American Steel
Bensman, David
Against the City, announced the direction of his work in 1970. The title conveys the one-dimensional character of Sennett's thinking. He has never been able to grasp the way in which families...
...but exposure to others will do them very little good if they have no minds to risk...
...The problem extends to front-line supervisors who have never done their job before, and have no understanding of the dangers inherent in steelmaking...
...and Nucor employees' retirements could be impoverished if Nucor's stock were to drop significantly...
...It does not train its employees and managers adequately...
...New perspectives presuppose a pre-existing point of view...
...its incentive pay system reinforces the company's culture of indifference to workplace safety...
...And Crawfords-ville is the most notable of Nucor's successes: the new plant incorporates a revolutionary technology, developed in West Germany, that allows a relatively inexpensive mini-mill to produce thin slabs of steel that can be rolled into the sheets that make up American cars, refrigerators, railroad cars, and washing machines...
...Preston reports the death of two ironhangers, who, under Nucor supervision, fell to their deaths because they had not bothered to use their safety straps...
...The story is of extraordinary interest because Nucor is a success story whose entrepreneurial verve makes the Big Steelmakers look like bunglers whose failures have jeopardized the nation's international competitiveness...
...It is important for people to measure their own values against others and to run the risk of changing their minds...
...Throughout the 1980s, Nucor's willingness to try out new production methods enabled it to move from the low end of the steel market (bolts and bars), where profit margins are lowest, to the midlevel small structural beam market, and finally to large structural beams and sheet steel...
...Preston's refusal to investigate the context of his story is especially evident in his slipshod treatment of Nucor's safety record...
...It should, however, carry a label: Warning: The Story You Are About to Read May be Injurious to Workers' Health...
...The first is the company's investment in technology...
...Among the important elements of the Nucor story that Preston all but ignores are the fact that almost all American steel companies became profitable after the fall of the U.S...
...Nucor's willingness to try out new processes has enabled it not only to earn consistently high profits, but to challenge Big Steel on its home turf, the product markets where the large integrated companies earn the bulk of their profits...
...Nucor employs just five layers of management, as opposed to ten or eleven at Big Steel...
...One must wonder why American Steel reaches such cavalier conclusions about the safety issue...
...It is a story of fully fleshed out men and women engaged in path-breaking work...
...we learn a paltry amount about the dynamics of the world steel industry, about Nucor's competitors, about government policies affecting steel, about the state 338: Commonweal and local government subsidies offered Nucor to induce its investment in rural areas...
...Average annual earnings of production workers exceed $40,000, significantly above the union wage in Big Steel...
...its top management allows plant managers to run their operations as if they were separate businesses...
...that almost all American steel companies made tremendous productivity gains since 1982...
...The problem stems from Preston's decision to tell Nucor's story directly from the mouths of company personnel...
...IMPERFECT MODEL AMERICAN STEEL Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt Richard Preston Prentice Hall, $19.95, 278 pp...
...They also receive stock sharing, in lieu of a retiremen( plan...
...Such carnage calls into question Nucor's status as a model for American industry...
...and many Nucor managers have become millionaires...
...Hot Metal Men and the Resurrection of the Rust Belt is a brilliant but deeply flawed account of the start-up of a Nucor Corporation minimill in Crawfordsville, Indiana...
...He has never been able to grasp the way in which families work for the city as well as against it...
...In countless articles in the business press, Nucor is presented as a model for American business, living proof of the wonders that can be accomplished when the bureaucratic management structures and restrictive union work rules that cripple our nation's industrial plants are removed...
...Apparently, Preston agrees with Kinney...
...The crane had not been maintained and inspected in compliance with federal safety standards...
...In lieu of his New Yorker conclusion that Nucor's incentive pay system encourages unsafe practices, in his book Preston parrots company rationalizations...
...Probably not...
...Preston takes us to the "vomit colored" building housing Nucor's spartan corporate headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, where its president, Ken Iverson, orchestrates a $1.3-billion company with the aid of twenty support staff and an Ayn Randish managerial philosophy: decentralize!make mistakes ! take risks...
...Without question, the Nucor pay plan is generous and extreme in the way it ties compensation to output...
...it does not plan carefully...
...in many cases, the author paraphrases his characters, practically removing himself from the narrative...
...Preston's account allows the reader to see the dramatic opening of a steel mill through the eyes of the men and women who planned, built, and operated it...
...From the evidence presented in American Steel, Nucor is far from the model corporation Pleston and so many other business writers have claimed...
...On the other hand, Nucor surely has pioneered in technological risk-taking and productivity enhancement...
...dollar in 1985...
...If Nucor's productivity gains come at the expense of workplace safety, who would advocate that other companies join Nucor in turning back the clock on eighty years of progress...
...but he would be hard pressed to refute it, without revising most of his assumptions about society, cities, and selfhood...
...Nucor production workers are grouped into teams of twenty-five to thirty, and they earn bonuses that can double (or triple) their base pay every week for exceeding standard output...
...On the other hand, in Nucor's worst year, 1982, Ken Iverson's earnings were just $110,000, last on the list of Fortune 500 chief executive officers...
...Three factors are usually cited as responsible for Nucor's success...
...Preston provides only the slightest of contexts for his dramatic story...
...Unless people start life with a culture of their own, exposure to other cultures will seldom enhance their moral or even their aesthetic awareness...
...Throughout Preston's narrative, he provides incidental details ofNucor's irresponsible approach to workplace safety...
...Preston's decision places us quickly inside the characters' souls, but we learn little more than what his characters see and feel...
...In one of the book's most bloodcurdling chapters, Preston describes how one worker is burned to death by molten steel when a crane slips its cables and drops a ladle onto the floor of the casting room...
...Second, Nucor's decentralized management structure is favorably contrasted to the bureaucratic Big Steel companies...
...David Bensman ichard Preston's American Steel...
...Moreover, why does Preston's book not incorporate the research on which the modified, sober conclusions of his New Yorker article are based...
...ii 17May 1991:339...
...The company's indifference to safety is pervasive...
...Preston is the best of many writers who have celebrated Nucor's entrepreneurial success...
...Joseph Kinney, director of the National Safe Workplace Institute, whom Preston cites and slights, believes that "Nucor's bonus systems and the absence of work rules encourage both managers and workers to take chances with safety in order to increase production...
...When I asked Preston's editor at Prentice-Hall about the discrepancies between the book and the articles, he professed ignorance about workplace safety and "stood by" Preston's research abilities...
...The "death of the subject" makes us more receptive to a variety of impressions, but it also means that impressions will make little difference in our lives, except to strengthen the feeling that nothing really matters...
...For some workers, the risks are fatal...
...that the United Steelworkers of America, the onion that Preston disparages repeatedly throughout the text, worked diligently with the steelmakers to boost productivity and reduce labor costs over the last decade...
...But in the book-length version of American Steel, Preston mysteriously dismisses Kinney's concerns about Nucor's fatality record (nine to twelve deaths over eleven years, depending on which fatalities one attributes to Nucor, and which to its venders and directly supervised contractors...
...In the New Yorker's second installment of an abridged version of American Steel (March 4, 1991), Preston writes: "Nucor, having thrown work rules out of the window, has developed an uncanny ability to motivate its line workers to play hard and fast in the start-up and operation of a plant--that is, to take business risks, operational risks, and even personal risks, in their efforts to raise production...
...Managers also enjoy a pay-for-performance system that can hold down their earnings to relatively low levels if things go wrong, but can make them rich if things go well...
...The problem starts at the top, with Keith Busse, a plant manager who leads Preston on a hair-raising chase through small towns and rural country lanes at ninety miles per hour in his pearl-colored Audi sed.an with smoked windows...
...Without home culture, as it used to be called--a background of firmly held standards and b e l i e f s - - p e o p l e will encounter the "other" merely as consumers of impressions and sensations, as cultural shoppers in pursuit of the latest novelties...
...It includes construction workers too macho to use their safety equipment...
...To be sure, Preston's tale is a tour-de-force...
...Is that the point Sennett wants to leave us with, that nothing matters...
...Finally, Nucor depends on a bonus and profit-sharing system to motivate workers and managers to do their best, indeed, to do better than anyone ever dreamed they could do...
...Such a situation calls for a more complex, comprehensive assessment...
...Unfortunately, deficiencies in Preston's method cause him to paint a distorted picture of what is far from a model for American business...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 10
