WAITING FOR THE BRIMSTONE
Wasik, John F.
Waiting for the Brimstone BY JOHN F. WASIK The scent of slag follows you like a mangy, stray cat on the southeast side of Chicago. Even a rainstorm can't dispel this cheap cologne that winds its...
...But it was not acted upon...
...But for now all he can do is fine-tune the radio with John F. Wasik is a free-lance writer in Chicago...
...Envirodyne was taking over a Only hope still burns at a Chicago steel mill company ten times its size...
...The most recent bid for the mill has come from the Shanghai Investment Trust Company, which has offered to buy the mill and move it to China...
...Several months after the mill closed, he found another job in a foundry...
...The idea was forwarded to Harold Washington, whom the steelworkers supported...
...One of the nation's foremost steel experts, the Reverend William Hogan, a Jesuit who teaches economics at Fordham University, evaluated the mill's prospects for revival in a report commissioned by the Government in 1980...
...Until the recession of the late 1970s, that was a relatively easy task...
...His Boston accent conceals more than thirty years in a steel mill...
...The candidates paid lip service to the plight of the workers, but that was all...
...Three days after the closure, Envirodyne's Wisconsin Steel holding company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy...
...But a lengthy United Auto Workers strike against Harvester, the deep recession, and several loan defaults shut the mill down in March 1980...
...Some millworkers who bought two-flats are losing them now that the paychecks have stopped coming...
...On the southeast side of Chicago, the blue-collar vote has traditionally gone to the Democratic Party...
...In every election since the mill closed, Wisconsin Steel has been an issue the politicians have bandied about...
...Government, the beneficial owner of Wisconsin Steel, has rejected the offer as too low...
...The f parade of potential owners was ¦ "a cruel joke," said one Commerce Department official, noting the remote chance the mill had of reopening...
...their signs read...
...Their unemployment compensation ran out long ago...
...Since then, a number of suitors have announced their intentions to buy the mill...
...Linde planned to rebuild the mill, which had lost $40 million in the five years preceding the Envirodyne acquisition...
...The taverns, outnumbering the schools and churches, are not likely to have hanging plants or brass rails...
...It has been three years since Wisconsin Steel shut down without prior notice, idling more than 3,000 workers...
...Huge sections of blast furnace—which the Government loan program would have rebuilt—lie on the ground like fallen chimneys...
...Schools, churches, and taverns popped up—many of them within sight of the mills...
...the rounded stumps of two fingers he severed in the mill...
...He launched a $100 million improvement program, and the U.S...
...Yet they still wait with canine fidelity for the mill to reopen...
...Came Thanksgiving and the mill was still idle, so some workers and their wives picketed below Byrne's Gold Coast high-rise...
...A graying, short Hispanic worker was asked how he felt about the shutdown...
...But children still whirl around the sidewalk in their "Big Wheels" as their mothers watch from the porches covered with green indoor-outdoor carpeting...
...For the last three years, the workers of Wisconsin Steel have journeyed from one end of the country to the other in search of someone who can restore their lost back pay, benefits, pensions, and jobs...
...Vrdolyak represents the ward that contains Wisconsin Steel and is the lawyer for the independent union at the mill...
...they played their part in the Chicago Democratic machine...
...Although some | tradesmen and managers found jobs in other mills or related industries, the bulk of the semiskilled or unskilled workers were I forced to go on relief...
...For Thanksgiving 1980, Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne had promised that Wisconsin Steel would be open and the men back at work...
...In April 1981, Savage organized a one-day lobby for a group of 200 steelworkers, who met with some twenty-five members of Congress or their aides and picketed the White House...
...The U.S...
...Their suffering can be subtle...
...Where's Our Turkey...
...it was slated to buy 30 per cent of the mill's product...
...And since the report was issued, a large portion of the mill has deteriorated...
...Lumpkin runs an office for those who have been waiting for the mill to reopen...
...When a crew from the Public Broadcasting Service came to South Chicago to produce a documentary on the plight of the workers at Wisconsin Steel, it chose to conduct interviews in front of the mill...
...No concrete proposals were made...
...To reopen the mill, the workers at Wisconsin Steel would have had to scrape up a substantial sum...
...The shutdown has stranded the millworkers, many of them middle-aged and with limited labor skills...
...We will use the judicial system to warn the Harvesters of the world that they can't stiff a community and walk away from it," Thomas Geoghegan, the young lawyer who has been representing the workers for about two years, told a jobless throng at a rally on the third anniversary of the shutdown...
...Ironically, the only major piece of legislation he introduced that year was a resolution to honor the late boxer Joe Louis...
...The cathedral-like mill reverberates as loose metal flaps pummel each other in the wind...
...The laid-off workers scoured the steel district for any kind of decent work...
...As soon as his candidate, Byrne, lost to Harold Washington, Vrdolyak stopped talking about the OTS plan...
...Jim Hooper, a maintenance worker, was one of the lucky ones...
...Wisconsin Steel was one of the oldest of the lot, orginally built to make bar shapes for Cyrus McCormick's reapers...
...On the day of the steelworkers' rally, Savage told me he considered himself to be the Muhammad Ali of Congress and would get the mill reopened within a year...
...They've gotten nowhere...
...And the workers also have angrily charged that Harvester deliberately failed to upgrade the mill, dumping it to dodge the pensions...
...A subsequent probe by the local media revealed that the company knew nothing about making steel...
...And on the main strip, small shops sell everything from fresh-ground Polish sausage to tacos...
...It's a "damn rotten deal," he blurted out...
...A state-of-the-art continuous caster, only partially completed when the mill shut down, collects dust in the basic oxygen shop...
...The Wisconsin Steel workers were no different...
...In many ways, Geoghegan's sentiments are little different from those being voiced in Youngstown, Allentown, Canton, Middle-town—steel communities orphaned by the recession and corporate negligence...
...During the mayoral election campaign, Lumpkin recommended that the laid-off millworkers be hired at $12,000 a year for two years to perform public works jobs for Chicago and maintain the mill for future use...
...Envirodyne acquired the mill, its subsidiaries, and its mining properties without having to put down one dollar of its own money...
...It was just one of a long line of curiously timed proposals designed to stir interest in the dormant mill...
...Most of the major steelmakers have mills in the Calumet area, and the millyards stretch for thirty-five miles from South Chicago east to Portage, Indiana...
...But after less than half a year on his new I job, the conglomerate that owned the foundry announced it was shutting down the facility...
...The mining properties were simply pledged as collateral in the $65 million deal...
...Mills abut one another, and blast furnaces vie with church steeples for their own piece of the sky...
...In 1977, International Harvester sold Wisconsin Steel to Envirodyne Industries, an engineering consulting firm...
...Most of the machines at Wisconsin Steel have now been auctioned off, a cold-finishing mill was sold one piece at a time, and anything that could be peddled or hauled away has long since departed...
...One scheme involved OTS Development Corporation, a holding company owning little more than a Delaware registration...
...Ronald Linde, Envirodyne's chairman, hoped to mold a conglomerate that would boast $ 1 billion in annual sales within five years...
...But because they lacked capital or had doubts about the future of the steel industry, they quickly left town and were never heard of again...
...Mill creditors have sued Harvester for fraud, charging that Harvester sold the mill to avoid pension liabilities...
...But only muffled echoes remain in this cave of a room...
...In return, the politicians were expected to keep the jobs in the neighborhood...
...Life in the biceps of America yields little promise for the men and women who toiled in the mastodon-like mills...
...But the air has become ominously cleaner, and Frank Lumpkin listens to the clock radio on his desk...
...they rarely shed tears...
...International Harvester has caught most of the criticism for the shutdown...
...The unions were solid Democratic voting blocs, as any ward committeeman in Chicago would tell you...
...He is the spokesman for the Save Our Jobs Committee, a mostly middle-aged group of black, Hispanic, and white former millworkers...
...Southeast Chicago sits at the western end of the Calumet region, once hailed as the largest steelmaking district in the world...
...Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration guaranteed $90 million worth of loans...
...Reopening the mill would cost at least $10 million, Hogan said...
...Harvester itself was to retain a key role...
...The man stuttered at first, then exploded in tears...
...Although not particularly articulate, he commands attention with his barrel-chested frame and anvil nose...
...The Wisconsin Steel workers did have apparent allies in Congress, however—most notably, Representative Gus Savage...
...Even a rainstorm can't dispel this cheap cologne that winds its way from the bowling alleys to the taverns and into the two-flats and bungalows...
...During television debates last year between Washington, Byrne, and Cook County States Attorney Richard Daley, the question of what to do about Wisconsin Steel came up...
...When I last toured the mill, the only signs of life were two men from a liquidating firm, a couple of security guards, some maintenance workers, and a stray cat...
...The Save Our Jobs Committee meets on the second floor of Roma's Restaurant...
...The rest of his response was unintelligible...
...He expects an announcement any day now that Wisconsin Steel in Chicago will reopen...
...The egg-gas is an acrid messenger of prosperity, for when the mills are up, the brimstone brings home a paycheck...
...The powerful Tenth Ward alderman, Edward Vrdolyak, chairman of the Cook County Democratic Committee, announced the plan just before the mayoral primary in February 1983...
Vol. 48 • March 1984 • No. 3
