In “Enduring Disaster: The Recycling of the Working Class,” Gabriel Winant illustrates how the working-class, specifically steelworkers, were “recycled” following the wave of plant closures and mass layoffs caused by deindustrialization. With the rapidly increasing unemployment rates in states like Pennsylvania, a new service-based economy was activated. The gradual transition from a male-dominated, labor-based economy to a service-based one with more opportunities for women, in particular, was indeed tumultuous. Effects of the layoffs from steel plants were devastating and far-reaching. Widespread unemployment plunged working-class families into poverty. Winant writes, “When the unemployment rate in 1983 for the Pittsburgh metropolitan area peaked at 17 percent overall, it reached a Depression-like 25.6 percent for Black workers” (188). This was financially devestating for labor workers who had previously been able to work and provide for themselves and their families. But the consequences of deindustrialization did not only affect steelworkers and their wives and children, but their the older generation of labor workers, as well. Retired working-class individuals who had saved up for their retirement were now being relied on by their children, the generation left unemployed by a dying industry. So, too, were local governments affected. Winant describes that towns “drew as much as half their tax revenue from in dustrial property, so the idling of the factories was a fiscal catastrophe, causing sharp cutbacks in almost all basic ser vices” (189). Getting a new job wasn’t simple, either. Retraining efforts were severely unprepared for an entire industry to go under. Winant demonstrates this by using the example of the 1975 Trade Readjustment Act (TRA), “In 1983, seventeen thousand people in western Pennsylvania became eligible for TRA benefits; 97 percent were laid-off steelworkers. But, reported the Pittsburgh Press, ‘the state Department of Labor and Industry, which channels the federal [TRA] money, got only $3.3 million this year— enough to provide training for only 576 applicants’” (193). Working-class regions saw a drain in their young men as a result. Physical and mental illnesses as well as domestic violence also skyrocketed. Winant writes of this effect on even the president of United Steelworkers of America (USWA), Lloyd McBride, who “dropped dead of heart disease in the early 1980s— a death journalist John Hoerr at tributed to the stress of trying to serve a membership undergoing crisis” (200).
As awful as the effects were, one industry did not suffer—the healthcare system. As working-class men lost their jobs, the increased need of a healthcare system opened up more opportunities in “service” positions. Hospitals and nursing homes needed workers, and working-class women filled these spaces. Winant writes, “Hospital and especially nursing home work required tens of thousands of new employees in altogether less prestigious positions” (210-211). Winant explains that the “fall of steel” (209) is what created an opportunity for service-based positions to expand. The Allegheny Conference on Community Development conference report showed that “The most remarkable growth has occurred in the category which for government data gathering purposes is described as ‘private services’, and which includes such major employers as health care facilities, business support services . . . and educational institutions” (209-210). Further, welfare programs such as Medicare “proved immune to austerity in this time” (207).
The welfare programs such as TRA and other unemployment benefits were meant to support cyclical layoffs. The death of an entire industry was not cyclical—people didn’t bounce back easily because there were fewer jobs available that required the skills of steelworkers. While deindustrialization was somewhat foreseeable, government programs didn’t prepare for the wave of unemployment. They shouldn’t be blamed too much; the steel titans themselves did not acknowledge that plants were on their way out despite evidence that proved otherwise. The increased demand for government support forced these programs to stretch a limited amount of resources while eligibility requirements also became more strict. All said and done, without the efforts of the people within the healthcare system who understood that everyone was entitled to a bed, times probably would have been a lot more challenging for the working class.
Will Wright 