Time was, a steel worker was a prince of central Alabama. He (and they were, at one time, all men) could buy a new truck, pay off the house early, take that regular vacation to Panama City — all without worrying about the cost.
But that time was. It's not now.
U.S. Steel Corp. is closing its blast furnace at Fairfield Works, the sprawling plant that’s been a mainstay here for more than a century. When it shuts down Nov. 17, so will a chapter in southern manufacturing. According to the steel maker, it is the final furnace, the last behemoth where ore was fired to over 2,000 degrees to make that finest of American products, steel.
Today, about 2,000 people work at the U.S. Steel operations in Fairfield, the majority of them at Fairfield Works, home of the furnace. Eleven-hundred jobs will be lost.
Many more lives than that will be affected.
Towana Pettis understands. On a recent morning, the Fairfield native bent over a basil plant in a community garden here. Snip! A tangle of basil leaves fell in her left hand. With her right, she gestured toward U.S. Steel's main gate, less than a mile away.
"This used to be the steel city," she said. "Now, things are about to get rougher."
U.S. Steel announced the closing in August. Some workers who made as much as $100,000 a year with overtime would lose their jobs.
“We have made some difficult decisions over the last year as a part of our portfolio optimization,” Mario Longhi, the steel maker’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “We have determined that the permanent shutdown of the Fairfield Works blast furnace, steel-making and most of the finishing operations is necessary to improve the overall efficiency and cost structure of our flat-rolled segment.”
In real language: U.S. Steel is cutting costs.
‘Catastrophic’ announcement
Fairfield, about 150 miles west of Atlanta, is battered. Stroll along some blocks and the only company you’ll have is your reflection on dusty, darkened windows.
U.S. Census figures underscore some of the city’s travails. The per capita income in Fairfield is less than $18,000; statewide, that number is close to $24,000. Median annual household income is slightly more than $34,000; the median state income exceeds $43,000.
The layoffs, said Fairfield Mayor Kenneth Coachman, are “catastrophic.”
“I know what that (layoffs) means,” said Coachman, a Fairfield native who’s lived through past layoffs and strikes. “I have to look at the city, the region, and how it’s going to affect us.”
U.S. Steel, Coachman noted, is not in the city limits; it doesn’t pay property taxes to Fairfield. But that doesn’t mean steel money isn’t spent here. Convenience stores, Walmart, restaurants: the cash made in a blast furnace makes its way to local cash registers.
But Fairfield, he said, will survive, in spite of this latest bit of bad news. “As far as closing down the city?” he asked. “No, we don’t expect that.”
Coachman does expect hard times to hit workers with kids in college, younger families with a big note on their recently purchased home, the fellow who’s making payments on his dream truck.
“The families,” Coachman said. “That’s who my heart goes out to.”
People will stumble on, predicted Willie Hearnes, who works for his son at a downtown small-engine and bicycle repair shop. Some may even prosper.
“People got to have lawnmowers,” he said. “They’re going to need bicycles for their kids.”
‘Not going to come back’
The image is engraved on our consciousness — the silhouette of a steel worker, bent before a furnace that glows brighter than any sun. Steel made in Alabama helped win wars. It erected buildings so tall that architects coined a new term: skyscrapers. It made bridges that spanned the widest rivers, the deepest gorges.
It made a region strong. At one time, 15,000 U.S. Steel workers toiled at its Fairfield operations. They were people like Roger Barger.
Barger worked for the company for 33 years; ditto for a brother and his father. His son, Jason, works for the company’s pipe plant, whose work force isn’t supposed to shrink.
Barger, 64, retired in 2004. These days, he heads American Legion Post No. 137. It’s opposite another organization with a different number: United Steelworkers Local No. 1013.
Barger, killing time before members began arriving for a weekly hotdog supper, took a long drink from a Diet Mountain Dew.
“Used to be, you wanted to buy a new car, the dealer would ask you where you worked,” said Barger, who raised three children to adulthood on a steel worker’s salary. “If you said ‘U.S. Steel,’ he’d say, ‘Oh, OK!’”
Barger sighed. “It’s kind of heartbreaking to see this area go down.”
The decline of southern steel jobs mirrors other, earlier, job losses in the South, said Dan Broun, a senior program director for MDC, a Durham, N.C., nonprofit that charts southern economies and trends.
He likened it to textiles, an industry that moved from the North’s aging mills to the South’s lower-wage, eager-to-work population. In time, Broun said, those textile jobs moved again — this time, overseas, where a ready workforce waited.
The same, he said, has happened with steel. China’s low-wage workers make a lot of it.
“Bottom line?” he asked. “Those jobs are not going to come back in that same form.”
Automation has taken a toll, too, said Robert Rogers, a retired Ashland University economics professor. He’s the author of “An Economic History of the American Steel Industry,” published in 2009.
In 1950, Roberts noted, American foundries produced about 100 million tons of steel. They needed 600,000 workers to do it. A half-century later, he said, domestic steel firms needed 140,000 workers to produce the same tonnage.
“That trend’s continuing,” he said.
A life-changing decision
Clarence L. Broadnax leaned against the exterior wall of the union hall here and smiled. It was the sort of satisfied expression a man gets when he realizes his working days are numbered. When he heard that a furnace shutdown was imminent, the 61-year-old steel worker decided it was time to retire. He has worked at U.S. Steel since graduating from high school in 1973.
He always worked in the blast furnace, wearing fire-retardant clothes topped with “silvers,” reflective attire that also deflected cinders. It was hot work, “but you get used to it.”
He decided he could not get used to working in another capacity for U.S. Steel. “I just didn’t want to learn something else,” he said.
He is grateful to the steel maker. “It’s been a good job,” said Broadnax. U.S. Steel, he said, helped raise five kids, buy two houses and 12 cars, plus pay for two divorces.
When he was younger, paying for braces and other child-care costs, he worked overtime. The past few years, Broadnax said, he worked a regular hours — “eight and the gate.” Last year, he made $80,000.
He plans to travel, look after his aging parents. He’ll cross his fingers for younger workers facing an uncertain future, too.
“I feel sorry for a lot of them,” he said.
Prayers, preparation
That’s not to say Fairfield is rolling over. The state’s Office of Community and Economic Development has been working with affected workers to alert them to other jobs and to urge that some train for new careers. Frederick Hamilton, the agency’s director, called it a “rapid response.”
“In many cases, they (workers) have transferable skills,” said Hamilton. A regional auto-part supplier has hired some former steel workers, he said. Companies in Anniston also have called, he said.
Even so, Hamilton said, he understands the tumult such a job change causes. “Those workers made real good money,” he said. “I don’t know that the (replacement) wages would be the same.”
There is room for hope, agreed the Rev. David Craig, senior pastor of Mount Pilgrim Baptist Church in Fairfield. Craig and a handful of other ministers recently organized Fairfield Renaissance: A Rebirth. A three-day celebration of song, prayer, and a look to the future. The revival took place Sept. 13-15 at Fairfield Preparatory High School. The school, close to the Birmingham city line, is a stunning structure, its stone columns a reminder that education is an important business.
Plans for the renaissance started before U.S Steel announced the layoffs, Craig said. City officials, the school board, pastors, “the entire community” – all are part of the plans to help Fairfield retool, rebuild, reinvent.
“The closing (of the furnace) is a setback,” said Craig, 61, a native of Fairfield who worked for the company 22 years. “But it’s not a death knell for our city.”
Craig likened Fairfield’s woes to a passage in the Book of Isaiah, in which the Lord urges the afflicted not to give up hope. One passage may be particularly pertinent:
Afflicted city, lashed by storms and not comforted, I will rebuild you with stones of turquoise, your foundations with lapis lazuli…
“We can’t do anything about U.S. Steel,” he said. “It is a setback. It’s one of those situations that takes place in life.”
Other cities, he noted, have experienced economic renaissances – nearby Midfield, Bessemer, Birmingham. He believes it’s Fairfield’s turn. “We won’t be left out.”
This, said Craig is a chance for Fairfield to do something different — to live up to its motto, “An Older City Moving In A New Direction.”
“We aren’t oblivious to the past,” he said. “But we are looking to the future.”
People, he said will have to adjust. “It’s not like U.S. Steel called and asked me about (layoffs),” he said.
And if the steel giant had? Craig smiled.
“I would have advised them differently.”
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