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Title: Why Manufacturing's Last Boom Will Be Hard To Repeat

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/06/1813...

American manufacturing's postwar boom from the 1940s through the 1970s
resulted from conditions that cannot be recreated, a story on WSJ argues.
Global competitors had been destroyed by war. Energy was cheap. Unions could
demand concessions without fearing job losses to foreign rivals. Strikes were
frequent in steel, auto, trucking, rubber and coal mining. That relentless
pressure from an organized working class raised real wages and created fringe
benefits including health insurance and retirement pay. Government support
for unions kept executive salaries at just a few times median income. Stock
buybacks were illegal or frowned upon. President Eisenhower declared at the
1956 dedication of the AFL-CIO national headquarters that "Labor is the
United States." The system began unraveling by the mid-1960s. The Vietnam War
drained federal coffers. Inflation accelerated as government deficits
exploded. Nixon abandoned the gold standard in 1971, unleashing currency
volatility. The 1973 OPEC oil embargo quadrupled energy prices. Foreign
competition returned from Japan, Korea and West Germany. American companies
carried mounting legacy costs like pensions that discouraged investment in
upgrades and research. Milton Friedman declared in a 1970 New York Times
essay that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.
Clinton signed NAFTA in 1993 and championed the World Trade Organization in
1995. Bethlehem Steel employed around 150,000 people in the mid-1950s. The
company filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Its former hometown plant in Bethlehem,
Pa., is now a casino.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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