Very interesting OCR. I didn't remember the details, but I lived at the time in a small town in west central Illinois and the strike was a topic of keen interest with everyone living there as many worked at the IH or Caterpillar plants. The contractor I was working for at the time did a lot of site ex for the manufacturers in Peoria and the other factory towns in Illinois.
McCardell was on the leading edge of the modern trend to overcompensate upper corporate management with extra large salaries, stock bonuses, cheap loans or outright grants, and other expensive perks that had nothing to do with performence either company or personal. The board of directors at IH were also guilty of blindly following bad advice of one set of advisors instead of doing their own research and voting their own minds. Other than the fact that IH did not mislead people as Enron did, they were a modern precursor of corporate disaster.
One other note. In early 1980 I worked for a time at US Steel, and Bethlehem's Steel's Gary Works. US Steel's facility was very old, yet the company had made efforts to clean up and modernize the plant. They were in fact, in the process of tearing down four blast furnaces that had been built in the 1880's. Bethlehem was a very modern plant by the standards of the day.
One day my boss called me and some other management folks into his office and told us we were going over to Wisconsin Steel's plant in South Chicago to look at the possibility of bidding on the slag contract there. Great, we were all excited at the thought of more work, so off we went.
Well, our excitement turned sour as we entered the Wisconsin Steel facility. The plant, which had been owned for years by IH, had recently been purchased by some outfit out of California, which was why we were there looking at the potential for the slag processing. You talk about the feeling of going from one dimension into another, that's how we all felt. It's as though we had stepped back in time fifty years or more. Everything was almost exactly as it had been originally built. I don't believe there was a single unbroken pane of glass anywhere excepting the office building. A grittier, dirty looking, run down place would have been hard to find, though I had been to some places in Detroit that would have run a close second.
There was little to no modernization at this plant. They were still using the original furnaces and much of the work was performed by hand. I began to look for horse-carts, and there were in fact, still a couple of steam-driven dinky engines working, moving dilapidated rail cars along the plants many miles of crooked tracks. I don't know that we ever saw a smile among the plant's workers, other than the new management team folks in the office, and on our tour guide as he blithely drove us around in an old International Travelall that was mostly a collection of rust and patches.
We all took a look and made our notes, then made our way back to our office at Bethlehem's plant. Our general manager then told us to type up our views and submit them to him the next day. Just from what I had seen, and had heard in speaking with various Wisconsin Steel workers, my comments were mostly negative, as I learned later, most others were as well.
Our company owner and his team made their own evaluations, then came by and spoke with all of us before going back to Detroit. It seems that the new owners were not just looking for slag processors, they were looking for partners too, people with actual steel making experience and expertise. My company also had very deep pockets, a fact I'm sure was duly noted by the owners of WS.
It wasn't too much later that we heard thorough our company grapevine that WS was shutting down and that we were not going to get involved in any way. Sure enough, it wasn't a week and that's what happened. It was done in a very poor manner, no warning to employees at all. The various union workers at both US Steel and Bethlehem and many other steel and iron plants around the region spoke of going out on strike in a show of solidarity with their union brothers at WS, but it never went beyond just talk.
Wisconsin Steel was a prime example of maximizing profit at the expense of not maintaining and modernizing plant equipment, bringing in new methods, and upgrading technology. The entire rust belt of the upper Midwest is full of examples. The real wonder is that so much of this was still in production in the eighties and nineties, and I'm sure there are some places left that look way out of place.
International's story is exceptionally interesting and I recommend the book: 150 Years of International Harvestor, by C. H. Wendel.
