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Black Monday, ’77, When the Mill Shutdown in Youngstown Gave Birth to the Rust Belt [billmoyers.com]

 

Democratic Ownership and the Pluralist Commonwealth: The Creation of an Idea Whose Time Has Come

On Sept. 19, 1977 — a day remembered locally as “Black Monday” — the corporate owners of the Campbell Works in Youngstown, Ohio, abruptly shuttered the giant steel mill’s doors. Instantly, 5,000 workers lost their jobs, their livelihoods and their futures. The mill’s closing was national news, one of the first major blows in the era of deindustrialization, offshoring and “free trade” that has since made mass layoffs commonplace.

What was not commonplace was the response of the steelworkers and the local community. “You feel the whole area is doomed somehow,” Donna Slaven, the wife of a laid-off worker, told reporters at the time. “If this can happen to us, there is not a secure union job in the country.” Rather than leave the fate of their community in the hands of corporate executives in New York, New Orleans and Washington DC, the workers began to organize and resist. And they joined with a new coalition of priests, ministers and rabbis — headed by a Catholic and an Episcopal bishop — to build support for a new way forward. I was called in to head up an economic team to help.

[For more on this story by Gar Alperovitz, go to http://billmoyers.com/story/bl...ave-birth-rust-belt/]

Photo: Night view of Republic Steel Corporation, circa 1940s. (Photo by Mark Vitullo/ flickr CC 2.0)

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