Side, once a leading center of steel production in the United States. More layoffs and plant closings followed. By the mid-1980s, Chicago's steel industry had been decimated.
But even as the large steel-makers were closing inefficient plants, others were investing in mills in Gary, northwest Indiana and elsewhere. By the early 1990s, plants in Indiana were making steel efficiently, and the region was being referred to as the steel capital of the world.
Other Midwest manufacturers also invested heavily to improve productivity. In the mid-1990s, one Chicago bank economist called the Midwest the nation's "Growth Belt."
The region had become a global center of professional services and high-tech manufacturing, with one urban planner forecasting steady growth in jobs and population for many years.
On Chicago's Southeast Side, however, Wisconsin Steel and U.S. Steel's South Works were gone and so were the jobs they had provided.
Where many steelworkers' homes once stood, there were vacant lots. The closings shattered the lives and dreams of many working-class families.