Personal Transition from Mill to Healthcare

It's hard to miss the legacy of steel when you come to Bethlehem The rusted out former mill looms over the city. The two hundred plus foot tall blast furnaces are long out of commission, and they make their own unique skyline that's kind of like a memorial to a bygone industrial economy But this plant was running, it was like a city unto itself. There had traffic lights. guards, security. they had a bus system to drive around seventy two year old Bill Liner and I are standing just across the street from those giant towers Bill's wearing a blue fleece jacket and scratches his salt and pepper stubble as we crane our necks up to look at an old industrial brick building This is the machine. This is where I basically worked in All in all, Bill spent more than twenty years working for Bethlehem Steel in some capacity The first second and third floor over my career It was old when I hired in in nineteen seventy three Of course, it's oldolded out Some of the windows have been knocked out, and others are yellowed with age I just wish you could get in there. I to walk around a see. Well, now there's nothing. It was Last time I was in there was a few years ago. It was all cleaned out. And it was really it was eerie because he walked in, you know you walk into it and all your memories are there And you can picture all these different machines where they were walked upstairs. Bill helped make wheels for the cranes throughout the plant. It was hard work. And it could be dangerous too. Myself had an accident. I had eight stitches in my index finger and five on my thumb. I wrapped around a string piece of string so I'm looking and I said, Wh, and I just right to the bone. Bill's thumb is okay now Worplace accidents aside, Bethlehem Steel was so significant to the national economy in the twentieth century that it was one of thirty blue chip companies that made up the Dow Jones industrial average It was important locally here too. It was the area's largest employer My dad worked here, my brother worked here in this summer help My brother in law worked here and we talk about this all the time and we get together But the US economy changed a lot in the nineteen seventies and eighties, and it hit the company hard They kept the buildings in good shape when they were making money. As a company slowly went down, you could notice they weren't painting as much, they weren't reparing things like the cut costs. Bill had a plan like a lot of other Americans from his generation, work thirty years at the same place and collect a pension after retirement But that didn't work out for him, or for a lot of other U. S. blue collar workers in the late twentieth century. The Bethlehem steel plant shut down in the late nineties and the company went bankrupt in the early two thousands As he saw the ship going down, Bill realized he needed a new career. So in his mid to late thirties, he pivoted to one of the major industries that would come in to replace steel manufacturing in Bethlehem That's healthcare Bill became a nurse and he still works part time to this day He's really a living example of how a local economy can adjust after a major disruption In this episode, we're going to walk you through the life and death of Bethlehem Steel and what happened to the city after that I'm Sona Hudson, and this is the Bethlehem Project, the series where we look at US economic and political issues through the lens of one city take the Pennsylvania three hundred sev eight south Eit toward Bethlehem. Bethem. Bethlehemh. Bethlehem. Bethem from Bethlehem. Growing up, I thought Bethlehem was just like your average small town. Recently though. I' realized we're really in the center of a lot of things Andrea Ziyah is shuffling through a stack of laminated archival photos. She's the president and CEO of the National Museum of Industrial History here in Bethlehem And she pulls out a black and white picture of a young man in a nineteenth century suit Is this young Charles Swab? It is It is. Yes. a very dapper young man born in Western Pennsylvania Charles Schwab, no not the man who founded the financial services company, but this Charles Schwab bought Bethlehem Steel in the early nineteen hundreds. He pioneered the so called H Beam that became Bethlehem Steeel's specialty. Andrea's dad, Mike Ziya, is a former executive at Bethlehem Steel, and he picks up Schwab's story from here He got the patent and built a first Lge structural mill here in Bathhroom in nineteen oh seven. And then another larger structural mill And the company just grew from there Andrea says it really became a powerhouse in World War one and World War two when the military needed a lot of steel to fight those conflicts And by World War I Bethlehem became the second largest steel company in the country About one hundred eighty thousand people worked in shipbuilding. So they were also the largest private shipbuilder in the world Outside of wartime in the twentieth century, it was all about building cars and skyscrapers The corporation helped build everything from the New York City skyline to my hometown's iconic landmark, the Golden Gate Bridge Manufacturing was a big part of the national economy at this time too According to federal government data, it made up twenty seven percent of gross domestic product in nineteen fifty seven Today, that number is less than ten percent During this time of abundance for Bethlehem Steel, it was a huge player in the local economy It meant everything to the local economy. This was a company town. Pretty much everybody had a connection here Things were going pretty well Then the first crack started to form The nineteen fifty nine Steel strike five hundred thousand workers across the country walked off the job because of a dispute over wages and benefits You know, everything shut down. this was a national strike. and then we start to see foreign imports coming into the market at that time More disruptions came in the nineteen seventies biggest being that a new way of making steel started taking off Mi mills They were, as the name might suggest, smaller, and they didn't make steel from scratch. They made it from scrap metal, which made things cheaper Here's Mike Zaya, the Steel executive again It was probably downownward spiral in the eighties and nineties because I think another way to put it is I started in nineteen sixty five And the first teen years I spent building the company And the rest of the time, No Managing the downside of the company Plus, these mini mills were largely not unionized, which brings us to the last big drag on Bethlehem Steele's finances One point. there were seven Bethem Steeel retirees for every one That was working was quite an expense from a healthcare standpoint on a pension standpoint So Bethlehem Steel began its slow desents Mass layoffs started in the early nineteen eighties, which cost the steelworker who we heard from earlier, Bill Liner, his job The Bethlehem plant shut down throughout the mid to late nineties, and eventually the entire company went bankrupt in two thousand one Andrea saw the economic impact of that firsthand. wasn't certainly an economic downturn, I have three older brothers and they all decided to leave the area. They thought that there was not an economic future. One of them moved to the Detroit area, and then he might have questioned that choice because when he came back here, it had just changed so much So to recap Bethlehems steel faced a combination of cheaper foreign steel, more efficient domestic competitors, and a lot of pension money to pay out. The company had evolved before, so why did this set of challenges prove to be too much for Bethlehem Steel to overcome asked Roland Kushner I'm a recently retired professor of business at Nulenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania and a long term resident of Bethem, Pennsylvania Rolland points to a study that identified four types of companies when it comes to adjusting to changes in the market prorospectors, defenders, analyzers, and reactors And Roland says Bethlehem Steel was a reactor which sticks its head up and says, what happened? What should we do next The study that coined these terms, Roland says, found that reactors are the only type of company that doesn't do well in the long term behavior and its conduct as an enterprise by not being out frront with additional investment in the nineteen seventies and eighties That's the period when it started to to go down What Roland's saying here is that the companies that thrived They were better engaged in the market. better technology and we're more flexible Reactors, like Bethlehem Steel, didn't have a consistent way they adapted to change So when disruptions came, they were caught flat footed and didn't know how to respond But when steel went under in Bethlehem, other industries took off, like transportation and logistics, and healthcare also became a major industry The area's biggest employer went from Bethlehem Steel to two major hospital systems So why was Bethlehem able to pivot and flourish economically after its biggest business disappeared? Roland says it was a combination of things I think that some elements of how the city has done well have been Luck. So one is location Bethlehem is well situated, accessible to metropolitan populations It's about an hour and a half from both New York City and Philadelphia It had unusually helpful public spaces that could be converted into performing arts venues. He also praises local leadership from the city and and the business sector, even though Bethlehem, I don't think has any really big businesses. that are located here It's also got a you know, a thriving small business sector ham Steel shutdered more than a quarter century ago But Andrea Zayah, the museum's CEO, says its legacy lives on, even for generations who weren't directly touched by the mill. I teach at some of the local colleges here And I've been assigning an essay assignment. What is Lehi Vatley culture? And after twenty five years, students are writing that We have a Bethlehem Steel identity How is that possible You know, even in the shadow, these kids growing up in the shadow of a cold blast burnace And somehow this is becoming part of who they are. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we'll hear a personal story about what it was like to transition from steel to healthcare Bill Leiner still remembers the day he was laid off from Bethlehem Steel. march nineteenth, nineteen eighty two On that day, he came into the large brick machine shop where he worked and all the steel chips that accumulate from the lays that the lab's clean Nothing was done. I looked around. I said, what the hell is going on And they told me Massive layoff And a superintendent who was a great guy, may rest in peace. G guy He says to me, Bill, he had like a musical quality to his voice, Bill What are you gonna do Now, Bill had been laid off a few times before throughout the mid to late seventies, but he always got hired back after a few months. so he figured it'd be the same thing again. I said, Smmer vacations open up, you got will' be calling people back. And he looked at me and he said There's no work coming in. loss of that job and me concerned because I just bought the house in nineteen eighty one. And I'm thinking, Oh my God, I don't gonna lose the house and I' lived in town all my life. My parents live three blocks away. My brother in law and sister are up the street. And that spoke to me That's why I work so much you know what Phill started working at a stove factory at night and then got a full time job at a mental health facility He was working a lot, which he says strained his relationship with his wife and man would really kill the marriage was I I was hired by Leight County Crisis Intervention Unit. I did that One night a week on a Saturday night ten hours. And so you put basically three rolls together Wife's sitting around, what are you doing Anxiy Anxiety, intention and before you know it, it doesn't fit and then' gone. Bill did eventually get hired back at Bethlehem Steel, but he knew that it wasn't going to last You can see the steels are going down Now you're at like nineteen eighty eight, eighty nine, ninety ninety, you can see this is not gonna this is sinking. So I thought, what am I going do The answer to that, it turns out, was nursing He realized from his jobs at the Mental health facility and the Crisis intertervention unit that he was interested in psychiatric care And I thought I like what I'm doing. I enjoy nursing. In the nineteen nineties nursing in psychiatry nursing was a very good job. Length of stays were twenty one days or more. you go work and you would have the same people you talk to over days. Bill went back to school in the evenings to get his nursing degree and eventually got a job at Lehigh Valley Hospital Remember the big boom in healthcare that I mentioned earlier Bill worked there for more than fifteen years and now has a job at a mental health facility. So I went to see what his new life is like. How do you feel That's good to hear Bill is walking me through the dining room at the mental health facility he works at The room is an old chapel. The pews have been ripped out and replaced by tables We cut out the patient's response to Bill's question in order to protect their privacy Bill and I sit down in a small office to talk more about what his life looks like now Iave a shot. I just g gave someone a shot He pulls out an empty box from a pile of papers on his desk and shows me the label on it That's a long acting a longong acting psychotropic medication We have a lot of our folks are on long acting injectables. That's like my role. How does a day working here compare to a day working at Bethlm Steel? Oh my God, entirely different. Entirely, entirely different. It's a different structure. I mean, in this type of work, you're working with people, which is working serving people. The steel company is more, you had a job to do, you had things to make, I ran a machine, a lathe And it didn't really matter How yak it I mean, somebody acted like a real idiot Thoroughly As long as he was doing his job performance and let him go he's working, and he's a good guy. Right. Here it's a differe It's a softer environment and more interactional and that's that's Frankly, it's more important Another big difference, he's no longer in a union. Bill says that made him feel vulnerable Well, I tell you what, you feel naked and here's why. Because when you work at a place like Bethleem Steel, Mac trucks, cement companies and all that, you never It never entered your mind that you could get fred How did the two working environments compare? We talked about the people, but what about the actual work itself? The dangers are different. I mean, you can have needle sticks, you can do something like that. or when HIV arrived, I was working as a staff nurse on the unit and it was like crazy. People were afraid. But yeah, the danger the dangers are different. In a machine shop The possibility of getting hurt, I mean were and even dead was very real. We had a lot of guys killed in the Bethylen plant, s I hired in in nineteen seventy three. Was there anything about working at the steel mill in the machine shop that? trained you or helped you in your career as a nurse? Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. What I learned at Bethleem Steel, what helped me is You worked on what's called direct incentive and a machine shop on machines. You got to base pay You could potentially double your pay based on your output. Right? So That forced you to be efficient. you had to be efficient. How can I say this? How can I say that, That is one of the biggest takeaways, positive takeaways from working at Bethleham still for me This episode got me thinking about how different work used to look. You were doing things by hand, working in massive factories that employed your neighbors, your parents, your siblings. So many people I talked to could list off several family members who worked for Bethlehem Steel. It was hard work and was dangerous work, and there was such a reverence for it It reminded me of my own family, who hails from the Midwest My grandmother used to talk about how proud her family was when her father got a job as a welder for military ships during World War two She told me that he was the best welder at the factory, and honestly, I'm not sure how to fact check her on that. When she died last year, I found her father's work badge in a box inside her closet Can you imagine keeping something like that for eighty years Pham Steel was more than just a job for Bill too And that was evident as we stood in front of the old machine shop where he used to work Every time I come down here always Holy stop And look, Bill starts to get choked up and tears form in his eyes. I mean, he spent more than two decades at Bethlehem Steel Because to a certain extent, I grew up here nineteen when I came in her, didn't shave ' nineteen years old. This was the Bethlehem Project, the series where we explore US economic and political issues through the lens of one city. Our show was edited by Mark Filipppino and it was mixed by Brene Turner. Tophher Forez is our executive producer, and Flo Phillips is the FT's global head of audio. I'm Sonya Hudson, thanks for going to Bethlehem with me