Middle America Is Dying Hard
WEIRTON, West Virginia -- Most people in this town will tell you they'd rather have taken a physical punch to the gut than get the news they received yesterday when Cleveland-Cliffs Steel announced it was idling its tinplate production plant, a move that directly cost 900 people their jobs.
It isn't just those workers who face catastrophic uncertainty; this closure also jeopardizes the jobs of thousands more people whose businesses supported the plant: the barber shops, gas stations, mom-and-pop grocery stores, the machine shops that make the widgets for the steel industry. And there's also the demise of the tax base, which affects the school district and the quality of the roads.
Thirty years ago, more than 10,000 people worked here at Weirton Steel. Now, the last 900 workers left have just lost their jobs.
"It's just another scar to add on what people in power have done to our lives and our community over the past 40 years," said one employee who declined to give his name, adding, "Honestly, how many times does this story have to be told before someone in power cares about our lives."
He points to different buildings downtown, and all of them for him were "used to be this" and "used to be that."
Ryan Weld of Wellsburg, 43, grew up in downtown Weirton right behind the local funeral home.
"When I was growing up in the '80s, the mill was still going at full tilt with Weirton Steel employing 10,000 people, including my grandfathers," he said.
The Republican state senator said things started to slow down here in the mid to late '90s after the North American Free Trade Agreement was enacted: "That dramatically changed the landscape of downtown, went from a bustling the last age group that remembers the shops and stores and restaurants of downtown."
He believes NAFTA, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, essentially made it hard for companies like Weirton Steel, which had to follow strict and expensive Environmental Protection Agency guidelines, to compete with places like Mexico. The towns all up and down the Steel Valley died hard.
"The legacy of the federal government and its refusal to properly enforce trade laws is nothing but empty mills and unemployed workers," Weld said. "That was true in the '80s and '90s, and that is true today."
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