Weirton Revisited: Finance,the Working Class,and Rustbelt Steel Restructuring

Abstract

I met Dave Houston while researching an article on the 1983 employee buyout of Weirton Steel. This contact initiated a journey that led me to a PhD in economics and research on financially driven corporate restructuring in an era of troubled capital accumulation. Dave counseled and practiced a clear-eyed look at the conditions for “acceptable” surplus value extraction when analyzing viable avenues for worker resistance. With a quarter-century’s hindsight, this paper applies that approach to an assessment of what restructuring has meant for the industrial working class in steel and related sectors.